Natural gene / paints nothing

Diet — what the horse will eat

Thirteen alleles. Twelve of them are narrow diets — raw meat, fish, wheat, cake, potions, lava, one metal, one gem — each needing two identical copies to show, against a wild type that eats what any horse eats. A narrow diet refuses almost everything, and what it does accept feeds it far better: a single gold bar takes a metal-eater to full health however hurt it was.

Crossing two of them

The trade

A narrow diet is a genuine cost. Almost nothing on the ground will feed the horse, and the mod’s gated healing is untouched by it, so a lava-eater in a paddock still needs its lava carried to it. What it buys is efficiency, and the numbers grade by breadth — the only axis that makes the bargain legible.

Diet	Roughly	Per item
Anything edible	every food item there is	the least of any diet
Cooked food	bread, cooked meat, stews, pies, cake	a moderate amount
Raw meat / fish / raw vegetables / wheat	one food family each	a hay bale’s worth
Water	a water bucket	a hay bale’s worth
Cake / potions / lava	one item	full health
One metal / one gem	one particular item	full health

The values themselves live on Diet and are not repeated here. DietGene builds each outcome’s description from them, so the sentence in the gene browser and the number it is about cannot drift apart.

Its gene carrot

Gene key: horsegenetics.diet
Alleles: 12 diets + n — see DietGene
Outcomes: 13, and all of them wild type — it paints nothing
Shows when: homozygous for one diet allele, and only then
Default allele: n
Priority: DietGene.PRIORITY — ahead of every gene that paints
Founders: feral only, and never carriers
Epigenetic draws: 1 × nextFloat, and only for a variant diet
Model: genetics.Diet, genetics.HorseDiet, genetics.DietContribution
Items: neoforge/server/DietFoods — deliberately off common/

Unplayed

The locus, its inheritance and the resolution channel are covered by DietGeneTest. The feeding half — refusing an apple, healing off a bar of gold, leaving a bucket behind — has never been run in a game. See verification.

Which metal, which gem

An ingot-eater does not eat metal in general — it wants one metal, and a gem-eater one gem. Diet.variants() says how many there are and the choice is one stored number — variant, on the expressing copy — so it is fixed for the horse’s life and a foal that inherits the copy inherits the craving. Two ingot-eating siblings can want different bars. It is kept as a position in [0, 1) rather than an index because how many variants there are depends on which diet the alleles gave the horse.

common/ names no item, so the count is the contract between the two sides: DietFoods must list exactly variants() items for each, and DietFoods.verify() runs at startup and throws if it does not. That check is there because the failure is silent — an out-of-range index would give you a horse that never accepts anything and no error anywhere.

Feral only, and never a carrier

No named breed has any of it. DietGene returns true from Gene.feralOnly(), which is new with this gene: BreedFounder forces such a locus to its wild type on every breed. (Every magical gene a breed does not name is forced wild too now; feralOnly predates that and says the same thing louder.) A lava-eating Shire is not a breed trait. A breed that genuinely wanted one could still name the locus in its own pool — that check runs first.
A founder is never a carrier. The founder table lists n/n and the twelve homozygotes and nothing between, so a feral horse that rolls into this gene has the diet outright. The heterozygote exists only as something you breed.
The random splice carrot cannot hand one to a foal. Its spliceTable() is the mirror image — n/n and the twelve carriers. An unasked-for horse that only eats gold is a trap; a carrier is a gift. The named Known Gene Splice carrot is heterozygous too, so a player who wants the diet still has to breed for it.

Early on purpose, so it can be overridden

A horse has one diet, so several genes may have a claim on it and exactly one answer comes out. HorseDiet.resolve walks Genes.codeOrder(), asks every DietContribution on the way, and keeps the last claim — which is the opposite of the eye channel’s ranked contest, and is the point.

That is the whole reason this locus sits at priority DietGene.PRIORITY, ahead of every gene that paints. Nothing about the coat needs it there. What needs it is that a later gene saying “and this horse cannot be fed at all” wins by sorting after it, with no special case anywhere and nothing to register. Diet.NOTHING exists for exactly that and is not an allele of this locus.

What the game module does with it

HorseDietHandler intercepts PlayerInteractEvent.EntityInteract and does nothing at all unless the horse has a special diet:

Not a feed attempt	Left alone entirely — a saddle, a lead, an empty hand. A special diet must never stop a horse being ridden.
A vanilla love item	Left alone. The locus governs healing, not breeding; a horse that could never be bred would be a dead end rather than a curiosity. This is the one deliberate leak: a golden carrot heals a little on the way past.
Something it eats	Heals, consumes the item (leaving a bucket or a bottle where there was one), awards double the ordinary feed bond, and cancels so vanilla does not also feed it.
Anything else edible	Refused — smoke, no healing, and a message naming what the horse actually wants. A diet nobody can see is a guessing game; this one is a puzzle with a solution.

Natural or magical? An open call

The locus is declared natural. It paints in neither phase, so the flag chooses nothing about the coat; it is declared that way because dietary preference is a real heritable thing, and because a magical gene would be thrown into BreedFounder’s magic lottery — which would hand breeds the very alleles feralOnly() exists to keep off them. The lava and ingot ends of it are frank fantasy, so if the natural/magical split ever means more than which coat pass a gene paints in, this is the first gene to revisit. It is a question on verification.

This is the one gene here with no real locus behind it

Every other natural gene on this wiki names a published variant. This one does not: dietary preference is heritable, but there is no equine “lava” allele and no gene that makes a horse eat gold. So what this tab does instead is set out what a real horse actually eats and what the Minecraft food list means to one, because that is the part of the gene a player can be wrong about — and because the Dveg, Dwht and Dhum ends of the allele list are near enough to real feeding to be misread as advice.

What a horse is built to eat

Horses are non-ruminant hindgut-fermenting herbivores. A relatively small stomach and a very large caecum and colon are built for frequent intake of fibrous plant material; grazing horses eat small amounts for much of the day, and gut microbes fermenting forage fibre supply a large share of their usable energy. Ohio State AS-1022

A sound feeding programme is:

Forage as the foundation — pasture, grass hay, sometimes legume hay or forage products. Guidance commonly calls for at least 1.5–2% of body weight per day as forage dry matter; forage should be at least half the ration and is usually much more.
Unlimited clean water, and salt or minerals suited to the horse and the local forage.
Concentrate only if needed — a growing horse, a lactating mare, a senior with poor teeth, a hard keeper, a horse in real work.
Slow changes. Switch hay, pasture or feed over roughly 7–14 days. Abrupt changes or large sugary or starchy meals disrupt the hindgut microbes and raise the risk of colic and laminitis.

For scale: a 500 kg adult might need roughly 7.5–10 kg of forage dry matter a day. Treats count toward total calories and should be tiny against that. Merck Veterinary Manual

The Minecraft food list, judged as horse feed

“Can eat” below means a small amount is not expected to poison an otherwise healthy horse. It does not mean nutritionally useful, appropriate as regular feed, or safe for every horse — horses with equine metabolic syndrome, insulin dysregulation, prior laminitis, obesity, ulcers, dental disease or a prescribed diet need tighter limits.

item	verdict	why
Carrot	good occasional treat	one of the best on the list — palatable, hydrating, modestly fibrous, still sugar-containing. Cut small for greedy eaters
Apple	good occasional treat	the traditional one. Cut it up: a whole apple can lodge in the oesophagus and cause choke
Melon slice	good occasional treat	commonly listed as acceptable. Remove seeds, avoid mouldy rind, keep pieces small
Beetroot	small occasional treat	sweet, water-rich, fibrous. Not a staple; introduce a little at first, and do not confuse it with large amounts of processed sugary beet products
Pumpkin (plain)	acceptable small treat	the pumpkin is fine; see pumpkin pie below
Bread	avoid	refined starch, sometimes sugar, salt, fat or additives; no advantage over forage. Never raw yeast dough
Potato	do not feed	a nightshade. Green, sprouted, damaged tubers and plant parts are the worst, for glycoalkaloids. Horse-nutrition guidance names potatoes among foods to avoid
Baked potato	avoid	cooking does not fix it, and human baked potatoes carry salt, butter and toppings
Beetroot soup	avoid	human soup means salt, onion, garlic, stock, spices or dairy. Plain cooked beet mash would be less bad and still unnecessary
Sweet berries	only if identified	a Minecraft category, not a botanical identity. Some real berries are fine in small amounts; an unidentified wild berry may be toxic
Glow berries	unjudgeable	fictional. No species, no safety data
Dried kelp	vet-guided only	seaweed is very high and highly variable in iodine and may carry excess salt or contaminants. Small amounts appear in formulated feeds; loose kelp is not a casual addition
All raw and cooked meat — beef, pork, chicken, mutton, rabbit	do not feed	animal muscle is not part of a herbivore’s programme. Unnecessary protein and fat, digestive upset, and raw meat adds pathogen risk; cooked adds salt, seasoning and fat
Cod, salmon, tropical fish	do not feed	fish is not part of an equine ration. Raw adds pathogen and parasite concerns; cooked is often salty, and salmon fatty. “Tropical fish” covers species some of which are toxic
Pufferfish	never — emergency-level hazard	can contain tetrodotoxin, an extremely potent neurotoxin. Keep entirely away; contact a vet immediately on any suspected ingestion
Mushroom stew	avoid	uncertain mushroom identity plus salt, onion, garlic, stock or dairy. Wild mushroom exposures can be serious
Rabbit stew	do not feed	meat plus onion, salt, stock, fat and flour
Pumpkin pie	avoid	sugar, flour, fat, salt, spice, possibly dairy. The pumpkin is fine; the pie is not
Cookie	avoid	flour, sugar, fat, and often chocolate, raisins or artificial sweeteners
Cake	avoid	high sugar, starch and fat; frequently dairy, chocolate, raisins or alcohol flavourings
Honey bottle	avoid	concentrated sugar. A tiny accidental lick is unlikely to matter for a healthy adult; it has no benefit and is a poor choice for an easy keeper or a horse prone to insulin dysregulation

The defensible treat tier from that list is carrot, apple in pieces, melon, plain pumpkin, a little fresh beetroot — one or two small pieces at a time, not a pile. Even safe treats add calories and can upset the intestinal microbial balance when overdone. Kentucky Equine Research

Where the mod’s diets sit against that

Dveg (raw vegetables) and Dwht (wheat) are the only two narrow diets in the mod a real horse could survive on at all, and even they are wrong in kind — a horse needs forage, and neither carrots nor wheat is hay. Dmeat, Dfish, Dhum (cooked food) and Dcake describe things a real horse should never be fed, and Dlava, Ding, Dgem, Dpot and Dwat are frank fantasy. That is fine — this is a Minecraft gene — and it is worth a player knowing that the one item the mod treats as ordinary horse food, hay, is the only one on the whole list that a real horse actually lives on. The gene’s own source calls this out: it is feral-only and never carried by a named breed precisely because a lava-eating Shire is a curiosity of the unbred population rather than a breed trait.

Can a horse eat meat?

A horse may mouth or swallow an odd bit out of curiosity. It should not be fed meat deliberately: its feeding ecology and hindgut microbial system are built around continuous fibrous plant matter, not animal protein and fat. A tiny accidental lick of cooked meat is not the same as a poisoning emergency — and it is still not a treat, not a useful protein supplement, and not part of the diet. Raw meat adds foodborne bacteria and parasite risk; fatty, salted, seasoned or spoiled meat adds digestive upset. Fish, and pufferfish above all, are a firmer no.

If a real horse has eaten a substantial amount of something inappropriate — especially pufferfish, unidentified mushrooms, green or sprouted potatoes, or a large sugary or starchy quantity — remove access and call a vet or an equine poison-control resource promptly rather than waiting for symptoms.

Does breed change the diet?

The basic diet does not change by breed. Every horse needs forage-first feeding, water, minerals and gradual transitions. What changes is the amount and the energy density.

type or situation	feeding implication
Ponies, many Morgans and Quarter Horses, drafts, some warmbloods	often easy keepers; fewer calories, careful control of lush pasture, sugary treats and starch to avoid obesity, insulin dysregulation and laminitis
Thoroughbreds and similarly lean, high-metabolism horses	more often hard keepers; more calories, ideally from digestible fibre and managed fat rather than large grain meals
Draft horses	more total feed because they are large — not necessarily more per kilogram; many gain readily
Growing foals and yearlings	carefully balanced protein, amino acids and minerals — calcium, phosphorus, copper, zinc — and energy for steady growth
Pregnant and lactating mares	progressively more energy, protein, lysine and minerals, sharpest in late pregnancy and early lactation
Performance horses	energy matched to workload, plus water, electrolytes and forage availability
Seniors, or poor dentition	softer, soaked, high-fibre feeds — soaked hay products, beet pulp — under guidance

Breed is only one input. Body weight, condition score, age, individual metabolism, workload, pregnancy, teeth, health conditions, forage analysis, climate and pasture access matter at least as much. Merck names ponies, drafts, warmbloods, Morgans and many Quarter Horses as common easy keepers and Thoroughbreds as tending toward hard keepers — while insisting the starting ration is adjusted to the individual horse’s observed condition.

The one thing here the mod could act on

Easy keeper versus hard keeper is a real, breed-correlated, quantitative trait, and it is the part of this page with an obvious mod-shaped hole next to it: it is exactly the sort of thing a breed file could carry as a feed-efficiency modifier, sitting alongside this locus rather than inside it. The Diet enum already grades efficiency by breadth — four points an item for Dany, a hay bale’s worth for Dmeat, full health for a single ingot — so the machinery for “this horse gets more out of the same feed” exists and is not currently connected to anything a real horse does.

Is dietary preference actually heritable?

Partly, and not in the way this gene models. Feed preference and intake behaviour in horses are shaped by early experience with the dam, forage availability, palatability learning, social facilitation in a herd, and individual metabolic state — with breed-level differences in efficiency (the easy-keeper pattern above) better attested than breed-level differences in what a horse will accept. No single equine locus has been validated as controlling what a horse chooses to eat.

So the mod’s decision to declare this locus natural is, as its own source says, arguable. It paints in neither phase, so the flag chooses nothing about the coat; it is natural because dietary preference is a real heritable thing, and because a magical gene would be thrown into the breed founder’s magic lottery, which is the opposite of what the locus wants. The lava and ingot ends are frank fantasy. If the natural/magical split ever means more than which coat pass a gene paints in, this is the first gene to revisit.

Horse care — gated healing and bond Items Carrots & splices The genetics model

Source: common/genetics/genes/DietGene.java, common/genetics/Diet.java, common/genetics/HorseDiet.java, neoforge/server/DietFoods.java, neoforge/server/HorseDietHandler.java