Magical gene / no coat effect

Echolocate

Every so often the horse makes a sound no horse should make, and for a moment you can see everything alive around you — through the walls, through the dark, out to a radius written on the allele copy.

Built, and not yet seen in game

The gene, its inheritance and its founder table exist and are covered by the test suite; the translator that turns it into behaviour was written against the 26.1.2 sources and is flagged unverified in its own comments. Nothing on this page has been watched happening to a horse. What to look at, and what is most likely to be wrong, is on To be verified.

What it does

Combination	Outcome
`Ech/Ech`	a bat cry, and everything living nearby outlined for a while
anything else	nothing

What it is for

Caves. A horse you ride underground that tells you what is round the corner before you meet it is worth a great deal, and it highlights everything alive, not only what is dangerous — so it finds the animals you lost as readily as the skeleton you did not.

Health

None.

Gene key: horsegenetics.echolocate
Alleles: Ech echoing, n
Inheritance: homozygous recessive
Reaches the game as: a sound effect and a group-targeted glowing aura
Epigenetic: radius
Coat effect: none, ever

Effect packets are the hazard, not the entity scan

Glowing is a mob effect, and every application syncs to every client tracking that entity. Re-applying it to every living thing in radius on a short refresh is a packet flood in a busy cave — the expensive part is the network, which is exactly the cost that does not show up when testing with one horse in a field. Long refresh, hard target cap, and let the effect lapse rather than re-applying every beat.

“Everything alive” was chosen deliberately, so the cap carries the weight

Hostiles-only was the cheaper and quieter design and was rejected — finding lost animals is half the appeal. That decision moves the entire burden onto max_targets, which is therefore not a tuning knob.

One firing per event, with a cooldown

The hazard on every gene using the sound verb is not tick cost, it is spam. A firing per beat per target in range is unbearable within seconds and there is no setting that makes it pleasant. Fire on a state change and then hold off.

Two shared pieces, nothing of its own

The sound verb and the group-targeted aura are both built for other genes. Like meowing, this is a good gene to schedule late in the batch, when it costs almost nothing.

A gene that changes what the player can see

Almost every locus in the mod changes the horse. This one changes the rider’s information, which is a category the mod has barely touched and probably should — a horse bred for what it tells you is a different kind of animal from one bred for what it can do.

Meowing Singer Eyesight locus What to check in-game

Planned source: common/genetics/genes/EcholocateGene.java