Magical gene / mane and tail

Element Dusted

Three hues to a horse - one leading and two supporting - climbing the legs from the hoof, running down the far half of the hair, and settling along the topline as dapples.

What it can come out as

Outcome	Carrying
Element Dusted	`Ed/Ed` · `Ed/n`
Wild type	`n/n`

How each one is actually drawn - region by region, and the layers it is built from - is on the coding tab.

Crossing two of them

Finding one

About 1 in 2,500 wild horses is born showing this. That is the whole of the supply: catch one, or make one with the carrot below. Breeds set their own pools and a breed built around this gene will carry it far more often than the wild population does.

Wild pair	Shows as	How often
`Ed/Ed`	Element Dusted	0.002% — 1 in 50,000
`Ed/n`	Element Dusted	0.038% — 1 in 2,632
`n/n`	Wild type	99.96%

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/element_dusted.json — a data-driven gene, not a Java class. It is listed in the index.json beside it and registered by Genes' class initialiser at startup.

Key	`horsegenetics.element_dusted`
Phase	magical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority	406 — where it sits in the one `(priority, key)` paint order
Alleles	`Ed` · `n`
Varies per horse	4 values drawn once off the expressing allele copy, so a foal that inherits the copy inherits the look
Built from	AXIS, RAMP, SPOTS, TOWARD

What it paints

Each outcome, described the way the gene file describes it, and then the layers that draw it in the order they are painted. The prose is the part a reader checks a bake against; the list underneath is what the engine actually did.

Element Dusted

On the legs the colour starts at the hoof and climbs a quarter to three-fifths of the way up, ending in a fade rather than a line, and no two legs end at the same height. It is palest and least saturated at the very bottom - near-white at the hoof on most horses - and gets deeper and stronger as it rises. The hair works the other way round from the legs: the roots keep the horse's own colour and the far half or better takes the palette, running toward near-white at the very ends. Along the topline, from withers to croup and no further down than the upper quarter of the barrel, is a field of soft round dapples in the leading hue at low saturation, which read darker than the coat rather than lighter.

the legs, climbing from the hoof — AXIS, painted with RAMP
the near-white at the very bottom — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
the far half of the mane and tail — AXIS, painted with RAMP
dapples along the topline — SPOTS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No dusting.

Paints nothing.