Magical gene / spots and rings

Fish Scales

The barrel raises into overlapping fish scales, each one rimmed in a warm colour this line of horses carries, with a darker line traced along its outer edge.

What it can come out as

Outcome	Carrying
Fish Scales	`Scl/Scl` · `Scl/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
`Scl/Scl`	Fish Scales	0.002% — 1 in 50,000
`Scl/n`	Fish Scales	0.038% — 1 in 2,632
`n/n`	Wild type	99.96%

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/fish_scales.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.fish_scales`
Phase	magical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority	322 — where it sits in the one `(priority, key)` paint order
Alleles	`Scl` · `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	PARTS, SPOTS, TOWARD

Why it is built this way

'arc' and 'angle' on SPOTS exist because of this gene. Drawing every scale as a closed ring gives a NET - a lattice of complete outlines - and a shingled surface is the opposite of that: the nose-facing half of each scale's boundary is hidden under the scale in front of it and shows no line at all. RINGS could already clip one instance to a crescent; nothing could clip every cell of a tiled field to the same crescent, which is the difference between a net and a roof.

'angle' is 180, so the drawn half of every scale faces the TAIL. Turn it toward 0 and the scales read as lying the other way, which on a horse looks like fur brushed backwards.

The colour is carried entirely on the hue knob rather than a fixed orange, so each horse draws its own scale colour at birth and passes it to its foals with the allele.

The hue knob runs 8 to 48 rather than the whole wheel. The marking is described as warm orange and the colour is the only thing a horse gets to draw for itself here; letting it reach green would make the blurb a lie on two horses in three.

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.

Fish Scales

The barrel is patterned in overlapping scales, each rim a bright warm band with a thinner, darker line along its outer edge.

the bright rim of each scale — PARTS × SPOTS × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
and the darker line along its edge — PARTS × SPOTS × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

Nothing.

Paints nothing.