Magical gene / no coat effect

Hydrophobic

It will not be ridden into water. Take one in past its knees and it throws you and makes for the nearest shore — which is what every horse in vanilla Minecraft does, and which this mod otherwise quietly fixed for you.

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
`Hyd/Hyd`	bucks its rider in water and heads for land
anything else	nothing — it swims like any other horse here

Why this is the odd one out

In this mod a tamed horse gets a swimming assist and will carry you across a river. That is a deliberate improvement on vanilla. This gene takes it away again for the horses that have it — so it is a defect to breed out rather than a trait to breed for.

Health

None to the horse. Being thrown into deep water is a hazard to you.

Gene key: horsegenetics.hydrophobic
Alleles: Hyd hydrophobic, n
Inheritance: homozygous recessive
Reaches the game as: the water_averse traversal flag
Coat effect: none, ever

It finishes the other flag that currently does nothing

water_averse is declared in the gene format and falls into warnUntranslated at GeneAbilityHandler.java:438, described there as “an AI-goal weight” and never wired. Like fireproof's lava flag, this gene turns a dead branch into a feature.

Recessive, not dominant — and that was the whole decision

The original specification made it dominant. Dominant would mean most horses revert to vanilla water behaviour, silently changing how every horse already bred behaves, and quietly retiring HorseWaterRidingHandler. Recessive keeps the swimming assist universal and makes this a rare defect. Nothing existing changes behaviour.

Do not dismount the rider into a drowning loop

Bucking someone off in deep water and then swimming away from them is a death. The dismount needs to leave the player somewhere they can act — low cost to get right, very high annoyance to get wrong.

Half-built: it throws you, it does not flee

The water_averse flag currently ejects the rider in water deep enough to swim in, and stops there. The “and then makes for the nearest shore” half is not implemented — the horse stays where it was. Worse, in the middle of a lake it leaves the rider swimming. Treat this locus as incomplete rather than merely unverified; it wants a flee-to-land goal before it is honest about its own page.

A gene that removes a feature

Unusually, the wild type here is the improved behaviour and the allele restores the vanilla one. That is worth stating plainly on the page, because a reader who knows Minecraft will assume the opposite and conclude the gene does nothing.

A defect in the magical family

The natural side of the mod has disorders; the magical side has almost nothing a breeder actively wants to remove. This is one, and it is a useful shape to have: a locus whose entire breeding project is getting rid of it.

Waterborn Ocean-born Magic swim speed What to check in-game

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