Magic meat

Crossing two of them

What it does

Two meaty copies and the horse drops meat as well as everything else it would have dropped. One copy shows nothing, so a carrier is indistinguishable from a horse that has never had the allele.

How much is not fixed by the gene. Each copy carries a number — two to seven for a wild one — and the two copies are averaged. A foal inherits its parents’ numbers rather than rolling fresh ones, and the numbers drift slightly at every breeding, so a line bred for yield keeps improving on the horses it started from.

It stacks with the other drop locus

A horse can be diamond-bearing and meaty: the diamonds replace the leather, the meat is added, and both land. That cross is the reason the two are separate genes.

Health

None. A meaty horse is an ordinary horse in every way that can be observed while it is alive.

Its gene carrot

Gene key

horsegenetics.magic_meat

Alleles

Mty meaty, n

Priority

132 — the magical utility band, beside milk

Reaches the game as

an item_drop effect with drop: meat

Coat effect

none, ever

Averaged, not summed

Every other epigenetic locus here that reads both copies adds them. This one averages, and the difference is a claim about what the number means.

A per-copy percentage on the body-stat genes is a dose: two copies of an allele that each push the horse are genuinely twice the push. The quantity of meat on an animal is not a dose, it is a property of the animal — a homozygote is one horse, not two half-horses. Summing would have made a homozygote from two average parents better than either parent for a reason that is arithmetic rather than biological.

double average = (epigenetics.copy(0).get(YIELD) + epigenetics.copy(1).get(YIELD)) / 2.0;
int count = Math.max(1, (int) Math.round(average));
return List.of(new GeneAbility.ItemDrop("meat", count, count,
        GeneAbility.Condition.ALWAYS, 1));

Floored at one, because “meaty, and drops nothing” is not an outcome anybody means.

It shares a verb with the treasure locus

Both emit item_drop; this one names meat, which is the one value that adds rather than replaces. Sharing the verb is what keeps the vocabulary small, and the translator has one drop path rather than two.

A production trait, behaving like one

Averaged copies, inherited numbers, and a small drift per generation is the shape of a real production trait: selection works, it works slowly, and the ceiling is wherever the breeder stops. It is the same machinery milk volume uses, and the two are meant to be recognisable as the same kind of gene.

Why the carrier is silent

A dose-dependent version — one copy for half the meat — was the obvious alternative and would have made the locus much easier to breed and much less interesting to own. A silent carrier means a herd’s yield potential is invisible until two carriers meet, which is what makes the gene database worth building for a farmer rather than only for a collector.