Magical gene / no coat effect

Meowing

The horse meows. Not often, not loudly, and with no explanation available anywhere in the genome — but creepers hear it and keep their distance, which turns out to be worth a great deal.

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
`Mew/Mew`	meows occasionally; creepers stay outside the radius
anything else	nothing

Why it matters more than it sounds

Creepers are the mob that costs you a horse. A meowing horse you leave in a pasture is a horse that is still there in the morning, and the radius is epigenetic so a line can be bred wider.

Health

None. It is protection, and it costs nothing.

Gene key: horsegenetics.meowing
Alleles: Mew meowing, n
Inheritance: homozygous recessive
Reaches the game as: a sound effect and a filtered mob_aura repel
Epigenetic: radius
Coat effect: none, ever

It rides entirely on machinery built for other genes

The sound verb is wanted by singer, base alarm and echolocate; the group filter is wanted by four other genes. This one adds nothing of its own, which makes it a good gene to build last in the batch — it is free by then.

One meow per detection, with a cooldown

The hazard on every sound gene is not tick cost, it is spam. A firing per beat per creeper in range is unbearable within seconds. The sound fires on a state change — something entered the radius — and then holds off.

The repel is capped like every radius effect

Same max_targets discipline as intimidating, and for the same reason. The format requires every radius effect to state a cap.

A narrow filter on a general verb

Creeper-only is the narrowest use of the shared group filter, and it is a useful test of it: if the filter can express “one entity type” as cleanly as it expresses “all undead”, it is the right shape. If it cannot, better to find out on this gene than on cleansing light.

A joke that pays rent

The gene exists because a meowing horse is funny. It survived design review because vanilla already establishes that creepers fear cats, so the joke has a rule behind it — and because the resulting effect, a horse that protects itself from the one mob that reliably kills horses, is genuinely worth breeding. Silly and useful is a better combination than either alone.

Intimidating Singer Base alarm What to check in-game

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