Magical gene / spots and rings

Scuted

The underside carries a snake's belly - a column of wide flat scutes down the midline, graded outward into smaller and smaller scales toward the flanks.

What it can come out as

OutcomeCarrying
Pale scutesW/W · W/B · W/C · W/n
Black scutesB/B · B/C · B/n
Coloured scutesC/C
Wild typeC/n · 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 1,786 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 pairShows asHow often
W/WPale scutes0.002% — 1 in 50,000
W/BPale scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
W/CPale scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
W/nPale scutes0.038% — 1 in 2,632
B/BBlack scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
B/CBlack scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
B/nBlack scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
C/CColoured scutes0.0027% — 1 in 37,495
n/nWild type99.944%

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/scuted.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.

Keyhorsegenetics.scuted
Phasemagical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority329 — where it sits in the one (priority, key) paint order
AllelesW · B · C · n
Varies per horse2 values drawn once off the expressing allele copy, so a foal that inherits the copy inherits the look
Built fromAXIS, CENTERLINE, PARTS, SPOTS, TOWARD

Why it is built this way

Three SPOTS fields, not one. A real belly grades from wide ventral scutes at the midline to fine scales at the sides, and SPOTS has one spacing and one stretch per mask - so the grade has to be written as three overlapping bands with a CENTERLINE cutting each to its own zone.

stretch 3.4 on the midline layer is what flattens the scutes. It divides the sample before the lattice walk, so the cells themselves elongate: radius 1.15 comes out 7.8 units long and 2.3 deep, with 0.7 of bare coat between rows. The three layers deliberately do NOT share a stretch, because they are three separate fields rather than three bands of one compound mark - if they were meant to nest, a differing stretch would scatter them.

Every gap here is checked against a texel: 0.7 between scutes, 0.6 between flank scales, 0.56 between the fine outer ones. Reference-faithful spacing would put the outer scales about a third of a unit apart, which averages to a solid dark belly with no scales visible at all.

mirror: true on all three. Body space has a signed z, so without it the two sides of the belly scatter independently - which is right for a paint marking and wrong for anything that reads as anatomy.

Sourced from a traced SVG, but not drawn with the SVG mask. The trace runs to thousands of path commands over hundreds of subpaths, most of it trace noise - well past the point ceiling, which exists to keep a traced photograph out of a gene file, and it would have made the marking identical on every horse. The reference was read for what KIND of shape each element is and rebuilt from field masks. A hand-drawn, low-node version of the source would be worth the SVG mask with its d string verbatim.

Arrived keyed 'ixora.scuted'. Renamed to the horsegenetics namespace every other gene in the mod uses - the format allows a modder their own, but a gene shipping INSIDE this mod under a second namespace breaks the tooling that builds a key from a slug.

Arrived at priority 154. Moved to 329: spots and rings, near fish scales (322) - scales on the underside. The arriving number was taken, or sat in a band whose family does not describe this marking - priority is both the paint order and the family the sidebar files a gene under.

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.

Pale scutes

A chalk-white belly plating graded from wide midline scutes to fine flank scales.

  1. the ventral scutes — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  2. the flank scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  3. the fine outer scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD

Black scutes

The reference form - black scutes and scales over the underside.

  1. the ventral scutes — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  2. the flank scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  3. the fine outer scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD

Coloured scutes

Belly plating in the line's own colour, deepest along the midline.

  1. the ventral scutes — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  2. the flank scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD
  3. the fine outer scales — PARTS × AXIS × CENTERLINE inverted × SPOTS, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No marking.

Paints nothing.