Shadowcreature

Crossing two of them

What it looks like

Not a dark coat colour — an absence. The black is painted at full opacity, so nothing the horse’s own genes did shows through it and no dilution it carries lightens it. A palomino shadowcreature and a black one have the same head.

The eyes are gold and burn in the dark, with no sclera: the whole eye is the colour, not just the iris. On the front of a shadowcreature they are the only thing a viewer can find.

The horse gives off light at level 5 — enough to notice, far short of a torch. A shadowcreature that lit a stable would stop being one.

The join

Every horse carries its own tentacles. How far down the barrel they reach, how far apart they sit and how thick they are come off that horse’s allele copy and are inherited with it, so two shadowcreatures are not the same animal and a foal that inherits the copy inherits its parent’s shoulder.

What you can catch

Recessive, and a single copy shows nothing at all. A twentieth of a percent of wild horses are the doubled form — and no carriers, so the first one you see is the real thing rather than a hint.

Health

None. It is a very strange-looking horse and an entirely ordinary one.

Its gene carrot

Gene key

horsegenetics.shadowcreature

Alleles

Shc, n

Priority

613 — among the modifiers, after almost everything

Reaches the game as

a glow effect at light level 5

Coat effect

flat black head and neck, gold eyes, tentacles into the barrel

Three things, three phases

This is a Java gene rather than a gene file, and the reason is that its three halves land in three different places.

• The black is phase 3, written with ColorField.set — flat, at full opacity, rather than a walk toward black.
• The eyes cannot be phase 3 at all. CoatRegions.redrawEyes restores them from the template as the last act of the bake, precisely so that a wide white pattern can never blind a horse — so a gene that wants to colour them has to run after that, which is what the overlay pass is for.
• The light is a glow ability, which is not a coat concern at all.

shadeEyes, not tintIris

CoatOverlay offers both. tintIris colours the iris and leaves the white ring intact, which is what eye colour means; shadeEyes shades the whole eye, which is what “no sclera” means. The distinction is the entire visual difference between this gene and light’s gold eyes, and the two share the same gold on purpose — one glowing gold in the mod, not two.

The tentacles are the STROKES shape

Deliberately, and not by coincidence: the distance to a value-noise level set, divided through by the field’s own gradient. The naive |n - 0.5| does not work, because value noise is flat near its extrema and steep between them — a fixed band is a hairline over half the horse and a blot over the other half.

What is not shared with that mask is the falloff, and it is what makes these tentacles rather than stripes: coverage is scaled by how far the texel sits from the shoulder, normalised by the copy’s reach and squared, so a tentacle spends most of its length thinning and finishes by running out instead of by stopping.

double fade = 1.0 - back / reach;
fade *= fade;
double d = levelSetDistance(seed,
        point.x() / (spacing * 4.0), point.y() / spacing, point.z() / spacing) * spacing;
double k = (1.0 - BodyStripes.smoothstep(half, half + 0.3, d)) * fade;

Why the black is a colour and not a pigment

Because black pigment is not black.

Phase 1 works in melanin, and melanin is resolved through a gradient chart that the LUT locus can swap. The chart’s black corner is whatever the artwork says it is, and on an alternate palette it is not black at all. A shadowcreature’s head has to be the absence of the horse on every palette, so it is painted as a colour in phase 3 rather than as a pigment level in phase 1.

That is the same argument the new LUMA mask makes from the other direction — there, “find the black” has to ask what the chart produced rather than what the pigment was.

Why it paints so late

At priority 613 it has the last word on the head and neck. A gene that blackens them and is then painted over by a face marking is not a shadowcreature, it is a horse with a dark head — the one thing the gene cannot afford to be. Tron still draws over it, which is correct: neon on a void is the horse both genes describe.