Shallows

What it can come out as

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.

Its gene carrot

The file

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

Why it is built this way

The source was an SVG: four flat colours - a near-white ground, a strong blue, a lime and a near-black - traced off a photograph, about 130 KB of path data. Too many points for the SVG mask, and a field rather than an outline, so it is rebuilt as a rule.

Reading of the source, which is four things stacked: a pale ground; fine blue flecks arranged in concentric arcs around a centre off one corner, dense and small near it and opening out away from it; irregular lime splotches lying over the flecks with no relation to their arcs; and a black mass invading from one edge with hard lobed fingers reaching into the ripples.

The concentric-arc half is SPIRAL, which is a stretch worth naming. SPIRAL draws ONE closed spiral per part rather than a set of rings - at five turns on a fine pitch the eye reads it as concentric rings, but it is a single continuous curve and there is a seam where it closes. Nothing in this vocabulary draws true concentric rings around a chosen point: RINGS scatters its own centres per cell, FAN's bars run radially rather than tangentially, and WAVES repeats along a straight line. The look is close and the mechanism is not the same, which is exactly the thing to know before anyone tries to tighten the arcs.

SPIRAL takes its centre from the part's bounds, so this is a ripple centre PER PART - the barrel gets one, the neck gets its own, each leg gets its own. That is why the water reads as water across the whole horse rather than as one bullseye on the flank, and it is also the reason the legs come out with near-straight bands: a radius of 9 body units is most of the way across a 4-by-11 leg, so only the outer arcs land on it.

The flecks are the spiral multiplied by a SPECKLE, which is what breaks a continuous ring into dashes. Pitch is set against width: radius 9 over 5 turns is a 1.8-unit pitch, and a 0.6-unit line leaves 1.2 units of pale between rings. Winding turns past about 7 closes that gap and the whole field resolves as a blue wash.

The black flood is AXIS first and FRACTAL second on purpose - the band is the region and the fractal cuts the fingers into it. Its softness is 0.06 rather than the usual 0.12 because the source's boundary is hard-edged, and a soft one there reads as a shadow instead of as depth.

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.

Shallows

A pale wet ground carrying rings of short blue flecks that spread from a centre on each part, lime splotches scattered over them, and a black depth reaching down from the back in lobed fingers.

Layer order is the source's stacking order and it matters: ground, flecks, splotches, flood. The lime sits over the blue with no relation to the arcs, which is what stops the splotches reading as part of the ripple, and the black goes last because in the source it covers everything it reaches.

1. the pale wet ground — ALL, painted with TOWARD
2. the ripple, broken into flecks — SPIRAL × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
3. the lime splotches over the top — FRACTAL, painted with TOWARD
4. the black depth, fingering down from the topline — AXIS × FRACTAL, painted with TOWARD

Coloured shallows

The same water and the same splotches in two colours this line of horses runs to, which need not agree with each other.

The recessive coloured half of the usual pair, and the one place this gene carries two independent hue knobs rather than one. The source's own pairing is a blue water under a yellow-green splotch - near enough opposite sides of the wheel - so a single hue driving both would collapse the thing that makes it read. The ground and the depth stay achromatic: they are the value floor and ceiling the two hues are judged against.

1. the pale wet ground — ALL, painted with TOWARD
2. the ripple, broken into flecks — SPIRAL × SPECKLE, painted with TOWARD
3. the splotches over the top — FRACTAL, painted with TOWARD
4. the black depth, fingering down from the topline — AXIS × FRACTAL, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

Dry.

Paints nothing.