Snow Cloud

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 3,572 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/snow_cloud.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

Imported from the magic-gene intake, 2026-09-08. White goes on first over everything, and the three clouds of points are painted back over it. Clumping on the speckle fields is what makes them clouds rather than an even dusting.

The points are subtler on a bake than the source description suggests. If they want to be louder the knob to move is the speckle size rather than the density - denser small points still read as grey from a distance.

The white used to be a flat PARTS mask over every part, so the horse went entirely white and the only thing the base coat could do was not be seen. It now runs through a large-scale PATCHES mask (owner's call), so there are bare drifts the coat shows through - which is what the gene's own name describes and what makes a snow-cloud chestnut and a snow-cloud black different animals. The three point clusters are untouched; where a cluster lands on a bare drift it simply has less white to sit on.

The black allele is the white one with the light taken out of it, and it sits one rung under white in the dominance series - so every combination that existed before it keeps the outcome it had, and only the pairs carrying Snk are new. The re-toning is a mapping rather than a repaint: every achromatic target moves into the dark end of the scale keeping its order and its spacing, and every SATURATED one is left alone, because that colour is the gene rather than its lightness.

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.

Snow Cloud

Snow lies over the horse in drifts with the coat showing through where none settled, and three clouds of dark points are laid over the top - each a speckle field pinned to one part of the body: high on the croup, round the ankles, and across the face in front of the ears.

1. snow over the horse, with bare drifts the coat shows through — PARTS × PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. points clustered high on the croup — SPECKLE × AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
3. points round the ankles — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. points across the face, forward of the ears — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD

Snow Cloud, black points

The same marking as the white form with the light taken out of it: the same 2 steps, moved to the dark end of the scale.

1. snow over the horse, with bare drifts the coat shows through — PARTS × PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. points clustered high on the croup — SPECKLE × AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
3. points round the ankles — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. points across the face, forward of the ears — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD

Snow Cloud, coloured points

The same drifted snow with the points in a colour the line carries instead of in near-black. Fully recessive.

1. snow over the horse, with bare drifts the coat shows through — PARTS × PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. points clustered high on the croup — SPECKLE × AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
3. points round the ankles — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. points across the face, forward of the ears — SPECKLE × AXIS, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No snow.

Paints nothing.