Magical gene / lines and strokes

Tribal Claw

Three swept, tapering claw strokes laid across the shoulder, the same on both flanks.

What it can come out as

OutcomeCarrying
Tribal clawTc/Tc · Tc/tc · Tc/n
Tribal claw, colouredtc/tc
Wild typetc/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
Tc/TcTribal claw0.002% — 1 in 50,000
Tc/tcTribal claw0.008% — 1 in 12,500
Tc/nTribal claw0.038% — 1 in 2,632
tc/tcTribal claw, coloured0.008% — 1 in 12,500
n/nWild type99.944%

Its gene carrot

The file

common/src/main/resources/horsegenetics/genes/tribal_claw.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.tribal_claw
Phasemagical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority385 — where it sits in the one (priority, key) paint order
AllelesTc · tc · n
Varies per horse1 value drawn once off the expressing allele copy, so a foal that inherits the copy inherits the look
Built fromSVG, TOWARD

Why it is built this way

A drawn shape rather than a rule for one, so it is identical on every horse carrying it and identical on both flanks - plane side extrudes along z. That is the point of the gene and also why it has no seed knob.

The viewport is u 0.47-0.67, v 0.39-0.56. In body space the topline is 0.62 and the underline 0.33, so that lands on the flank, about 4.6 by 5.7 body units against a 22-unit barrel; points above 0.62 would be floating over the back and nothing would appear on the barrel at all.

Only three of the seven strokes in the source drawing are here. The full spray covered most of a flank, which is more than this gene is for. The other four are in the source SVG if anyone wants the loud version.

Arrived at priority 124. Moved to 385: lines and strokes, after lacevein (384) - three strokes on the shoulder. 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.

Over the SVG point ceiling on arrival - the engine flattens every curve to sixteen segments, so a traced outline costs its command count rather than its size. Brought under it with intake/tools/fit-svg.mjs: flattened the way the engine flattens, Ramer-Douglas-Peucker to a point budget, re-emitted as polylines. The claws 1316 to 700, 0.01% of the viewBox changing side, measured through the engine's own inside test on a 400-sample grid. The whole viewBox is a few dozen texels across on the horse, so none of that reaches a texel. The d strings are therefore no longer the ones the trace produced. Gap 168 is the engine-side fix.

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.

Tribal claw

Three pale swept strokes across the shoulder, each tapering to a split point.

  1. three swept claws across the shoulder — SVG, painted with TOWARD

Tribal claw, coloured

The same three strokes in the colour this line carries.

  1. three swept claws across the shoulder — SVG, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No claw mark.

Paints nothing.