Magical gene / no coat effect
Verdant
A horse that changes the ground it walks on: mycelium, moss or grass, creeping outward from wherever it stands. Three variants at one locus, every one of them needing two of itself — so a mycelium copy beside a moss copy is not half of each, it is nothing at all.
Crossing two of them
It paints nothing, and that is a gap
All five outcomes are wild types, so affectsCoat() is false, the
locus is out of the texture key, and the gallery collapses it to one entry —
four alleles for no catalogue growth at all, the same trick
sex and the
non-coat loci use.
The cost is real, and it is the same one milk has: a verdant horse is indistinguishable from an ordinary one until you watch the floor. It sits awkwardly beside healer, which draws a stripe precisely so a player can see what it does. A marking would be the fix, and it would want to be part of the locus rather than bolted on.
Its gene carrot
- Gene key
- horsegenetics.verdant
- Priority
- 180 (magical band)
- Alleles
- mush moss grass n
- Combinations
- 10, all carryable — 5 outcomes
- Outcomes
- wild,
verdant-carrier,mycelium,moss,grass - Default allele
- n
- Wild frequency
mush6%,moss7%,grass8% per allele- Founder draws
- 1 × nextFloat()
- Coat effect
- none, ever
- Spread
- at most one block per 60 ticks, within 2 blocks, 35% of the time
Nothing has watched a horse change a floor. The conversion lists in particular want a look: the risk is a horse eating something a player built with, and the lists are narrow specifically to avoid that. Checklist on To be verified.
The combination table
| Combination | Outcome | Effect |
|---|---|---|
n/n | wild | The ground is left alone |
| any single variant copy, and any two different variants | verdant-carrier | Nothing — inert, and passes both on |
mush/mush | mycelium | Mycelium spreads |
moss/moss | moss | Moss spreads |
grass/grass | grass | Bare dirt greens over |
Three recessives at one locus
Every variant needs two of itself. That is a genuinely different shape from the rest of the mod, and it is worth sitting next to its nearest relative: milk’s two variants are also mutually recessive, but the pairing of them is lethal where this one is merely inert. Both are combination tables. Neither needs a word for what it is doing, and no dominance ranking could tell the two situations apart.
The consequence is that a verdant horse takes real work. With the commonest variant at 8%, about one wild horse in a hundred and fifty spreads grass, and the two carriers who could throw one look exactly like every other horse. Three variants at one locus also means a line bred toward one of them is drifting away from the other two — which is the sort of decision this model exists to create.
A cover, not a block id
The gene names one of three covers — mycelium,
moss, grass — and stops there. It does not name a
block, because “spreading moss” is not one conversion: it is a small
family of them, plus a rule about what it will and will not eat. That judgement
needs the game’s block registry, so it lives in the translator, where the
lists are deliberately narrow:
| Cover | Eats | Becomes |
|---|---|---|
mycelium | grass block, dirt, coarse dirt, podzol, rooted dirt | mycelium |
moss | stone, cobblestone, andesite, gravel, dirt, coarse dirt, grass block | moss block |
grass | dirt, coarse dirt, rooted dirt | grass block |
Every entry is ground a player would expect to green over, and nothing on the lists is a block anyone builds with. Grass is the gentlest of the three and the only one that undoes damage rather than doing it.
One block a beat, on purpose
The translator converts at most one eligible block per beat, and picks a random candidate near the horse rather than the nearest one. Both are design rather than performance dodges: this is a horse changing the ground it walks over, and a player who leaves one standing in a field should come back to a patch rather than to a new biome. Picking randomly also makes the edge of a spread ragged instead of a perfect expanding disc.
It is skipped entirely in the horse dimension, for the same reason the light block is: nothing there should be able to rewrite the floor.
common/genetics/genes/VerdantGene.java