Magical gene / lines and strokes

Vortex

A hard-edged lens over the neck and shoulder filled with undulating bands in a fixed four-colour order - cyan, cream, magenta and near-black - carried a little way into the mane.

What it can come out as

Outcome	Carrying
Vortex	`Vtx/Vtx` · `Vtx/n`
Wild type	`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 5,000 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 pair	Shows as	How often
`Vtx/Vtx`	Vortex	0.001% — 1 in 100,000
`Vtx/n`	Vortex	0.019% — 1 in 5,263
`n/n`	Wild type	99.98%

Its gene carrot

The file

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

Key	`horsegenetics.vortex`
Phase	magical — it adds signed colour in phase 3, after the pigment has resolved
Priority	369 — where it sits in the one `(priority, key)` paint order
Alleles	`Vtx` · `n`
Varies per horse	2 values drawn once off the expressing allele copy, so a foal that inherits the copy inherits the look
Built from	AXIS, RAMP, SPOTS, STROKES, TOWARD

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.

Vortex

A broad teardrop reaching from the throatlatch back to about the girth, its outer boundary hard against the coat and made of the pointed ends of its own outermost bands rather than of any outline. Inside it, twelve to twenty-five bands run nose-to-tail on sinusoidal paths, widening at the crests and pinching at the inflections, merging and splitting and dying off between their neighbours. The four colours cycle in order and never repeat side by side, with the cyan and cream toward the core and the magenta and black at the margin. Where the field meets the crest the bands run on into the mane for a third of its length.

the near-black ground the bands separate — SPOTS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
the cyan and cream bands, toward the core — STROKES × SPOTS × AXIS, painted with RAMP
the magenta bands, toward the margin — STROKES inverted × STROKES × SPOTS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
the bands carried into the mane — STROKES × AXIS, painted with RAMP

Wild type

No vortex.

Paints nothing.