Yalia

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 893 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/yalia.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 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 Ylk 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.

Yalia

Zones with straight edges and sharp corners - angular and blocky, never curved or organic - each drawn round in one colour and filled with flat white that barely varies. A mask across the face, a band along the neck, big patches on the shoulder, ribcage and hindquarter, and the same zones continuing down the legs to the knee and hock. Bands run round all four legs as well, perfectly level and sharply bounded. Where a zone reaches the mane or tail the hair inside it goes stark white too. Whatever white the horse already carries is taken into the design rather than left beside it: a tobiano patch, a splash, a blaze or a stocking is flattened to the same white and drawn round in the same outline colour, so the horse reads as one piece of architecture and not as two markings at once. There is no regular mane striping, and the hooves take the outline colour. Nothing about it feathers or fades.

1. the white fill — PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. the outline round every zone — PATCHES × PATCHES inverted, painted with TOWARD
3. a band round every leg — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. the outline of the leg band — AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
5. hooves in the outline colour — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
6. the horse's own white markings, filled flat like a zone — LUMA, painted with TOWARD
7. and drawn round in the same outline colour — LUMA × LUMA, painted with TOWARD

Black Yalia

The same marking as the white form with the light taken out of it: a single near-black tone.

1. the white fill — PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. the outline round every zone — PATCHES × PATCHES inverted, painted with TOWARD
3. a band round every leg — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. the outline of the leg band — AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
5. hooves in the outline colour — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
6. the horse's own white markings, filled flat like a zone — LUMA, painted with TOWARD
7. and drawn round in the same outline colour — LUMA × LUMA, painted with TOWARD

Coloured Yalia

The same architecture in a colour the line carries rather than in white. Fully recessive: it takes two copies, and a single copy beside the white allele shows white. Unlike the white form it leaves the horse's own white markings alone - there is nothing for them to match - so a coloured Yalia over a tobiano is genuinely two markings on one horse. It never gives blue eyes.

1. the white fill, in colour — PATCHES, painted with TOWARD
2. the outline round every zone, in colour — PATCHES × PATCHES inverted, painted with TOWARD
3. a band round every leg, in colour — AXIS, painted with TOWARD
4. the outline of the leg band, in colour — AXIS × AXIS, painted with TOWARD
5. hooves in the outline colour, in colour — AXIS, painted with TOWARD

Yalia outline

The outline colour and none of the architecture. It draws no zones, adds no white anywhere, and paints no leg bands or hooves - all it does is run the same bright hard-edged line round whatever white the horse already carries: a tobiano patch, a splash, a blaze, a stocking, a snip. On a horse with no white it is completely silent, however many copies it carries, which makes it the one form of Yalia that can sit unnoticed in a line. Recessive to both filled forms.

1. the outline round the horse's own white, and nothing else — LUMA × LUMA, painted with TOWARD

Wild type

No zones.

Paints nothing.