Item / knowledge

Research papers

A paper naming one gene. Reading it adds that gene to your gene database and unlocks its targeted splice carrot — which is the only way to breed for a specific gene on purpose.

What it does

Right-click the paper to learn its gene. That gene joins your gene database, and you can then craft a Known Gene Splice carrot for it.

The tooltip tells you which gene the paper is for, how rare it is, and what it does, so you can decide before you read it.

A paper is not something you read

Right-clicking one does nothing. It used to add its gene to your database and unlock that gene's carrot — which made a paper a shortcut past the animals: find one in a chest and you knew a gene you had never met. Your gene database is now earned only by owning a living horse that carries the gene (tamed, bred, bought, given), and that same moment is what unlocks the carrot.

So a paper is a component. It goes into an Equine Research Shelf to be copied, and it goes into a gene carrot to be spent.

Four ways to get one

  • Find it. Research papers turn up in about eight kinds of vanilla chest. Which gene a found paper names is weighted by rarity, so the common genes come up far more often.
  • Take it off a horse. Right-click a horse while holding a book and you get a paper for one gene that horse carries, at random. You do not choose which — that is the point, and it is why a paper is a discovery rather than paperwork. A completely ordinary horse has nothing to teach and costs you no book.
  • Copy one you already have. File a paper into an Equine Research Shelf and that shelf can copy it onto blank books for as long as the original stays in it.
  • Trade for it. Papers can be handed to other players — which is the point of being able to write them. Knowledge is shareable rather than hoardable.

The component and the routes

research_paper carries a research_gene data component naming one gene. Right-click it to add that gene to your gene database and unlock its carrot line; the tooltip shows the gene’s name, rarity tier and blurb.

  • Chest loot — injected into ~8 vanilla chest tables by a global loot modifier, with the gene weighted by its rarity tier (data/loot/AddResearchPaperModifier).
  • Off a horse — server/GeneBookFromHorse, on EntityInteract with a book. It collects every locus the horse is not homozygous-baseline at (the same test discovery uses) and picks one uniformly. No JSON recipe: the result depends on the animal.
  • Traded from another player — which is the point of the second route: knowledge is shareable rather than hoardable.

Known gaps

The gene database Splice carrots All items
data/loot/AddResearchPaperModifier, menu/HorseBrowserRecipes.