Item group / breeding

The splice carrots

Carrots that add a gene to a foal. One targets a gene you have researched; the others roll one at random, either from the whole pool or from one themed slice of it.

Known Gene Splice — the targeted one

Pick the gene yourself. Craft it with a research paper for the gene you want, and feeding it to a parent gives the foal that gene.

Recipe: golden carrot + a research paper + horse hair + the rarity item for that paper’s gene — and nothing else, exactly four filled slots. The gene comes off the paper, so a rarer gene needs a rarer reagent.

This one is not filtered

The random splices refuse to hand a foal something that would kill it or cost it hearts. The Known splice does not: you named the gene and you can read what it does, so splicing a horse into a lethal genotype on purpose is allowed. Check the gene’s own page first.

Unknown Gene Splice — the random one

Recipe: golden carrot + horse hair + gunpowder. It picks one gene at random and gives the foal a random version of it. It will never pick something that kills the foal or costs it hearts — see the breeding carrots.

The five themed splices

Each is the plain Unknown Gene Splice refined with one more reagent, and each narrows the random draw to one kind of gene. Same surprise, smaller pool.

CarrotRecipe (shapeless)Rolls from
Dilution Gene SpliceUnknown Gene Splice + light grey dyethe genes that lighten a coat
White Gene SpliceUnknown Gene Splice + bone mealthe white-patterning genes
Marking Gene SpliceUnknown Gene Splice + ink sacthe marking genes
Performance Gene SpliceUnknown Gene Splice + rabbit’s footthe speed / size / jump genes
Magical Gene SpliceUnknown Gene Splice + amethyst shardthe invented genes

A splice that lands marks the foal

A foal that got a gene from a splice carrot carries that fact for life, and so do its descendants — a spliced line is visibly a spliced line. The detail is on the carrot family page.

The Known Gene Splice is a custom recipe type

Not a JSON shapeless recipe: server/recipe/KnownGeneSpliceRecipe. It requires golden carrot + a research paper + horse hair + the rarity item for that paper’s gene, and nothing else — exactly four filled slots. The gene is read off the paper at craft time, so a drop-in gene file gets its carrot the moment it registers.

This recipe lands in four places

KnownGeneSpliceRecipe (what it requires), SpliceRecipeDisplay (the canonical slot layout), RarityItems (the tier → item table, deliberately off common/), and wiki/gene-carrot/gene-carrot.js, which redraws both for the wiki. The wiki cannot read the last two — they are Minecraft-side — so a change there is silent on the pages until it is made here too.

One item, many genes

known_gene_splice_carrot is one generic item parameterised by a data component, so every gene’s carrot looks the same in the inventory. That is a known gap.

The blacklist, and why it is derived

SpliceSafety works the random pool out from what the genes actually do rather than from a typed list of keys: every combination the carrot could roll is resolved through HorseTraits on an otherwise wild-type horse, and the locus is dropped if any of them produces a condition worse than INFORMATIONAL or leaves the horse short of baseline health. A new health gene is excluded the moment it is registered, by having done its job. Full argument on the carrot family page.

server/recipe/KnownGeneSpliceRecipe, common/genetics/SpliceSafety.java.