Reference / what covers what

The paint order

Every gene that paints a coat, stacked in the order the composer applies it — the last thing painted at the top. Scroll down and you are working back through the horse: the modifiers that read what is already there, then the markings, then the white, then the pigment underneath all of it, ending at Agouti. A gene higher up this page covers a gene lower down.

The stack

Each entry is the gene as the icon baker photographs it, its priority number, and which phase it paints in. Click one for its page.

There is one order, and it is derived

Genes sorts every registered gene — built-in and data-driven alike — on (priority, key), once. The three views anything else uses are all a result of that sort rather than a source: codeOrder() is the whole list and decides where a gene's segment sits in a genotype code; naturalOrder() is it filtered to the phase-1 genes; magicalOrder() is it filtered to the phase-3 ones. Registration order is never respected, so two people who drop the same gene files in a different order get the same horses.

The phase, not the number, is what splits the two painting passes. The 0–99 / 100+ bands are a convention that keeps the two readable side by side, and Genes.register logs a warning when a gene sits outside its own band rather than moving it.

What the number decides

  • What covers what. Phase 3 folds each gene's signed RGB into one accumulator in this order, and a gene that paints absolutely - flat paint rather than a tint - replaces whatever is underneath it outright. That is why a gene that covers the whole horse is deliberately kept low: Dhampir paints every texel white, and at the top of the order it would have been the last word on every horse that carried it.
  • What a modifier has to read. A gene with no shape of its own - Voided, Opalized, Fielded, Yalia - only means anything once the markings it modifies exist, so all of them sit at the very end. Anything that reacts to another marking has to be painted after it, and the priority is the only place that is said.
  • Where its segment sits in a genotype code. Same sort, so a code reads in paint order too.
  • Which family it lands in on the sidebar, the landing page and both gene editors. GeneFamily bands on priority, because the bands were laid out as families in the first place.

The one gene the order does not describe

Extreme white dominant paints nothing and has no slot in this stack that means anything. What it does is change the rule the stack is folded with: while it is present, a white texel is final, and every gene above it in the order is discarded wherever the coat is already white. It appears on this page nowhere, because it does not paint - which is the honest answer and also the point of it.

Where the pictures come from

:common:bakeGeneIcons, which bakes each gene on a standard horse and projects it to a three-quarter view. The backdrop is measured, not declared: a plain bay unless the gene has too little to do on one, in which case it falls through to a tobiano, a chestnut or a leopard - whichever gives it enough to show. A gene with no icon here is one the baker could not photograph, and for a gene that claims to paint that is a finding rather than a formatting problem.