HGG Community Forums

Yep PATN1 increases the size of the spots on Appaloosa

“PATN1 is the most important gene for controlling the size of an appaloosa's blanket. One copy of ECA3PPATN1 will give a horse a large blanket while two copies will give a horse a near or total body white”

You can look at this link for examples from the game creator
https://www.huntandjump.com/geneticsguide/?page_id=190

Giving him a copy of PATN1 will give you an idea of how big his are, but I don't think you can change it if they're small.

I think it might be an unknown quantity on each horse. Just depending on a set of numbers we cant see. As far as i can tell, breeding horses with smaller spots to horses with bigger spots will help increase size, but only sometimes, so i think when a horse is bred it takes the parents numbers and puts them on a range scale, kinda like how ability/PT works, and they can come out either between or a little above or below depending on the size of the parents. If the sizes are close together, there's not a lot of range, but if they're micro dots and Huge ones, you can get middling, or teeny, but less likely to get huge, just because the range is so stretched out.

Here is a link to a previous forum discussion on this topic. Basically the darker the pigment, the bigger the spots.

https://hj2.huntandjump.com/forum/discussion/59035/spot-size-in-appaloosas#Item_31

Whoops my bad, I was thinking of the blanket size not the actual spots.

Yeah I was pretty sure I remembered it was about saturation of color rather than actual shade, but didn’t have that old thread bookmarked!

There is definitely something to be said of those mystery control genes as, like Kintara said, I have some horses with the same genetics and vastly different spot size. It's a big reason that part of my breeding is based just phenotypically for spot size vs what their genes can (at this time) tell me about them. ;)

I have a big spot appy line on the other server and have steadily been increasing spot size for about 18 months now. My findings have matched with stated above, but to summarize.

- Sooty and DP increase spot size
- Dun and cream do not always correlate with smaller sports (can't testify for the other genes @Ren mentioned)
- Eliminating mares with what I can "pinprick" spots had a huge impact
- Non-LP mares can contribute to spot size. I have a solid mare that has consistently thrown foals with larger spots than the sire

Gender, huh? I've never really tracked across gender before, but a casual "just flipping through a search in about two minutes" makes me want to say my my studs on average have larger spots than the girls... but I also keep fewer studs intact, so that may be *very* heavy on the selection bias.