Sooty Flaxen Chestnut? (theoretical question)

[Arctictea]

I've been thinking for a while - in RL there are dark chestnuts with light manes and tails (some even look black with white mane/tail). I find it to be georgeus colour, and I might want to recreate it in the future...

But here, the sooty often stains mane/tail on the horses.


So,
1. Is there another way of altering the basic shade of a horse without using sooty?
2. Is it feastable to breed sooty away from mane/tail so they stay light? Have any of you seen such a horse, and how much sooty can it still be on them without staining mane/tail?
3. Is there something else I don't know? Such as, I don't know, a magical property of flaxen that removes sooty or something like that (my current horses are not flaxen but diluted chestnuts).

[Totina]

It is very much possible to get a dark chestnut with very light mane/tail in the game without sooty. There are many variations of chestnut from very red/orange to almost black and the flaxen gene also has many variations from white/silver to red/orange. Some variations are more common than others.

Here is a horse that I bred once that is very dark chestnut and with very light flaxen:

[Arctictea]

Interesting! A lot of darkness seems to come from the Forest Horses, which also gives plenty of sooty, so that's unfortunate.
I found some of his descendants that had about the same color without the grey in mane/tail.




Basically that's your stallion twice + belgian mare to keep flaxen chestnut and remove sooty.




And he carried on giving gorgeous flaxen chestnuts. Nice!

I suppose one must choose between nonstained mane/tail and dapples though, as sooty dappling is the only dappling that is not colourbound.

[Bitapetrone]

I know those critters! They're part of one of my colour projects.

Maintaining the non-sooty mane while keeping the dark body can be pretty difficult. Some variations of sooty seem to gravitate almost exclusively to the mane, while some variations avoid it. There are so many manifestations of sooty that isolating a specific type can be.. interesting. With line-breeding, I've been able to get fairly consistent results and control the sooty and stack it on a darker base coat. The issue I run into is that sometimes the mane and tail does not darken until much later in life, like 15-16 years, so there aren't always too many seasons to work with a horse that I know has the variation I want. Some of the horses below are from the same project, but they all showcase varying degrees of sooty on varying base coat shades.



On the above horse, I have photos of her at 12 and at 9. In her most recent photo you can see the sooty avoiding the mane, but just barely creeping into the feathering and tail. This was not really happening in her photo at age 9.

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Here's another branch of the same project. This horse's coat shade is lighter and the sooty is mostly isolated to the legs with little effect on the body. It can be difficult to see, but you'll notice the legs are darker than they should be by only a few shades and you can see the slight dampening of the white on the lower leg.

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For comparison, here is a slightly lighter version of the shade on the horse above with the sooty removed.

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This critter is from another colour project. The sooty in this project is usually restricted to the mane, but sometimes it creeps either halfway, or all the way down the body in a smooth sheet.

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And this horse is just fun. Lol

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This is hardcore sooty on bay silver. I was fortunate in that this variation avoided the mane and tail almost completely, so this mare is pretty striking. I've got a photo of her at 4, and you can see the sooty hitting hard and fast around that age, but it began creeping in when she was around 2ish if I remember correctly.

[Arctictea]

Awsome! Yes, I mistook the sooty for an actual shade since it was so well behaving, but the last mares gallery is clear on that point. It would have been interesting to know how she looked at age 2 or 3, to see what her base shade was (I think she had already begun sooty down at the first adult pic).

I tried to figure out where she got her good sooty from, but gave up. That lucky arabian stallion has almost all the horses from the whole hwo in his pedigree... And half of them are black!
(Btw, she has no foal and is 21...)

Belgians seem like a bet though. So far I've only used Forest Horses for my sooty (dapples) because they give heavy and quick sooty...

Sometimes I get this odd dull sooty. It kind of reminds me of your well behaved sooty (except that mine does not behave). I don't know if it's the base shade, or just that it covers most of the body evenly.




Dull


Compare with "normal"


And "extra shiny"

Another one:


Dull


Normal


Shiny

But yeah, basically, behaving sooty is the best scenario since it does mean that my sooty dapples could have clean mane/tails with a bit of work. So I'm very happy you showed it to be doable