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I think that the darkness or lightness of a shade is heritable. Perhaps there is a sliding scale or more randomness to it than the visible genes that always go by Mendelian inheritance, but I suspect breeding two darker shaded horses tend to give more frequent darker shaded foals. As far as I know there is no official answer to this question.

Hi

Thanks so much for the answers. That link is super helpful. Also I realised I made a mistake, I was looking at horses who were all called chestnut but they do actually have different genes *face palm* sorry for the dud question ^^’

There are some genes that will reliably lighten or darken a coat. But there is some randomness involved in the exact shade of a coat as well to mimic real life where gene expression has so much variety.

DP Sty and Sty+ will all result in darker coats.

Pangare, Cream, Pearl will result in lighter coats.

Doing some studying on horse coat color genetics is a good idea if you are really wanting to get into breeding specific colors.

This webpage is also kind of fun to play around with to get an idea on how some of the basic genes interact to influence coat color. Keep in mind this page is a little old and might not match the genes present in the game exactly.
https://www.etalondx.com/horse-color-simulator

Ammit does her very best to make our coat color genetics as close to real life as possible (not counting the fantasy genes present in the game). So sometimes changes or updates are made to reflect new discoveries.