Tutorial:Horses

This is a tutorial for playing the game effectively with horses, donkeys or mules.

Here are schematics of some quick and dirty parking methods. They do not depend on leads.

The pit-in-the-ground designs shown here make use of barriers that are slightly over 1 block high. You can use carpet instead of trapdoor, but it must be trapdoor until you have a horse capable of jumping over such barriers.

Note that horses can breed with each other across a fence, so it will be practical to place your best breeding pair in two adjacent fence-based parking spots.

If you have more time on your hands, see Tutorial:Automatic double doors for another option. Those doors could be used for either a "parking garage", or lead directly into your base if some part or a whole of your base is horse-friendly.

When building an integrated parking garage, keep in mind that the player almost always dismounts on the right side. As such, the garage should be to the left of your base.

Horses are particularly helpful to efficient gameplay when you minimize how often you need to dis-mount and park them. One way to do that is ensure accessibility inside your base.

Principles for making it non-annoying:

• 3 blocks headroom: The ceiling needs to be 3+ blocks high everywhere. It is permissible to have cubbyholes and other small spaces, if they are only 1 block wide or only 1 block high. The problem with 2-block high ceilings is that a horse can go there, and you will hit your head and take damage.
• 2-block wide passages: Make all doorways and corridors 2+ blocks wide. The only place to ever have an 1-wide passage is where you want to make it mandatory to dismount.
• No 1-block high builds: Build nothing that is only 1 block high. This includes furnaces and chests on the ground, for example. The problem with doing so is that the horse automatically climbs these, and often leads to the player hitting their head on something, and in any case is often annoying. An easy rule: every time you're tempted to place down a random furnace, place two, to form a little pillar that the horse cannot climb. Alternatively, a floor made of dirt path, mud or slabs can prevent this issue with most blocks.
• No "underfoot utilities": It is annoying to try to look down through the horse's body (this is one reason to prefer mules and donkeys, as their bodies are slightly smaller). So chests, furnaces, buttons, levers and everything else that needs to be aimed at should be placed higher up, or at least further away from where you stand.
• (relevant in large bases) Plenty of quick parking spots so that when you do dismount, you can prevent the horse wandering. Also, plenty of extra horses - view it as mass-producing bicycles and you'll have a useful mindset.
• At least one entrance to your base should probably be tripwires over double doors.

Pay special attention when you place non-full blocks on top of a full block. For example, a chest on top of a furnace. The horse will climb both! Put the chest on something from the following list instead.

List of horse-friendly foundations on which to place a chest:

• 👁 BlockSprite oak-fence.png: Sprite image for oak-fence in Minecraft
  Fence
• 👁 BlockSprite stone-brick-wall.png: Sprite image for stone-brick-wall in Minecraft
  Wall
• 👁 BlockSprite scaffolding.png: Sprite image for scaffolding in Minecraft
  Scaffolding
• 👁 BlockSprite grindstone.png: Sprite image for grindstone in Minecraft
  Grindstone
• 👁 BlockSprite decorated-pot.png: Sprite image for decorated-pot in Minecraft
  Decorated Pot
• 👁 BlockSprite chest.png: Sprite image for chest in Minecraft
  Another chest

Of these, the fence, wall and scaffolding are extra-practical default foundations for any block, since even when nothing is placed on them, the horse still won't climb them. If you construct the floor entirely out of slabs, scaffolding is the only remaining block with this benefit, although of course you can let a slab be there in place of scaffolding and allow chests to hover in the air.

Some floor materials can let you cheat the principle of "no 1-block high builds".

Normally, a ridden horse climbs any block that stands up to 1 full block high over the floor. So making the floor a bit lower eliminates the problem with many common blocks. But not all, so which things do we still want to place on a raised post? It depends on the floor:

An example of what this means is that you can have chests only ~1.5m over the floor if you use bottom slabs, but on a mud floor you'll have to raise the chest on a post so it sits ~2m over the floor. Conversely, on mud you can have a furnace only ~1m over the floor, but on a slab floor, the same furnace would sit ~1.5m over the floor.

You can keep your mount safe from death by dismounting when you fight. It is prone to wander off, so keep the fight brief. You can also make it easier to find the mount again by leashing a bee, allay or parrot to it.

Alternatively, practicing aim with your bow while on the move is pretty safe, and an interesting challenge.

This is a tutorial for the process of finding, measuring, and breeding horses and zombie horses. Most of the advice applies to donkeys as well, on Java Edition.

You usually don't need to do any breeding to get a pretty fast horse. Just carry some leads and keep trying horses while exploring plains biomes, you'll soon have two fast ones you can use to mass-produce plenty of spares.

If you want a pretty fast mule, then that takes a bit longer: do the above, and also breed donkeys for let's say 30 generations, then combine your best donkey with your best horse. This does not work on Bedrock Edition, where donkeys and mules have a fixed speed.

Prior to horse breeding, it's advised to have a reliable source of golden carrots. This can be through the combination of a zombified piglin farm and a carrot farm, or through trading with a master farmer. In a less progressed world, it often makes sense to supplement this with wheat, which can be grown alongside carrots in rows for an efficient supply of both. Zombie horses only eat red mushrooms.

Leads are useful in moving more than one horse at a time. Fences should be set up prior to breeding to conveniently attach horses to, if not lead-free parking spots (§ Parking). Having a few leads and saddles on-hand is very useful, but don't worry on older game versions where these items were hard to acquire, there's no reason to prepare a surplus as they can be reused after a horse is discarded and optimal methods of horse breeding rarely use more than 12 horses.

While horses also spawn in savannas, they're over four times more likely to spawn in plains or sunflower plains. They can be quickly scanned for because you see far in these biomes. Zombie horses can also spawn in these biomes, as well as in snowy plains, but in darkness like other hostile mobs, always spawning being ridden by a zombie with an iron spear, so they can be challenging to obtain.

The stats of a horse can be evaluated without riding it by exploiting the debug screen‌^{[Java Edition only]}, but it's not difficult to tell vaguely if a horse's stats are sufficient by taming and briefly riding it. If you're only after speed, you don't even need to tame it: observe how fast the horse wanders while you attempt to mount it.

Wild donkeys do not vary in stats, so pick any donkey.

Finding a naturally spawned horse with desired traits can save breeding time later on, especially regarding the color and pattern of the horse. Zombie horses behave similarly to horses, but with a few differences.

Zombie Horse pros:

• Zombie horses naturally regenerate health overtime.
• Aren't targeted by the wither.
• Are immuned to poison, which can prove useful when fighting witches.
• Always spawn with 25 health points.

Zombie Horse cons:

• Burn in the sun if not wearing horse armor.
• Can never have more than 25 health points.
• Are able to despawn until they are tamed as they count as monsters.
• Will never spawn on peaceful.‌^{[BE only]}
• Are dangerous, as they spawn as hostile horsemen.
• Cannot be bred.

Horses can be carried back long distances to a more convenient location using leads in tandem with an elytra or happy ghast. Alternatively, tamed horses can simply be ridden home, and excess horses pulled along with leads. In Java Edition, the Nether roof is an ideal way to transport horses, or you can prepare secure 2×3 walkways in the Nether ahead of time.

Pressing  +  while looking at the horse will copy entity data. Note that this only works if cheats are enabled. This can be pasted into a text editor or the in-game chat.

For health, find in "minecraft:max_health" (for example {id: "minecraft:max_health", base: 24.0d}, meaning the horse has 24HP👁 ❤️
× 12).

For jump strength: "minecraft:jump_strength"

For speed: "minecraft:movement_speed"

The health can be determined by looking at the heads-up display. The saddle icons replacing your hunger bar while riding a horse is the horse’s health bar. One heart equals two health points. When you ride a horse that has an odd number of health points, the last health point isn’t shown on the HUD. Sometimes, horses have an odd number of health points; one method you can check if the horse has an even or odd number of health points/hitpoints is by hitting the horse and mounting the horse to check the hitpoints. If the HUD shows one less health point lost in health than the attack damage to the player, after the player attacks it, either with or without tools, the horse has 1 more health point than shown in the HUD and thus has an odd number of health points. If the HUD shows the exact amount lost in health than the total attack damage to the player after the player attacks it, the horse has an even number of health and it has exactly the number of health points/hitpoints as shown in the HUD. The horse might regenerate one health point right after you attack it, so you might want to try again. Heal the horse to full health and attack it again to check again if you’re correct in checking if the horse has an odd or even number of hitpoints. For example, if a horse appears to have 22 hitpoints and you attack it, if the horse has lost one fewer health point than the damage you inflicted to the horse, and if the horse didn’t regenerate, then it means that the horse actually has 23 hitpoints.

The internal value for jump strength for horses ranges from 0.4 to 1.0, which turns out to be approximately 1.15 to 5.92 blocks.​^{[more information needed]} A device to measure this can be quite simple: build walls of increasing heights parallel to each other, 3 blocks apart. To test horse jump strength, simply jump over the shortest wall to arrive at the next wall, and continue jumping until you can no longer jump. The last wall you were able to jump over indicates your horse's maximum jump strength. Slabs and snow layers can be used to create non-full block increments.

Speed proves to be the most difficult attribute to measure accurately. The internal value for horses ranges from 0.1125 to 0.3375. A device to measure this can be constructed with the delay on repeaters, using repeater locking. Create a very long chain of repeaters.

Use a piston to hold back the horse. Connect redstone such that the piston releases the horse at the same time as a pulse starts down the repeater chain. At the end of a certain amount of blocks (~45 or so), add pressure plates, which are usually more consistent than tripwire. When these pressure plates are activated, use a long string of redstone to lock every repeater in the chain. This will "freeze" the chain and the pulse that started at the beginning will be frozen in place. You can mark the repeater where the pulse is frozen with a block.

Keep in mind that you may need repeaters to lengthen the signal enough to lock the entire repeater chain, which will introduce a delay. You can account for this delay by adjusting the delay of the repeaters used for locking. As long as all the repeaters lock at the exact same time, the device will work.

Also keep in mind that for the results to be consistent, you must be going perfectly straight every time. You can do this by opening F3 mode and looking at the "facing" label, which shows a numerical value for your camera angle. You can temporarily decrease your mouse sensitivity through the controls to align yourself perfectly.

This device cannot measure the horse's exact speed in blocks/second, but can accurately measure its speed relative to other horses. Aside from server lag, it is incredibly consistent and can be used for accurate comparisons.

To convert a horse's internal speed to blocks/seconds, multiply the internal value by 43.17.

Upon breeding, the two parent horse's stats are each averaged independently, and then a random deviation is applied. This random deviation is calculated by generating a number between -0.5 and 0.5 (biased towards 0) and multiplying it by the sum of the difference between the two parents and 30% of the total range for the given stat. This means that each stat in a horse produced by breeding can be up to 15% lower than their lowest parent, or 15% higher than the highest parent. However, the expected value for each stat is still the average of the two parents. When any stat value exceeds its' upper or lower limit, it gets lowered or raised according to the difference between it and the limit. This means that if the average of two parents is above the 85th percentile for a given stat, it becomes more likely for the offspring horse to have a lower value in that stat as opposed to a higher one, and the opposite is true for horses below the 15th percentile. Therefore, the chance of getting a better horse is 50% for any horse between the 15th and 85th percentiles, but worse horses approach a 48% chance of improving while better horses approach a 72% chance of being worse than their parents.

Each parent has an equal probability of passing along its color to their offspring, and the same applies to patterns. Additionally, new horses have a 20% chance to have a random new pattern, or an 11.11% chance to have a random new color. The relative probability of each combination of color and pattern is shown below. This is a table representing the probabilities of the color and markings of the baby horse when breeding two horses A and B.

Tutorial:Horses/Breeding_until_Java_1.19.4_and_Bedrock_1.19.70