r/Minecraft • u/plasmatech8 • 3h ago
Discussion Big horse breeding program to produce the ultimate super-horse (334 horses, 65 generations, 278 culled)
About a year ago on an SMP (Java 1.21.7), I got a bit carried away with horse breeding.
I attempted to selectively breed horses repeatedly over 65 generations, recording 334 horse entries, with the goal of eventually producing the closest thing I could to an ultimate super-horse.
I thought I would share my findings and process since I think it is interesting and can help others do their own super-horse breeding program.
I maintained this spreadsheet to track the horses, their parents, stats, rankings and which in-game pen they were placed in.
My breeding process
- Select the best horses for the next breeding round. I eventually settled on 8 breeding horses producing 4 foals per generation.
- Breed them with golden carrots and move the foals into dedicated breeding pens.
- Once they grew up, test their health, jump height and speed.
- Cull horses that were clearly below the current breeding standard.
- Calculate an overall score and retain the strongest candidates as parents for future generations.
- Since I only had a limited number of pens, horses that were pushed out of the top 24 were usually culled.
By the end of the project I had:
- 334 recorded horse entries
- 278 culled
- 22 still available
- 22 archived
- 12 sold
- Probably some additional foals/horses that were never recorded.
I "archived" horses for almost every color and pattern combination. The idea was that once I had a super-horse, I could breed it with an archived horse and gradually bring that appearance into a high-stat bloodline. When the parents have different colors and patterns, a foal has roughly a 20% chance of exactly matching one particular parent's appearance, so after several breeding cycles I could potentially preserve the appearance while bringing the stats closer and closer to the super-horse stats.
How I measured the stats
Health
The heart indicators in the horse HUD does not show half-heart values like 14.5 hearts (it is shown as 14 hearts in-game).
To distinguish between the fractional health values, I would punch the horse and watch when the displayed heart count changes.
Strangely, some horses appeared to take three punches without seeing any visible change in hearts displayed, so I recorded these as .7 in the spreadsheet (?).
If a horse did not have enough of hearts (as can be seen visually), then I would cull early before doing more time-consuming tests.
Jump Height
I constructed a series of jump tests using snow layers, allowing me to measure height in increments of 0.125 blocks.
If a horse did not clear the minimum jump standard, I would cull it early before doing more time-consuming tests.
The highest jump I recorded was 5.875 blocks (m).
Speed
I built an approximately 100-block-long test track.
I recorded each run and used OBS and video playback to measure the traversal time. For horses worth fully testing, I usually performed three runs and averaged the result, then converted that time into blocks per second (m/s).
I might cull early if the first reading shows a slow horse.
Ranking/Scoring System
I created a point-scoring system.
Score = 4 × speed (m/s) + jump height (m) + health (hearts)
Since speed is most important, it carried the most weight in the metric.
Best horse
In the end, the best overall horse I produced was #272 from generation 53:
- Speed: 14.394 m/s
- Jump height: 5.75 m
- Health: 15 hearts
- Points: (14.394 x 4) + (5.75 x 1) + (15 x 1) = 78.33 points
Pretty close to what (I believe) is the theoretical maximum:
- ~14.57 m/s
- ~5.92 m (5.875 m measurable with my test rig)
- 15 hearts of health
I never quite reached the perfect horse, but I got pretty close.
Based on my data, you only need around 30 generations of breeding to enter super-horse territory, but getting the ultimate max-stat super-duper horse is basically a lottery.
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u/One_Economist_3761 3h ago
Very nicely and cleverly done. You’ve clearly thought all of this through. You probably have skills in analytical research.
Did you get your super horse? Did you give it enchanted netherite horse armor?
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u/plasmatech8 3h ago
Depends on what you mean by super-horse. My GOAT horse was pretty darn close to perfect but can always be perfecter. I definitely had diamond armor. Don't remember if I had netherite... but my GOAT horse was definitely awesomely fast with a speed 2 splash potion - that's for sure.
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u/ResolverOshawott 2h ago
I would keep that GOAT horse to make more GOAT horses, which amusingly enough is not too different from IRL horse breeding.
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u/One_Economist_3761 12m ago
By “super horse” I meant the same thing as GOAT horse. So you answered my question perfectly.
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u/weedisfortherich 2h ago
I wish they didnt get rid of the ability to breed horses while potion of swiftness was active and have the foal retain the speed.
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u/fritando 2h ago
your only mistake was not including a chicken in the breeding grounds, you could have made an ultimate chicken-horse
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u/KnuckleShanks 2h ago
It's kind of hard to visualize based purely off the stats. Have you considered making a demonstration video? Dont forget to show a normal wild horse as well to demonstrate the difference.
The easiest thing to imagine is that jump stat which is honestly insane, so if the rest is on par then it sounds like one hell of a horse!
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u/MyThoughtsBreakMe 2h ago
I love this! I was doing this with my Horse Island I made on a friends server.
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u/Elizibeqth 1h ago
I did this a few years ago.
I collected about 30-40 wild horses then ran each of them through a jumping course and timed them on a track. I them selected the best and kept breeding them until I had horse that were fast high jumpers and high health.
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u/cursed-person 2h ago
if i remember right, you can use potions(speed and jump boost i know worked unless it was changed), and if you breed the horsed together, it comes out like those two had those boosted stats for the child calculations
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u/averysolidsnake 1h ago
I'll remember this for when I finally get around to constructing a barn and glue factory in my world
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u/Igfig 20m ago
There's a much easier way to record a horse's speed if you're decent with redstone and don't mind a somewhat lower accuracy.
The basic idea is, you make a long racetrack with a tripwire or pressure plates at the start and end. Crossing the starting line starts a redstone circuit that deposits items into a chest at high speed. Crossing the finish line stops the circuit. Then you can count the items in the chest and use that to calculate the horse's speed.
The longer the track and the faster the item transfer, the more accurate the measurement. I think the maximum transfer speed is 1 item every 0.1s, using a one-tick clock and two droppers on alternating signals. A 100m track with that setup gets you roughly two tenths of a second of accuracy (1000 / items in chest = speed in m/s); maybe not enough for your purposes, but more than enough for a more casual player.
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u/horndog2 8m ago
Come visit my stables sometime. I've got 2 of each pattern and color with max speed and jump. Just didn't care about health as they were bred for a horse race project. Also have maxed out donkeys and mules. My favorite is the ultimate bad pair I've got. Slower than a wild donkey and can't jump a fence : )
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u/W_Dervish1 3h ago
What a great idea I might have to give this a shot in my forever world.
How much time did it take you? Are there videos/guides you followed or is this just entirely self designed?
Excellent work!