- Players can breed horses in Minecraft using golden carrots or golden apples.
- The horse can be bred with a donkey to obtain a mule in the game.
- Players can breed horses repeatedly to get one with the best stats in the game.
Travelling across Minecraft biomes in the Overworld can feel draining, but having a fast mount can heavily enhance the process. So, relying on feet is not always the best option because you may quickly find your health massively low on a single hit due to hunger. The fastest option for a mount is a horse, as they can be tamed and saddled to move faster through your blocky world. In this guide, we discuss how to breed horses in Minecraft, so you can have more and better mounts.
Editor’s Note: This guide is updated for the latest Minecraft versions, including Minecraft 26.2 Java and Bedrock Editions.
Materials Needed to Make Horses Breed
Before learning how to breed horses in Minecraft, make sure that you have everything required. You should also learn how to tame a horse in Minecraft because it is a basic requirement before breeding. So, here’s what you will need:
| Requirements | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 2x Adult Tamed Horses | The parents who will produce the foal |
| 2x Golden Carrots or Golden Apples or Enchanted Golden Apples | Triggers the love mode in the horses |
Out of the above three food sources in Minecraft, golden carrots are usually the best option since they’re significantly cheaper to craft. Moreover, these food items occur as one of the cheapest villager trades in Minecraft in exchange for emeralds, thereby providing another easy method of obtaining them. Whereas the Golden Apples require gold ingots instead of nuggets in their crafting recipe, and the Enchanted version is a treasure item that cannot be crafted in the game.
How to Breed Horses in Minecraft (Step-by-Step for Java & Bedrock)
Once you’ve found two horses, you’re ready to start breeding. The process is identical whether you’re playing Minecraft Java or the Bedrock Edition. So, if you were searching for how to breed horses in Minecraft Java or how to breed horses in Minecraft Bedrock, you have to follow the same set of steps as discussed below:
Step 1: Tame Two Adult Horses
As discussed above, you will need to tame the two horses before they can be bred. However, taming horses can be a bit tricky and slightly different from the method followed by other Minecraft mobs.
Approach a horse with an empty hand and interact with it to climb onto its back. The horse may initially buck you off after a few seconds and emit a black particle effect. Once it does that, interact with it again to ride it and gain its trust. Do this same task repeatedly until some red hearts emit and the horse gets tamed.
You can also feed it its favorite food to reduce the time required to tame it as well. This is a required process, since untamed horses cannot breed.
Step 2: Feed Golden Foods to Trigger Love Mode
After taming both horses, bring them close in an open area and follow the steps below:
- Right-click on one of the horses with golden carrots (or its other favorite food) in your hand and then do the same with the other horse.
- The horses will now enter Love Mode, and you will see heart particles above their heads.
Then, the horses will get close to each other and breed a baby horse (foal) in Minecraft. In addition to the foal, you will also get a little bit of XP from breeding the horses. After you breed horses, you need to wait for the cooldown to wear off before you can breed them again.
Another unique addition was brought about in the Minecraft 26.1 update: the Golden Dandelion. Feeding a Golden Dandelion to the baby horse or mule mob can pause its growth and keep it in the baby state forever. Now you can make a Name Tag and give this baby a name.
How to Breed a Horse and a Donkey in Minecraft
Besides breeding two horses, you can learn how to breed a horse and a donkey in Minecraft. Just follow the steps to do so:
- First, you must tame both a horse and a donkey to proceed with cross-breeding them.
- A donkey can be tamed similarly to a horse by riding and feeding it its favorite food – carrots.
- Once done, bring the horse and a donkey close, and feed both of them a pair of golden carrots or golden apples.
- This triggers the mob’s love mode, and they produce a small mule. The adult mules cannot be bred, so it is the only way to get them into the game.
How to Breed Fast Horses in Minecraft (Stat & Speed Optimization)
After learning how to breed horses in Minecraft and the process for breeding a horse and a donkey in Minecraft, you can also get them with optimized stats for faster speeds. Every horse has these attributes: health, movement speed, and jump strength.
These values are generated individually for every horse, which means that even two identical horses can have completely different performances. If you’ve been searching for how to breed fast horses in Minecraft, understanding these three attributes is important. Here are the naturally spawned horse attribute values:
| Attribute | Possible Range | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Health | 15–30 HP | 22.5 HP |
| Movement Speed | 4.86–14.57 blocks/second | ~9.71 blocks/second |
| Jump Height | 1.15–5.92 blocks | ~3.12 blocks |
If you want a reference, the usual player walking speed is roughly 4.3 blocks per second, while the sprinting speed is 5.6 blocks per second.
While you may think that the foals receive an average of their parents’ attributes, here’s what really goes on behind the scenes:
- The parent horse stat value differences are calculated, and a 30% bonus is added to this range.
- A random triangular value between -0.5 and +0.5 is added.
- The result is added to the average value of both parents’ stats. The final value is then clamped between Minecraft’sminimum and maximum allowed stats
This is how the calculation looks:
base = (|Parent A – Parent B| + (MAX – MIN) * 0.3) * RandomFactor + (Parent A + Parent B) / 2
Here, if the base exceeds MAX, it will be recalculated as base = 2 * MAX – base
But, if the base falls below MIN, it will be recalculated as base = 2 * MIN – base
When it comes to the appearance of the foal, they have the same colors and markings as one of the parents, most of the time. However, the baby horse’s appearance is random, and it can be assigned random colors too. If you want a baby horse of a specific color, use two adult horses of the required color.
Can You Breed Skeleton and Zombie Horses in Minecraft
No, Skeleton and Zombie horses cannot breed in Minecraft or enter love mode. Players often wonder whether the game’s undead horse variant can breed just like the regular horses. However, neither can they reproduce babies or foals among breeding within themselves or cross-breeding them with donkeys to produce mules.
While you cannot find them readily in the usual Minecraft biomes, the zombie horse specifically spawns during the night, while the skeleton horse can only appear when lightning strikes on the regular one.
That’s pretty much everything you need to know about how to breed horses in Minecraft. So, launch a required world using the best Minecraft seeds, and start breeding horses to get the best variant. If you still have any questions, let us know in the comments below.
The rarest variant of a horse is a skeleton horse. It can only spawn during a thunderstorm, and when you get close, the skeleton horse trap is triggered, and skeleton riders appear.
When breeding two horses gives a foal with stronger stats than its parents, replace the foal with the weakest parent horse and continue the breeding process till you get the perfect and strongest horse in Minecraft.
No, when you have horses of different colors and shades, their speeds will be affected based on their stats and not on their fur color.
No, zombie horses cannot breed under any circumstances, whether with other horses or skeleton horses in the game.
To breed a horse and a donkey in Minecraft, first tame both animals, then feed each one either a Golden Carrot or a Golden Apple to get an offspring.
Bipradeep Biswas
