- 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 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 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.
Where to Find a Horse in Minecraft
The horse is a passive mob that can be saddled up and ridden in Minecraft. They spawn primarily in plains and savanna biomes in herds of 2 to 6 horses. You can also find and tame a horse naturally spawned as part of a stable in villages. They have a few different colors and marking variants.
How to Breed Horses in Minecraft
Before learning how to breed horses, you will need to tame them first. Once tamed, you can follow the steps below to breed the horses:
- After you have tamed two horses, you need their favorite food to get them in love mode.
- The horses in Minecraft eat golden carrots, golden apples, and enchanted golden apples.
- We suggest you use golden carrots, since they are more easily obtainable in the game. The best way to get golden carrots is through villagers in Minecraft or by crafting them with carrots and gold nuggets.
- Right-click on one of the horses with golden carrots 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 Minecraft Horse and Donkey
Besides breeding two horses, you can learn how to breed a horse and 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 in the game.
How to Speed up Growth and Get a Minecraft Horse with Better Stats
After learning how to breed horses in Minecraft or a horse and a donkey, you can speed up the growth of the baby in Minecraft. Here’s a complete list of food items you can feed the baby horse or mule to speed up their growth:
Food Speeds up growth by Healing Factor (in Hearts) Wheat 20 seconds 1 Heart Sugar 30 seconds 0.5 Heart Apple 1 minute 1.5 Hearts Carrot 1 minute 1.5 Hearts Golden carrot 1 minute 2 Hearts Hay bale 3 minutes 10 Hearts Golden Apple/
Enchanted Golden Apple4 minutes 5 Hearts
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.
On the other hand, there are three unique states for every horse – health, maximum movement speed, and jump height. For a baby horse, these values can be affected by their parents’ stats. The stats of both parents are averaged with the third random set of values.
This means that when you breed horses in Minecraft, their values for health values are added with a third random value and divided by 3. The same thing goes for the other two stats. This means there is randomness involved here as well.
To increase these values and produce the ultimate horse or mule, you will need to breed parents of the best stats you can find. If the foal born has any value higher than the parent when mature, start breeding that horse. Eventually, after many breeding sessions, you will start noticing better and better horses being produced. This is a time-consuming process, so be patient.
If your horse gets damaged, you can also use the food items listed above to heal them in Minecraft. That’s pretty much everything you need to know about how to breed horses in Minecraft. 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.
