Elden Horses Revamped

A Forge 1.20.1 mod that gives you Elden Ring style horse summoning, two new horse-armor enchantments, Apotheosis tome compat, and Shiny Horses compat. Heavily expanded port of hughbone_'s original Elden Horses (Fabric, MC 1.18/19).

Spectral enchantments

Two new enchantments for any vanilla or modded horse armor:

Spectral Steed: bond a horse and summon or dismiss it on demand.

1st-person body and armor go translucent while riding
5x mining speed on horseback
Reduced mount fall damage
Fatal hits auto-unsummon the horse and start a configurable cooldown instead of killing it (default 5 mins)
Once bound, the horse persists across world reload, death, and dimension change

Spectral Leap: mid-air double jump, with a cosmic burst of particles and chime on activation.

Obtain via enchanting table, anvil + book, or chest loot.

Summon and unsummon animation

Elden Ring style. Whistle, hop onto the materializing horse, ride off, and unsummon. Like Elden Ring, there are also i-frames during the transition; momentum carries over if you dismount mid-gallop.

Tome of Horse Armor (Apotheosis)

When Apotheosis is installed, a Tome of Horse Armor item is now available:

Crafted from 6 books and 1 blaze rod
Accepts any horse-armor enchantment (Spectral Steed, Spectral Leap, plus Shiny Horses' Protection / Mending / etc.)

Without Apotheosis the tome simply doesn't register.

Cross-mod compatibility

Shiny Horses Forge: vanilla armor enchantments (Protection, Mending, Unbreaking, etc.) stack with Spectral Steed and Spectral Leap on the same armor
Any mod adding horse armor: Spectral enchantments work on any item using the vanilla horse-armor type

Loot drops

Spectral books and pre-enchanted horse armor (random iron / gold / diamond tier) roll in chest loot across vanilla and modded chests. Drop chance and book-to-armor ratio are config-driven.

Netherite horse armor isn't in the loot pool. Smith it with a netherite upgrade template + diamond horse armor + netherite ingot, same flow as vanilla netherite armor.

Configuration

Edit config/elden_horses-common.toml:

Key	Default	Effect
`transparency_alpha`	0.3	Horse armor alpha in 1st-person while riding
`body_transparency_alpha`	0.15	Horse body alpha in 1st-person while riding
`chest_drop_chance`	0.05	Per-chest chance of a Spectral drop
`book_to_armor_ratio`	0.7	Share of drops that are books vs pre-enchanted armor
`spectral_steed_death_cooldown_seconds`	300	Recovery time before re-summon after a fatal-hit save

Recommended companion mod

Better Mount Steering is another one of my mods. If you want the 360-degree decoupled camera Elden Ring uses on horses (look around freely while the horse keeps its own facing), grab that too!

Required dependencies

Minecraft 1.20.1, Forge 47.4.4+
PlayerAnimator by KosmX (whistle and mount animations)

Optional dependencies

Apotheosis: Tome of Horse Armor
Shiny Horses Forge: vanilla armor enchantments on horse armor
Better Mount Steering: decouples mount camera from horse direction so you can look around freely while riding. Strongly recommended for the full Elden Ring mounted feel

Installation

Download the jar from the Files tab and drop it in your mods/ folder alongside PlayerAnimator.

Credits

hughbone_ for the original Elden Horses mod (CurseForge)
InspectorJ for the original whistle SFX (Freesound), modified for this mod
Vincent Yanez for the Minecraft horse model (CC BY 4.0) used in this mod's logo
Shadows-of-Fire for Apotheosis tome pixel art reference (Tome of Horse Armor Compat)
Netherite horse armor textures taken from Netherite Plus by OroArmor, same as original Elden Horses

License

MIT (preserves HughBone's original license). The elden_horses mod ID is kept for save compatibility with the original.