⚠️ GeckoLib and Modonomicon are required dependencies for this mod.

Icy's Better Horses

A complete overhaul of horse progression, travel, breeding, ownership, and mounted gameplay for Minecraft.

Icy's Better Horses turns horses from disposable transport into long-term companions. Ownership and bonding, fifteen real breeds with genetics, dedicated tack, carts, a command wheel, a roster of every horse you own, and a stack of riding fixes that make travel by horse actually feel good.

Better Horses 1.2 is here

The biggest update yet, and this one is about how the mod looks and feels, not just what it does.

Hand-drawn, animated interfaces

Every screen in the mod has been rebuilt from scratch on custom painted artwork. No more flat vanilla grey boxes — wood-framed parchment panels, dark-ink lettering, and hand-made buttons and card plates.

Horse Management

Press G to open Your Horses: a live roster of every horse registered to you, no matter where it is in the world.

Owned horses are now stored persistently. A horse sitting in an unloaded chunk shows as Resting — it still exists, still keeps its bond, and comes back the moment you call it.

The Stable Handbook

A full Modonomicon guidebook written to teach the mod from scratch:

Shapeless recipe: 1 Book + any Better Horses item. A vanilla Chest counts, so you can make one on day one.

Horse Carts

Craft a cart, hitch it to your horse, and pull it behind you.

• Four seats, two on the driver's bench, two in the bed; whoever sits first drives the horse
• Fit a Chest for a full double chest of cargo, with a lid that swings open as you browse
• Carts take anything a boat would, animals wander into the bed on their own, so you can herd livestock home instead of leading them one at a time
• Park one on the ground as a standalone prop; it still takes a chest, making a market-stall decoration

The cart shares the stabilizer slot

Other 1.2 additions

• 13 new Advancements!
• Chests now render on the horse — fit one and you can see the pouches on its flanks
• A full documentation wiki covering every system, item, breed and config option
• Coat/marking rendering bug fixed, plus a long list of smaller fixes

Ownership, Bonding & Commands

Tame a horse and it becomes permanently yours, that's what switches the rest of the mod on for that horse.

Bond

Every owned horse has a Bond stat from 0 → 100, saved with the horse:

Every 20 bond adds +15% speed and jump, up to +75% at max bond. Because it multiplies the horse's own base stats, a well-bred horse gains far more from bonding than a mediocre one — bonding and breeding stack.

Horse Whistle — P

Your active horse answers from anywhere. Within 32 blocks it walks to you; beyond that it teleports. Whistling also clears Stay and returns the horse to following you.

Command Wheel — R

A radial menu on any horse you own:

• Follow — trails you at 1.2× speed, stopping short so it doesn't shove you
• Stay — holds position, even across logouts
• Wander — grazes freely inside a 32×32 area
• Set Home — saves this spot as its home
• Return Home — sends it back there

Owner-Only Riding

Nobody takes your horse. A non-owner who tries to mount as the primary rider is bucked off, and can't open its gear or shear off its saddle. They can ride along as a second rider while you're in the saddle. Servers running shared stables can turn this off.

Horse Info Screen — P while mounted

A full profile of the horse you're riding: gender, breed, coat, bond, speed, jump and health, each with an animated bar and exact value.

Bars fill toward the mod's ceilings — 25.5 blk/s, 9.5 block jump, 30 HP — so a short bar tells you there's room to grow through bonding or breeding.

Don't want to mount up? Hold an Upgraded Saddle and look at any horse, wild or tame, for a Horse Stats overlay above your hotbar. Scan a whole herd before you commit to taming one.

Genetics & Breeding

Every horse now carries persistent genetics that survive saves, syncing and breeding.

• Gender — male or female, on horses, donkeys and mules
• Gender-gated breeding — two of the same gender won't breed, and you're told why
• 15 real breeds — Thoroughbred, Arabian, Friesian, Clydesdale, Appaloosa, Mustang, Icelandic and more, each with its own realistic coat palette
• Biome-locked spawning — wild herds spawn by region, so different parts of the world grow genuinely different horse populations, and whole herds share a breed
• Mixed breeds — a foal from two different breeds inherits one parent's breed plus a permanent (mix) tag
• Stat inheritance — foals take the best of both parents plus a small random bonus, capped so breeding can't run away

Existing horses from old worlds keep their appearance and are assigned a matching breed automatically.

Full breed list, coats and biome ranges are in the Stable Handbook and on the wiki.

Travel & Riding Improvements

Vanilla horse travel, minus the friction:

• Auto-ride — double-tap W and the horse keeps going while you steer with the mouse. Any movement key cancels.
• Free look — mounting no longer snaps your camera. Stand still and you get up to 90° of free look before the horse turns to match you.
• The horse gets out of your way — look down and it fades to near-invisible; while ridden its head drops out of your sightline.
• Water — horses float instead of sinking, and swim noticeably faster. Rivers stop being walls.
• Leaves — no collision while riding. Ride straight through a forest canopy.
• Raised step height — no more tripping on slabs and dirt paths at full gallop.
• Mounted mining — matches your on-foot speed for most blocks; any remaining penalty is cut by 80%.
• Two riders per horse — the first rider keeps the reins.
• Creative taming — use any saddle on a horse in Creative to tame it instantly.

Equipment

Upgraded Saddle

The core of the whole tack room — 5 diamonds, a saddle and 3 copper. It unlocks five gear slots on the horse: chest, hooves, medkit, stabilizer/cart, and hitchpost, plus the stats overlay.

Chest & Ender Chest

Drop in a Chest for 27 slots of storage that walks around with you — and now visibly appears on the horse. Drop in an Ender Chest instead and those slots become your ender inventory: your base storage, reachable from the far side of the world.

Horse Hooves

Walk on powder snow instead of falling through it, take reduced fall damage, and gain surer footing. Hooves accept Frost Walker for freezing a path across open water — optimised so a fast horse doesn't tank your framerate.

Horse Stabilizer

Fully animated survival gear for cliff country. On a serious fall, steam jets fire and mechanical wings deploy, cutting or entirely negating the damage. Mountain travel becomes a route instead of a hazard.

Horse Medkit

Automatically triggers below 50% health, applying Regeneration, Instant Health and Resistance. The difference between a scare and a dead horse.

Hitch Post

A cheap lead-and-fence post that physically tethers your horse in place — more immersive than the Stay command, and perfect for stables, towns and hitching rails. Only works on horses you own.

Wheel & Canister

The two components behind the bigger builds: two wheels make a cart, two canisters make a stabilizer.

Configuration

A JSON config (config/icys-better-horses.json) with six toggles: stabilizer, medkit, hitchpost, hooves, owner-only riding, and multi-riding.

Disabling an item doesn't delete it — it drops into dummy mode, still craftable and equippable, still rendered, just inert. Servers can trim the mod down without breaking anyone's existing world or stealing their items.

Install Mod Menu and Cloth Config (both optional) to edit everything in-game, including all three keybinds.

Older versions of the mod are available all the way from 1.20.1 up to 26.2 — but not every version is maintained.

The three maintained versions are:

Better Horses 1.2 is currently available for Fabric 26.2 only.

Q: When will this new update come to NeoForge and Forge?

For now, Better Horses 1.2 is Fabric 26.2 only. However, I'm working on Better Horses 2.0, which will release for all three maintained versions.

Q: Can I use your mod in a modpack?

Yes, feel free to include it.

Q: Can I repost your mod to another site?

No, you cannot.

• goozt — horse cart animations
• funado and zeldris — cart textures
• mrsketchystuff — UI backgrounds and the textures for most items