Icy's Better Horses

⚠️ GeckoLib and Modonomicon (patchouli for 1.20.1) are required dependencies for this mod.

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 that you can bond with! Five horse classes, fifteen real breeds with their own abilities and genetics, carts, combat, and a ton of QOL stuff that make travel by horse feel immersive!

if you only want the fancy models and animations, without the rest of the mod, check out Icy's Horse Breeds

Whats in 2.0.0?

Every horse now belongs to one of five classes, and the class decides the range its speed, health and jump roll from, plus a set of perks shared by every breed in it. The horses themselves have been rebuilt with new models, new coat textures across every breed, and a custom animations repurposed from FreshLX's fresh animations, and some of our own!!

On top of the class, each of the fifteen breeds has its own ability which grows twice, at bond 40 and again at bond 100.

• Clydesdale: barding grants 25% more armor, Resistance to its rider, and the ability to swat arrows out of the air!
• Percheron: soul sand, cobwebs, berries and honey blocks don't slow this draft horse down! and its charge gets more dangerous the more momentum it has!
• Icelandic: its warm coat will never let you freeze, and that same thick coat will shrug off most harmful potions!
• Mustang: outlines nearby hostiles, heals itself without food, and when it loves you enough, it heals you too
• Morgan — bonds twice as fast

…and 10 more. Arabian, Thoroughbred, Quarter, Friesian, Andalusian, Haflinger and American Paint all have different niches.

To charge, you need to ride at a full gallop, and a charge meter beside your hotbar fills as you gain enough momentum. your horse class decides how much damage it does (max: War 1.5x | min: Race 0.6x). Your horse can also kick from behind. if you hurt a player, their tamed horse at bond 40 or above will come to fight you. when riding, the horse can also panic and throw you, less often the more it trusts you, but war horses dont spook, which is a great reason to get one!

All of it is one config switch if you dont want it on all the time.

Press the walk cycle key to toggle between 4 gaits.

Walk (~2 blk/s), Trot (~4.4), Canter (~6.8), then Gallop, which is the horse's own top speed.

Basics

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

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. Bond 40 and bond 100 are also where the breed abilities open up. And these values are configurable in game.

Your active horse answers from anywhere. Within 32 blocks it walks to you; beyond that it teleports. Whistling also clears Stay. if your horse is in combat, a whistle makes it de-engage and rush back to safety, incase you accidentally pick a fight with a warden.

A radial menu on any horse you own:

• Follow
• Stay
• Wander
• Set Home
• Return Home

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, or be trusted outright. Servers running shared stables can turn this off.

Horse info screen

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 of 26.25 blk/s, 9.71 block jump, 50 HP so a short bar tells you there's room to grow through bonding or breeding.

to see any horse's stats, Hold an Upgraded Saddle and look at said horse for a Horse Stats overlay above your hotbar. this way you can choose the best one to tame.

Genetics and Breeding

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

• Gender-gated breeding
• 15 real breeds
• Biome-locked spawning
• Mixed breeds
• Stat inheritance
• Coat inheritance

All of the above are mostly configurable. Existing horses from old worlds are assigned a breed automatically based on their current biome.

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

Travel

• Auto-ride: double-tap W and the horse keeps going while you steer with the mouse. Any movement key will cancel it.
• 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.
• Transparent horses?!: look down and it fades to near-invisible while ridden so you can see whats under you. configurable.
• Water: horses float instead of sinking, and swim noticeably faster.
• Leaves: no collision while riding.
• Raised step height: horses now walk up a step instead of hopping over little things like path block to a block.
• Mounted mining: matches your on-foot speed for most blocks.
• Two riders per horse: Drafts horses can have 2 riders and a chest, the other horses can either have 2 riders or a rider and a chest.
• Rear on command

A full Modonomicon guidebook (for versions 1.21.1+) and a patchouli guidebook (for versions 1.20.1) cover every system, breed, ability and item, with live 3D previews of every coat and cart.

It covers all the new items like the:

• Carts (both sizes)
• Glidewing Harness
• Canisters
• Horse Shoe
• Medkits

among others.

A JSON config (config/icys-better-horses.json) with ten toggles: Harness, medkit, hooves, owner-only riding, multi-riding, mounted combat, horse transparency, gender-gated breeding, horse PvP and cart pickup.

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 Cloth Config (and Mod Menu on Fabric) to edit everything in-game, including all seven 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 anymore.

Better Horses 2.0 is available for:

• Fabric: 26.2, 26.1.2
• NeoForge: 26.1.2, 1.21.1
• Forge: 1.20.1

it will be ported to fabric 1.21.1, 1.21.11 and 1.20.1 down the line.

Q: Do I need this on the server?

Yes. Better Horses adds entities, items and world data, so it has to be installed on both sides.

Q: Where was AI used in this mod?

AI was only used in fixing bugs that i couldn't fix myself, as well as helping me port the mod to other versions. The codebase and architecture is entirely my own. The assets, including the models, textures, icons and UI are also all hand made by real, talented artists that are credited in the description. please do check them out!

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: cart textures, most of the adult horse models and textures
• mrsketchystuff: UI backgrounds and the textures for most items
• FreshLX: for allowing me to repurpose the fresh animations anims.