Stride & Sire

A comprehensive equine expansion for Minecraft Forge that gives horses the attention they deserve.

Stride & Sire expands every equine in the game — Horse, Donkey, Mule, Skeleton Horse, and Zombie Horse — with new equipment slots, a deeper breeding system, and genetics players can actually see and plan around, without touching the base game's spirit. Camels and Llamas are intentionally out of scope; this mod is about the horse family.

Features at a glance

• Horseshoes — a dedicated equipment slot with 4 material tiers and 3 custom enchantments that make fall damage, oceans, and lava no longer obstacles to exploring on horseback.
• Modular Saddlebags — a saddle-strapped inventory that gives Horses real carrying capacity and gives Donkeys/Mules even more, without replacing their chest.
• Transparent Genetics — see a horse's real stats with the Breeder's Spyglass, breed deliberately with diet-guided items, and grow passive lineage traits across generations.
• Mendelian Coat Genetics — three exclusive coat colors that never spawn in the wild, bred into existence through a focused Mendelian cross and locked in for life the moment a foal is born pure.

Horseshoes

An equipment slot entirely separate from the horse's armor/barding slot. Right-click an eligible horse with an empty hand to open its inventory and fit a horseshoe alongside the saddle and armor.

Material tiers

Durability depletes with use; at zero, the horseshoe breaks (no anvil repair with raw material — only Mending saves it). Unbreaking reduces wear odds normally.

Custom enchantments

• Feather Step — negates fall damage for the horse (and its rider). Usable on Copper, Iron, Diamond, and Netherite — not Gold.
• Frost Step — the horse freezes water under its hooves while moving, exactly like vanilla Frost Walker II; the ice melts after a few seconds. Usable on Copper, Iron, and Diamond only.
• Lava Walker — the horse walks on lava without sinking, like a Strider. Netherite exclusively.

Obtainable via enchanting table, anvil + enchanted book, or loot, same as any vanilla enchantment.

Crafting recipes (Horseshoes)

Copper, Iron, Diamond, and Gold horseshoes share a shaped "U" recipe (5 ingots of the tier's material):

I . I
I . I
. I .

Netherite has no standalone recipe. It's a Smithing Table upgrade, exactly like vanilla Netherite tools and armor:

Diamond Horseshoe + Netherite Ingot + Netherite Upgrade Smithing Template

The upgrade preserves existing enchantments and the item's damage ratio. Iron horseshoes no longer upgrade, and a horseshoe carrying Frost Step can't be upgraded (Netherite can't hold it).

Modular Saddlebags

A second equipment slot, strapped to the saddle, giving horses their own small inventory — without replacing the chest that Donkeys and Mules already carry.

Material tiers

Slot count is fixed at 9 by default for every tier — the only way to more capacity is the Draft lineage trait from Phase C (see below), which exposes 18 slots on any material tier.

For Donkey and Mule, the saddlebag's slots are additive to their native 18-slot chest — 27 slots total (36 with Draft) when both are equipped, and the two inventories never mix.

No durability — a saddlebag is permanent until you manually unequip it.

Saddle dependency

A saddlebag can only be fitted once the horse already wears a saddle. If you remove the saddle while a saddlebag (with contents) is equipped, the saddlebag is automatically unstrapped and dropped on the ground as a normal item — its contents travel with it intact. Removing the saddle is never blocked.

Crafting recipes (Saddlebags)

Same pattern as the horseshoes: Leather, Iron, Diamond, and Gold have their own crafting recipe (Diamond: 2 diamonds + 5 leather); Netherite is a Smithing Table upgrade from a Diamond saddlebag (+ Netherite Ingot + Netherite Upgrade Smithing Template), carrying its stored items over unchanged. Iron saddlebags no longer upgrade.

Transparent Genetics

Vanilla horse breeding hides its math from the player. Stride & Sire makes it visible and, with the right items, steerable — without turning it into a spreadsheet.

Breeder's Spyglass

Shift + right-click an eligible horse while holding a Spyglass to open a read-only report of its genetics: a letter grade (E to S) for Speed, Jump, and Max Health, plus every lineage trait it carries — including latent ones (inherited but not currently expressed, shown distinctly from manifest traits). Doesn't consume the Spyglass or need durability; check as often as you like.

Expanded attribute grades

Every horse's Speed, Jump, and Max Health ceiling is raised 20% above the vanilla maximum, graded E through S:

A wild-spawned or plainly-bred horse never exceeds B — A and S are only reachable by breeding with one of the diet items below.

Diet-guided breeding

The item used to start breeding decides which attribute gets a shot at inheriting from the stronger parent instead of a plain average:

Using any of the three unlocks the A/S range for all three attributes on that foal; the item only decides which one additionally gets a 20% chance to anchor on the better parent's value instead of the parents' average.

Lineage traits

Breeding can pass down one or more of three passive traits. Each exists in one of three states per horse — absent, latent (inherited, passable, but inactive), or manifest (active) — and a horse can carry more than one at once:

A foal has a low (1–2%) chance of spontaneously manifesting/carrying a trait neither parent has, and a much higher (15–35%) chance if at least one parent already carries it — breeding selectively keeps a trait in the line.

Mendelian Coat Genetics

Vanilla's horse color roll isn't the whole story anymore. Three coat colors never appear on a wild-spawned Horse — they only exist as the payoff of a small, deliberate breeding program. This phase is scoped to the Horse only: Donkeys, Mules, Skeleton Horses, and Zombie Horses have no color variation in vanilla and are unaffected.

Exclusive coats

Single-gene Mendelian inheritance

Each coat is controlled by one independent dominant/recessive gene pair (AA/Aa/aa) — simpler by design than Phase C's attributes and traits, so this stays a short breeding puzzle rather than a second genetics system to learn. Breeding is pure Mendel, with zero influence from diet items:

Wild Horses can spawn as a silent carrier (Aa, a 15% chance per gene) but never already showing the coat (aa) — inspect wild horses with the Breeder's Spyglass to find carriers worth building a line around. If a horse ends up aa pure in more than one gene at once, which coat is actually displayed is chosen at random the moment it's born and stays fixed for that horse's life.

The exclusive coat fully replaces the horse's vanilla color and markings. It's purely cosmetic — no stat bonus of any kind.

Spyglass support

The Breeder's Spyglass report gained a third section listing the genotype (AA, Aa, or aa) of all 3 genes for the inspected horse, alongside the attribute grades and lineage traits from Phase C.

Advancements

Breeding the first aa-pure specimen of each coat grants a one-time advancement — three to chase for a completionist breeding program: