How To Breed Horses In Minecraft [illustrated guide]

You might have heard that you can breed certain animals such as foxes, or axolotls in Minecraft? But did you know that you can also tame and breed horses?

Taming and breeding horses in Minecraft is important if you want a good mount available to you at all times. And you can create a whole stable of horses if you’d like.

In this illustrated step-by-step guide, I’ll teach you how to breed horses in Minecraft the easy way. It’ll ensure that you’ll be able to breed as many horses for your stables as you need.

Breeding horses in Minecraft is easy, as long as you understand the process to get good results. So let’s dive in.

1. Build a stable or enclosure for your horses

Build some type of stable or enclosure to keep the horses in. That way you’ll be ready when you’ve tamed some wild horses.

2. Locate the horses

Step one in how to breed horses in Minecraft is to locate some wild horses first.

Minecraft horses spawn in Plains or Savannah biomes with lots of grass to eat and are usually found in groups consisting of two to six animals.

You can choose to attack and kill horses, which will give you a bit of XP and leather.

Horses are passive mobs, meaning they don’t attack you, but they’ll throw you off their back unless you tame them.

3. Tame some horses. You must tame them to breed them.

Before you can breed horses in Minecraft, you need to tame some first. And you might have been wondering why the Minecraft horse won’t let me mount and ride it?

The answer is, that a horse will buck and throw you off before it becomes tame.

Luckily, this process isn’t all that complicated.

You’ll need to tame at least two horses so that you can breed them.

After you’ve located a wild horse, you’ll need to walk up to it and mount it.

On PC, you can mount horses by right-clicking the horse when you have a free hand with no item equipped.

The horse is going to try to buck you. You’ll likely fall off, but that’s completely fine. Your goal here is to raise the “temper” points of the horse beyond its threshold of 99.

Each time you mount the house you will raise its temper by five points.

So you just keep mounting the horse until it eventually becomes tame.

4. Bring the horses home to your enclosure or stable

After you’ve tamed two horses, you need to bring them back to your home base and stable or enclosure so that they won’t just run away.

You can bring the horses with you in two ways:

a. Put a lead on the horse

You can put a lead on it and get it to follow you back to your home.

You can see how to create a lead in Minecraft here.

b. Put a saddle on it

You might have been wondering, why won’t my Minecraft horse run when I’ve tamed and mounted it?

That’s because, if you want to ride a horse in Minecraft you need a saddle or else the horse won’t move when you sit on it.

When you’ve gotten a lead or saddle you need to bring two horses back to your base.

4. How to breed horses in Minecraft

So with these initial steps out of the way, let’s now look at how to breed horses in Minecraft.

Breeding horses won’t be hard at all once you’ve tamed two of them. Get your horses together and feed them both a special type of food that will put them into “love mode.”

For horses, you’ll need to feed them either golden apples or golden carrots. You do this by holding the golden apple or carrot in your hand and then (right-)clicking on the horse.

Once you’ve gotten some golden apples or golden carrots, you need to feed one to each horse you want to breed. They’ll then enter the love mode state.

After the horses enter love mode, they’re going to mate. This will make it so that a foal will show up and you will have done your job successfully.

Congratulations, you now have a baby horse for your home stables. You can continue to do this if you want to try to make many horses for your property.

How to breed a horse with high stats

Some people breed horses in an effort to get one with really good stats. Babies come out with stats that are an average of the two parent horses’ stats as well as a third randomized stat set.

Breeding horses with high stats in certain areas such as speed will allow you to reliably breed babies with good speed stats.

Depending on what you want to accomplish, you might need to breed horses for a while to get one with the stats that you desire.

Horses Can Also Breed with Donkeys to create Mules

Horses can also breed with donkeys. Just as in the real world, breeding a horse and a donkey will produce a mule.

You need to tame the donkey first in the same way you tame a horse. And you need to feed it a golden carrot or apple as well.

So if you want to have mules on your property, you’re going to want to tame some donkeys and bring them to the stables. One thing to note is that mules cannot breed.

Mules are sterile and this means that they aren’t capable of producing offspring.

• Two donkeys are, of course, going to produce a baby donkey when they mate.
• Two horses produce a baby horse when mating.
• One horse and one donkey will make a mule.

What Is the Difference Between Horses, Donkeys, and Mules in Minecraft?

Now that you know that you can breed horses and donkeys, you might be wondering what the differences between them are.

Horses, donkeys, and mules are all going to look different. So there’s automatically an aesthetic difference to consider. Some might simply like having more unique animals to keep at their Minecraft homesteads.

Horses are capable of equipping armor that will give them better protection. It makes them a bit more durable than donkeys or mules.

Both donkeys and mules have the advantage of being able to equip chests so that they can carry stuff around for you. They can make it easier to haul things back and forth when necessary.

Of course, horses are generally going to be much faster than donkeys and mules. Interestingly, the max stats for horses, donkeys, and mules are the same.

This means that with very selective breeding, it’s possible to breed donkeys and mules that are just as fast as horses. It would take some time, but you can do it if you’re interested.

How to breed horses with special colors and markings in Minecraft

Another aspect of breeding horses is the colors and markings on the horses.

The parent horses will have certain colors and markings. It’s very likely that the baby horse is going to get its color and marking from the parents.

However, in Minecraft, there is a random chance that the baby will come out with a different color or set of markings.

The chance for a horse to have a different color than one of its parents is only 11.11%. However, the chance for a horse to have different markings that are different from the parents is 20%.

You might need to keep breeding horses for quite some time if you’re hoping for a specific set of markings and the right color to match.

Luckily, breeding horses is easy enough that this shouldn’t feel like a huge problem. Just don’t lose hope and you’ll eventually be able to breed a horse that is quite aesthetically pleasing.

If all else fails, you can choose to apply a special texture pack to a horse to make it look closer to how you want it to look.

In Closing

Now that you’ve learned how to go about breeding horses, it’ll be easier for you to get the horses that you want.

Pick out good wild horses that have decent natural stats. Breed two horses with high stats together to produce an offspring that will hopefully have quite good stats.

If you keep doing this, you’ll eventually wind up with horses that have amazing stats, and that can really help you out.

You can also choose to breed donkeys if you’d like to. And, as mentioned, donkeys and horses can be bred together to create mules.

There are advantages to having donkeys, because the can carry stuff for you, and breeding donkeys with horses can produce mules with good stats and speed if you take the time to make it happen.

Getting horses that have the right color and markings that you want will likely take some time though. Even so, it’ll be a simple matter of repeating an easy breeding process.

I hope you found this guide on how to tame and breed horses in Minecraft useful. Feel free to share it if you like, and good luck getting a good mount to take you around the vast voxel biomes of Minecraft.