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How to breed horses in Minecraft

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While plenty of horses are likely roaming around in your Minecraft world, you may want to get into breeding horses wherever you’ve set up your home. It’s always smart to have a back-up horse at home in case danger befalls your go-to steed, or you might be roleplaying and looking to start a genuine horse ranch.

Breeding your own custom horse in Minecraft is fairly simple, but you do need a few specific items, and we have a few tips as well. Check out this guide to learn everything you need to know about breeding horses in Minecraft.

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Where to find horses

A horse, chicken and pig in Minecraft
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Horses spawn in plains and savannas in herds of two to six. These are mostly flat, grassy areas with a few scattered trees. There are a variety of colors — white, chestnut, black, gray, brown, and flaxen chestnut — with a handful of different markings that a horse can spawn with, and herds are likely to be similar. While it’s not difficult to find a herd of horses in the world, you may have to do some hunting to find a specific color if you have a preference.

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You can also find horses in stables in generated villages if you’re up for stealing one instead of finding one in the wild.

How to breed horses

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To get started, you need to find and tame two horses that you want to be the parents of your new horse. We’ve got a separate guide on how to tame a horse, but the process is pretty straight-forward – you’ve got to mount and try to ride a wild horse again and again until it finally gives in (little hearts will appear over its head when it is tamed).

Now that you’ve got two tamed horses, you’re going to attempt to get them into “love mode” so they produce a baby horse, or foal. The horses need to stay within eight blocks of each other for this process, so it’s a lot easier if you build a small pen with fences to keep them from moving away and making breeding more difficult. Once you’ve got them contained, you can make them enter love mode by feeding them either golden apples or golden carrots. Feed each enough so that hearts appear over their heads. When both horses have hearts they will turn and move toward each other. In a short time, the hearts will disappear and a foal will appear!

In case you’re attempting to breed a bunch of baby horses at once, know that two horses that have created a foal have a cool-down period of five minutes before they can breed again.

Your new foal

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Now that you have a cute new baby horse, it’s time to celebrate. Take some screenshots for the record if you need to, because the foal will mature and turn into an adult horse in a mere 20 minutes. You’ll need to go through the taming process with the new horse, just like you did with its parents. Once that’s through, you can ride your horse and take it on adventures.

The foal has a 44.44% of looking like either parent, and an 11.11% of being a random color. The foal’s stats — health, movement speed, and jump strength — are determined by averaging both parent’s stats with a randomly determined third set.

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Sam Hill
Sam Hill
Gaming Guides Editor
Sam Hill is a journalist and the gaming guides editor at Digital Trends. He's also written tech guides for Input and has…
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