Considering how useful horses are for traveling in Minecraft it becomes incredibly useful to start a breeding program in case anything happens to your horse while you’re out traveling. Breeding is also used to potentially increase the stats of horses so new breeds can run faster, jump higher, and take more damage compared to their parents.

Whatever your reasoning for breeding horses there are a number of steps that you need to take to do it efficiently. If you’re brand new to Minecraft or coming back after a long hiatus here are the things you need to keep in mind when starting to breed horses.

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10 Where To Find Horses

The first obvious step is to find horses for you to start breeding with. They can be found in one of three locations, savanna biomes, plains biomes, and village stables. Because of this it might take you some time to find the appropriate biome or a village depending on where you started and how convenient your world seed is.

Plains are empty fields of grass with very little trees, savannas are fields of tan colored grass with occasional Acacia trees, and villages can be found in a number of different biomes, though not all will have stables.

9 Supplies You Need

Minecraft Golden Apple

To breed horses you need the right kind of food to make the sparks fly, in this case either two Golden Apples or two Golden Carrots. Apples are obtained via random drops from any kind of Oak tree and Carrots come from either village farms or zombie drops, use whichever you have easiest access to.

Then it’s a matter of combining an apple with eight golden ingots to craft a Golden Apple or a carrot with eight golden nuggets to create a Golden Carrot.

8 Create A Horse

If you want to breed more horses than you’ll need two horses to be the parents. Any two horses will do it doesn’t matter what color they are, unless you’re trying to obtain a specific color with the foal.

The only exception to this are Skeleton Horses and Zombie Horses. Neither of these variants are capable of being fed so they cannot breed whatsoever. The only way to obtain more of these horses is to use a spawn egg or find Skeleton horses in the wild.

7 Create A Mule

You can breed a horse with a donkey to create a mule.  Mule’s sit between the two animals in terms of how much it can carry and how fast it is. For this reason mules are one of the best tamable mobs you can acquire in the game.

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There isn’t anything different about creating a mule other than the parentage so get a horse and a donkey in the same paddock, feed them both either Golden Carrots or Golden Apples, and you’ll have a mule.

6 Tame The Parents

It should be noted that you must have two horses that are tamed to be able to breed them. You cannot breed two wild horses and a tame horse will not breed with a wild horse. Taming a horse isn’t all that complicated though there are guides out there if you want to do it properly and efficiently.

Make sure both horses are tamed before breeding and you shouldn’t have any problems. You should also know that the resulting foal will be wild and must be tamed when it reaches adulthood.

5 Use The Food

When you have two horses in the paddock, or a horse and a donkey if breeding for a mule, then make sure you have either two Golden Apples or two Golden Carrots and feed them to each horse. You simply need to have the food item equipped and trigger the desired animal.

You’ll know you did this properly when hearts appear above the animal. Do this to the other horse and it should also have hearts, when two horses have hearts above them they’ll enter Love Mode and the breeding will commence.

4 Love Mode

Horses in Love Mode will need to be within eight blocks of each other to seek each other out for breeding. Once they get close to each other they’ll “kiss” for a few seconds and a foal will appear and the breeding process will be complete.

An animal will be in Love Mode for about 30 seconds if it has not bred within that time the hearts will disappear and it will be in its dormant state. At which point you’ll need to feed it again and it will reenter Love Mode immediately.

3 Down Time

After breeding is finished and a foal is born the two parents cannot breed again for five minutes. During this downtime you can feed the two horses the appropriate items all you want, but it will not re-enable Love Mode.

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Because of this it’s recommended to have multiple studs and mares, so to speak, in order to have a larger breeding operation. While one couple is on the five minute cooldown you could work with other pairs to continue breeding.

2 Maturation

Once a foal is born it will take approximately 20 minutes for it to reach adulthood. At which point you can begin riding or breeding it. This maturation period can be shortened by feeding the foal Sugar, Apples, Wheat, or Hay Bales. Each food item will shave off 10% of their remaining growing period.

Essentially you can keep feeding the foal until the time remaining reaches mere seconds or continue feeding until it turns into an adult. If you’re breeding operation can’t wait for a foal to mature naturally then it’s recommended you have a decent sized Wheat or Sugar farm.

1 Genetic Probabilities

While the act of breeding is simple, the mechanics behind determining what the offspring will be is complicated. It’s recommended you look up a guide to understand this mechanic better, but here’s a rough summary.

There is 17.78% chance the foal will be the same color and/or the same stats as Parent A, Parent B, or a variation of one or both parents. There is also a smaller chance the foal will have a different color and/or different stats from the parents. Basically, if you want a faster, stronger, different colored horse you’ll be breeding a lot of them to get the right combination. It’s a lengthy process, but if you have a lot of horses, with a large Wheat and/or Sugar and Carrot farm, with a stash of gold for crafting Golden Carrots, you can have a thriving horse ranch in no time.

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