Horses are a great way to travel around the world in Minecraft, they’re much faster than simply walking and can jump higher than you can. Your world will become smaller and exploration will be more fun when you have a horse at your command.
But getting a horse requires a few steps, none of which are complicated or difficult so long as you know what you are doing. If you’re new to Minecraft or you’ve taken a considerable break and want to get back into the game, here’s what you need to know to tame your own horse.
10 Why You Want To Tame A Horse
Taming the horse is important as it allows you to actually use the horse. You can’t equip a wild horse with any items, and it will buck you off if you try to get on its back. You can use a lead to take an untamed horse wherever you want, but it’s as useful as a cow or sheep until you actually tame it.
As mentioned earlier, horses really are useful if you plan to do a lot of exploring or need to reach another base and don’t want to spend all day running there. Even with a Nether portal system you’ll still find horses will cut down the time it takes to travel between portals, so you owe it to yourself to tame your first horse.
9 How Long Does It Take?
It really doesn’t take a long time to tame a horse, a few seconds at best or a little under a minute if you’re unlucky. What could potentially take time is gathering the items you need to cut down on taming, or to ride the horse once it’s tamed.
Food to expedite taming can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and a saddle can take only a few minutes or several hours of play depending on how lucky you are and the type of seed your world was generated from. You’ll honestly spend significantly more time finding a saddle as opposing to taming.
8 Find A Horse
The first step to taming a horse is to find a horse to tame. Horses are found in one of three areas; plains biomes, savanna biomes, or villages. Plains are large empty fields of grass where horses will populate on occasion, Savannas are big empty fields with a few Acacia trees, and villages are found in many biomes.
It can take a while to find one of these biomes or a village, but once you do they usually have at least one group of horses ranging from two to six horses.
7 Get A Saddle
A saddle is required to ride your horse once it’s tamed, and considering this is the entire purpose for taming a horse you’ll probably want to find a saddle before you tame the horse. Saddles can be acquired a number of ways.
Fishing has a .8% chance of turning up a saddle and 1.6% chance with Luck of Sea enchanted rod, trading requires a Master-level leatherworker villager who has a 50% chance of selling, and Ravagers only appear during raids though they do have a 100% chance of dropping a saddle. Your best bet is to hunt for chests in strongholds, dungeons, savanna villages, jungle temples, desert temples, end cities, or village tanneries.
6 Gather Food (Optional)
Food can cut down on the time it takes to ride a horse significantly, and if enough food is given, will outright tame the horse before you ever try riding it. Although it only takes a few seconds to tame a horse if you have a ton of food on hand, it’s a great way to save yourself a little time to get back to mining and building.
The foods a horse will eat are Sugar, Wheat, Apples, Golden Carrots, and Golden Apples. Sugar and Wheat are easy and quick to obtain, apples are random rare drops from Oak trees, and the others require a supply of gold to craft.
5 Try Riding (And Feeding)
Once you have a horse in front of you the first thing to do if you have food is to feed the horse by clicking on it with the appropriate food in your hand. This will cut down on the time it takes to tame if not tame it outright.
If you don’t have any food then you just need to click on the horse with an empty hand to try and ride it. Odds are your first attempt won’t be successful unless you are extremely lucky at which point you’ll get bucked off shortly.
4 Understanding Temper
The taming mechanic relies upon a stat called Temper. A horse’s temper is generated randomly the first time you attempt to ride one and can be anywhere between 0 to 99. When a horse’s temper is above 99 it will be considered tame and you can ride it, if it’s below 99 it’s still wild.
Temper can be raised one of two ways, attempting to ride or by feeding it food. Attempting to ride will increase temper by five points. Sugar, Wheat, and Apples will raise temper by three points, Golden Carrots will raise it by five points, and Golden apples will raise it by 10 points.
3 Get Back On
If you used enough food to tame the horse then you can skip this step. If not then you got bucked off and the horse is probably irritated with you. The thing you need to do next is get right back on that horse.
As the previous step explained, every time you attempt to ride the horse its temper goes up by five points. The most you’ll need to try and ride the horse is 20 times, but odds are it’ll take five or ten tries and the horse will be tamed.
2 Hearts
You’ll know you succeeded when the horses emits hearts. If your graphic settings are set low then hearts probably won't appear, so the way you’ll know is that you won't be bucked off and you can access the horse’s inventory.
At this point, you just need to access the inventory, put the saddle in the appropriate spot, and voila! You can now ride your newly tamed horse wherever you want.
1 Every Horse Needs To Be Tamed
Every horse in the game is considered a wild horse and must be tamed in the manner described above before being used. Even the ones you find in the stables in villages or the horses you get from breeding are considered wild to your character so you’ll need to tame them.
This is because the game treats taming as an act of claiming or owning the horse and until you tame it the horse isn’t yours. If you plan on breeding horses and find yourself needing to tame a lot of them then get some food farms set up, follow the steps above, and you’ll have your own horse ranch in no time.