How to Breed Horses in Minecraft: Step-by-Step
There are loads of tamable and breedable animals in Minecraft, but none are quite like the horse. Find out how to easily breed the perfect horse in this post!
Updated July 17, 2023.
Tamable animals in the Minecraft world all serve extra purposes aside from being adorable pets to have around your base. Your tamed doggos will attack skeletons for their bones, creepers are terrified of cats, and horses can get you to where you need to go FAST—depending on the horse you tame, that is.
They all have individual stats—how high they jump, how fast they run, and how much health they have. Horses also come in various colors, although the colors don't affect the stats of the horse.
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The 4 Steps to Breeding Horses
Breeding horses can be a little trickier than building a farm full of pigs, sheep, or cows. Here's how you can do so:
1. Find the Horses
Find the horses you'd like to bring home, tame them by feeding and riding them, and give an estimate on their jumping, running, and health scores. Try using leashes to bring multiple horses back to your base at once.
2. Collect Your Golden Apples and Golden Carrots.
You can find them in many biomes, but if you're not so lucky finding them, you can craft them by surrounding an apple with gold ingots on the crafting table or by surrounding a carrot with gold nuggets.
3. Feed the Horses
Feed the golden food to two of the horses that have the traits you desire, and watch the hearts fly. Let's say one can jump high but is slow, and the other is fast and has the color you like. The baby (foal) that they have will *hopefully* have all of the best traits of the two.
The two horses will stare into each other's eyes lovingly until a foal magically appears on the ground near them.
4. Just Wait
Now you have to wait for the foal to reach adulthood before you can ride it and see if the stats match what you were hoping for.
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Can All Horses Be Bred?
You may have heard of the rare Skeleton horse, and you might be wondering if you can breed them. Sadly, you cannot. However, you can increase your chances of finding one by turning up the difficulty of your game during a thunderstorm (there's a 6% spawn chance on hard).
You'll only find these guys during a thunderstorm, so don't bother searching for them during any other weather cycle.
» Want to breed frogs instead? Learn how to breed frogs in Minecraft
