Black Desert Online Horse Breeding Guide

Black Desert Online Horse Breeding Guide by Fractalus

Index

1. Taming
1a. Getting required materials
1b. Taming process

2. Formal Breeding
2a. With your own horses
2b. With other people’s horses

3. Informal Breeding

4. Other Important Information
4a. Expanding your Stable slots
4b. Setting up spreadsheets and other documents
4c. Horse Tiers from Breeding (Examples)

So, you want to learn more about horse breeding and are a tad confused? I don’t blame you. The breeding system is a great and complex way to get faster horses, and it took me a while to get some sort of grip on. I’ll do my best to explain what I’ve learned to you and I intend to create a video to show and explain this in depth as well.

1. Taming

First and foremost before you even consider jumping in and taming horses, you need to make sure your taming/obedience level is at LEAST Lvl. 5 taming. You can level this up easily by riding around on the donkey you’re given on a new character and letting it level up. For others, they can lend or catch fresh horses to do the same thing for their characters. You can check your taming level in the character information window. Eventually when you start taming efficiently, you can register wild horses to level up taming as well.

You need to have horses of both genders to get you started on breeding. To get horses, you need to tame them out in select areas around the world. You could certainly buy the horses you need to get going but for the most part you will eventually learn that females are typically rare gender to find in the marketplace especially for tier 1 / tier 2 horses. If you’re a new player you shouldn’t be spending on these horses just yet anyway unless this is your main goal of playing the game because this can become quite an expensive and rather time consuming hobby.

1a. Getting Required Materials.

The first thing you should get are taming ropes which are found at various horse stables throughout towns for 1,500 silver. You can also get these through quests if you choose them as your reward and you can purchase them on the marketplace for cheaper if you’re that tight on money. If you can’t find the horse stable easily, you can left-click the little horse icon on the top right of your screen to show you the nearest one or right-click to start auto-walking towards the nearest horse stable.

The second thing you should get are sugar lumps. Now, you can’t actually buy these unless on the marketplace but you should make them yourself by buying water and sugar from the local town restaurant/kitchen. Like the horse stables, if you can’t find the local kitchens then you can right or left click the icon that looks like a cooked chicken.

10 Raw Sugars + 1 Spring Water = 1 Sugar Lump

To process these sugars and waters into your desired lump, press ‘L’ to open the crafting window and then press the heating option. After doing that, right click both the water and sugar so they take up both slots and then you can process them. This is a great way to level up your production level as well.

I personally like to buy 40 ropes and 40 lumps or more because you’re not guaranteed success in catching a horse, however this amount could be pricey for beginners. I recommend 10-20 for those just starting out.

1b. Taming Process

Now that you have your taming ropes and sugar lumps it’s time to go out there and find some horses to tame. I can give you a few spots to start off your search and they range far and wide. The rest will be yours to discover!

When you reach a spot you may or may not find horses in that area. They could have already been taken by other players or even murdered by other players. Don’t worry too much because they respawn eventually – 2 hours or so give or take. If you do manage to find at least one horse at one of the areas, good! Make haste to catch one before someone else comes over to compete with you. (Horse Taming PVP) Up to 3 horses can spawn in certain locations as shown in my picture.

You may have noticed that one of the horses is slightly tinted a different color and you would be correct, for that slightly darker horse is classified as a Tier 2 horse. We’ll get into tiers later, but these are generally a little harder to catch and would be easier to get with higher taming experience. Tier 2 horses also have higher stats than their Tier 1 counterparts so if you catch one, that’s a good horse to start off with.

This is where the fun begins. Make sure you’ve hot-keyed your rope for quick and easy access should you fail. Start off by getting close to the horse, but not too close where you scare it off. When you’re close enough click the rope and hit the space bar when the bar is in the red for a successful lasso. Once you’ve lassoed the horse, start holding down ‘W’ to start moving towards it. You’ll notice a flashing rearing horse on the top of your screen but that’s just the directions for you, indicating that when you see the REAL horse rearing up, you should press the space bar to enter the tug-o-war mini-game and NOT when you see the ICON flash red. When you see the horse rear up, press the space bar. All you do here is spam your space bar to keep the bar over the line in the middle. When you win, continue pressing ‘W’ until you’re right up close and personal with the horse.

Latency WILL play a role when doing mini-games. Time your clicks accordingly!

From here, you have the choice of either mounting and praying really hard to the RNG gods to letting you tame the horse OR you can make it easier for yourself and feed a sugar lump to the horse first via pressing the bag icon to open your inventory and THEN mounting the horse. You have a much better chance at taming doing the latter option. (If it wasn’t clear enough)

When you’ve successfully mounted and tamed the horse, it’s time to take it back to a nearby stable. Do note that your newly caught horse CAN be killed by mobs or other players still, so if your guild is at war with another guild just take some precautions if possible. If you’re riding another horse to get back to a stable faster, you don’t have to worry about whether or not will be able to keep up with you. The horse will teleport closer to you and follow you no matter how far you go away from the taming location.

Once you are back at a stable you must click the register button and give it a name. I personally name my horses numerically such as “Horse15” since they are caught strictly for breeding purposes and for ease of organization . Unfortunately you won’t be able to know what gender the horse is until after you’ve registered it. What I’ve found is that a large portion of the horses you will catch will be male. So what does that mean? It means your stables will quickly turn into sausage fests and you will have to either hunt for another wild horse, or buy a female off the market.

2. Formal Breeding

There are two forms of breeding that I like to call formal and informal breeding. Formal being the more standard way (in my opinion) of breeding horses. You can do this method with either your own horses or renting someone else’s horse from the stable NPC. The cost of doing this method will vary depending on the tier of the horse you are mating with the female. Do note that breeding is limited on each horse. Males have 2 breeding attempts and females have 1 breeding attempt.

2a. With your own horses

When you have a male and a female horse you want to mate together the first thing you need to make sure is that they’re both in the same stables. If not, you must relocate them so they are in the same location. Second, once they are in the same location you must make sure both the female and male have full stamina otherwise the mating won’t occur and you wouldn’t be able to register the male horse for mating. You can heal their stamina via carrots or through the stable. Once those pre-requisites are fulfilled you must register the male horse for mating. Once the male is registered open up the window that shows the horses that are available to be rented for mating, click on the female horse you want to breed with your male horse and then click on the button to begin the process. It takes 2.5 hours for the process to complete and a total of 6 hours from when the mating began before you can register another male horse to do formal breeding. So in the end you have to wait 3.5 hours after the mating is complete to start again. Though to bypass this, you can mate with someone else’s horse so that you don’t have to wait for absurd amounts of time.

You can check the progress of the mating by looking under the stats of the female horse. There you will see how much more time is left until the mating is done. Once it is done, you will see another button appear when you highlight the female. Clicking this will prompt you to name your new foal and allow you to see what tier, pattern/color, and gender it is.

So to sum up the steps:

1. Have a male and a female horse.
2. Both horses must be in the same stable.
3. Both horses must have max stamina.
4. Register your male horse for mating at the minimum price.
5. Select your male horse.
6. Open the rent-able mating horse window and highlight the female horse.
7. Wait the given amount of time for the process to finish.
8. Acquire your new horse.

2b. With other people’s horses

I think this is self-explanatory as it’s pretty much the same way you’d do it with your own male horse, except you don’t need to go through the process of registering the horse. Just pick a horse of your choice that you want to breed with and pay the amount required. However, unlike breeding with your own horse, you won’t get your money back.

3. Informal Breeding

I call this informal breeding because you can force a horse with no more breeding attempts to mate once more at a heavy cost. This was introduced not too long ago into the game and is a quick and easy way to get a new foal technically without the wait time. As with formal breeding, you must make sure that both female and male are in the same stable. Both horses don’t need full stamina for this. However, one horse MUST have at least 1 breeding attempt left otherwise the method won’t work. The best time to do this would be when a female has [0/1] breeding attempts and a male has [1/2] breeding attempts left, that way you can maximize the amount of horses you can create. The cost to do this is always 35,000 silver.

WARNING: Doing this will result in the removal of both the male and female horse from existence. Only do this if you really need stable space and don’t mind losing the horses you are mating.

Even though you lose both horses, you will immediately get the child and be able to name it. Do note that you can only do this convenient process once every 24 hours(?) or after every reset at 12:00 midnight KST.

To sum it up:

1. Both horses in the same stable.
2. At least one breeding attempt left on at least one horse.
3. Have 35,000 silver and willing to lose both horses.

4. Other Important Information

One handy thing you might want to know is if you’re having a little trouble with room in stables and you’re trying to shuffle horses around to different stables across the land, you can force the current horse you’re riding into the stable via the remote store. (The second option when you’re trying to put your horse into the stable.) If the stable is full and you do the following method, the amount of horses in said stable should read 4/3.

4a. Expanding your stable slots

In order to minimize the amount of traveling you may have to do and maximize the amount of horses you can own at once, you should invest your contribution points into houses that expand the stable slots. I recommend that you have a hefty amount of contribution points especially if you intend to do other things other than horse breeding. These expansions are available in select cities.

Orange = Stables with no Formal breeding but may have Informal breeding available
Blue = Stables with Formal and Informal breeding with horse market

Velia

Heidelberg

Glycidyl

Calpheon

Keplan City

Village of Trents / Trent Village

Alti Nova


4b. Setting up spreadsheets and documents

If you’re serious about this in your attempts to create a specific horse, then I suggest you make an excel spreadsheet, otherwise you will get lost very fast. The organization of horses in Black Desert is rather flimsy so it’s best you use spreadsheets. Here is mine for example:

It’s rather messy but it does the job for me. The main thing is keeping track of where horses are and how many are stored at certain stables. I’ve code colored which stables have informal and formal breeding – or both, and I’ve color coded the tiers or horses that I have and have bred. On the right I keep which horses are in use by my characters, which ones I’ve released in order to keep track of names, and which ones have been informally bred for name purposes and genetics. Farther down is to keep track of family trees and genetics once more. You may come up with something better and more efficient.

4c. Horse Tiers from Breeding (Examples)

You can look here: Horse Tiers 1 – 7 for almost all variants of horses that can be made through breeding. All of Tier 1 and half of Tier 2 can be found in the wild. Obviously the higher the tier, the better the stats.

Keeping track of these tiers are important as it seems you almost have to go back to your biology knowledge and use of punnet squares. Going higher tier into a specific horse pattern/color you want isn’t so easy as catching and immediately breeding. The level of the horses bred matters in what tier and outcome the child will be (Credits: ChunChun). Doing this however will expand your knowledge of what to breed in order to achieve what you want. Here is a basic example of child horses when breeding level 1-5 parents:

This of course are my own documented results and yours may be completely different depending on which parents you use so please don’t rely on it 100%. Experiment! That’s the joy of this system.

Hopefully this helps out a lot of you and I will edit this based on any incorrect info I may have told or grammar errors. Thanks for the read and happy breeding!