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Icy's Better Horses
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Better Horses transforms vanilla horses into smarter, faster, and upgradeable companions.
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⚠️ GeckoLib and Modonomicon are required dependencies for this mod.
Icy's Better Horses
A complete overhaul of horse progression, travel, breeding, ownership, and mounted gameplay for Minecraft.
Icy's Better Horses turns horses from disposable transport into long-term companions that you can bond with! Five horse classes, fifteen real breeds with their own abilities and genetics, carts, combat, and a ton of QOL stuff that make travel by horse feel immersive!
if you only want the fancy models and animations, without the rest of the mod, check out Icy's Horse Breeds
Better Horses 2.0 is here
The largest update the mod has had, 2.0 is about the horses themselves.
Horse Classes
Every horse now belongs to one of five classes, and the class decides the range its speed, health and jump roll from, plus a set of perks shared by every breed in it.
| Class | Speed | Jump | Health | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Race | 11-15 blk/s | 3-5.5 blk | 15-20 | The Fastest legs |
| Western | 8-15 blk/s | 2-4 blk | 15-30 | The all-rounder |
| War | 9-15 blk/s | 2-5 blk | 25-40 | The toughest |
| Pony | 8-13 blk/s | 2-4 blk | 25-40 | The best at rough terrain |
| Draft | 7-10 blk/s | 1-3 blk | 35-50 | The Largest |
Remodelled horses
The horses themselves have been rebuilt with new models, new coat textures across every breed, and a custom animations repurposed from FreshLX's fresh animations, and some of our own!!
Breed Abilities
On top of the class, each of the fifteen breeds has its own ability which grows twice, at bond 40 and again at bond 100.
- Clydesdale: barding grants 25% more armor, Resistance to its rider, and the ability to swat arrows out of the air!
- Shire / Belgian : a powerful slam that punches a three-wide, three-tall hole straight through a wall
- Percheron: soul sand, cobwebs, berries and honey blocks don't slow this draft horse down! and its charge gets more dangerous the more momentum it has!
- Icelandic: its warm coat will never let you freeze, and that same thick coat will shrug off most harmful potions!
- Mustang: outlines nearby hostiles, heals itself without food, and when it loves you enough, it heals you too
- Morgan — bonds twice as fast
…and 10 more. Arabian, Thoroughbred, Quarter, Friesian, Andalusian, Haflinger and American Paint all have different niches.
Mounted Combat
To charge, you need to ride at a full gallop, and a charge meter beside your hotbar fills as you gain enough momentum. your horse class decides how much damage it does (max: War 1.5x | min: Race 0.6x). Your horse can also kick from behind. if you hurt a player, their tamed horse at bond 40 or above will come to fight you. when riding, the horse can also panic and throw you, less often the more it trusts you, but war horses dont spook, which is a great reason to get one!
All of it is one config switch if you dont want it on all the time.
Gaits
Press the walk cycle key to toggle between 4 gaits.
Walk (~2 blk/s), Trot (~4.4), Canter (~6.8), then Gallop, which is the horse's own top speed.
Bigger carts, and ploughing
Only the draft horses get the big carriage, which can hold a total of six entities(if they fit). Every other class pulls the small two-wheeled cart, and you can swap between them at any time with a keypress, configurable.
Right-click a small cart with any hoe and a plough pops up for you to use! Drive over grass, dirt, coarse or rooted dirt, podzol or mycelium and it turns a three-wide strip into farmland as you go, but i recommend that you don't gallop during this.
Trusted Riders
/horse trust PlayerName lets someone ride every horse you own, now and later. They're treated exactly as you are — gear, saddlebags, carts, commands, but they can never disown it.
Other 2.0 changes
- 14 advancements
- The Hitchpost has been removed. It was outdated and the command wheel does the job better
- A rear key, a free-look key, and a swap-cart-size key
- Persistent horse storage, a live roster, and the Stable Handbook guidebook
- A long list of fixes
Ownership, Bonding & Commands
Tame a horse and it becomes permanently yours. that's what switches the rest of the mod on for that horse.
Bond
Every owned horse has a Bond stat from 0 → 100, saved with the horse:
| Source | Gain |
|---|---|
| Standing near your horse | +1 per minute (within 10 blocks) |
| Name Tag | +10, once per horse |
| Golden Apple | +2, repeatable |
Every 20 bond adds +15% speed and jump, up to +75% at max bond. Bond 40 and bond 100 are also where the breed abilities open up. And these values are configurable in game.
Horse Whistle
Your active horse answers from anywhere. Within 32 blocks it walks to you; beyond that it teleports. Whistling also clears Stay. if your horse is in combat, a whistle makes it de-engage and rush back to safety, incase you accidentally pick a fight with a warden.
Command Wheel
A radial menu on any horse you own:
- Follow
- Stay
- Wander
- Set Home
- Return Home
Owner-Only Riding
Nobody takes your horse. A non-owner who tries to mount as the primary rider is bucked off, and can't open its gear or shear off its saddle. They can ride along as a second rider while you're in the saddle, or be trusted outright. Servers running shared stables can turn this off.
Horse Info Screen
A full profile of the horse you're riding: gender, breed, coat, bond, speed, jump and health, each with an animated bar and exact value.
Bars fill toward the mod's ceilings of 26.25 blk/s, 9.71 block jump, 50 HP so a short bar tells you there's room to grow through bonding or breeding.
to see any horse's stats, Hold an Upgraded Saddle and look at said horse for a Horse Stats overlay above your hotbar. this way you can choose the best one to tame.
Genetics & Breeding
Every horse carries persistent genetics that survive saves, syncing and breeding.
- Gender
- Gender-gated breeding
- 15 real breeds
- Biome-locked spawning
- Mixed breeds
- Stat inheritance
- Coat inheritance
Existing horses from old worlds are assigned a breed automatically based on their current biome.
Full breed list, coats and biome ranges are in the Stable Handbook and on the wiki.
Travel & Riding Improvements
Vanilla horse travel, minus the friction:
- Auto-ride: double-tap W and the horse keeps going while you steer with the mouse. Any movement key will cancel it.
- Free look: mounting no longer snaps your camera. Stand still and you get up to 90° of free look before the horse turns to match you.
- Transparent horses?!: look down and it fades to near-invisible while ridden so you can see whats under you. configurable.
- Water: horses float instead of sinking, and swim noticeably faster.
- Leaves: no collision while riding.
- Raised step height: horses now walk up a step instead of hopping over little things like path block to a block.
- Mounted mining: matches your on-foot speed for most blocks.
- Two riders per horse: Drafts horses can have 2 riders and a chest, the other horses can either have 2 riders or a rider and a chest.
- Rear on command
Equipment
Upgraded Saddle
The core of the whole tack room: 5 diamonds, a saddle and 3 copper. It unlocks four gear slots on the horse: chest, hooves, medkit, and stabilizer/cart, plus the stats overlay, pretty much the entire mod begins with this item.
Chest & Ender Chest
Drop in a Chest for 27 slots of storage that walks around with you, or drop in an Ender Chest instead and those slots become your ender inventory. Draft horses carry more storage than the others.
Horse Cart
Craft a cart, hitch it to your horse, and pull it behind you.
- Four seats on the small cart, six on the large wagon.
- Fit a Chest for a full double chest of cargo, or ninety slots on the larger one.
- Carts function much like boats, so mob transportation is easier.
- Fit a hoe to get a plough, which gives you a much easier way to till farmland!
- Park one on the ground as a standalone prop; it still takes a chest, making a market-stall decoration
The cart shares the stabilizer slot.
Horse Hooves
Walk on powder snow instead of falling through it, take reduced fall damage, and gain surer footing. Hooves accept Frost Walker for freezing a path across open water.
Horse Stabilizer
Fully animated survival gear for cliff country. On a serious fall, steam jets fire and mechanical wings deploy, cutting or entirely negating the damage. Mountain travel becomes a route instead of a hazard.
Horse Medkit
Automatically triggers below 50% health, applying Regeneration, Instant Health and Resistance. A war horse's medkit lasts twice as long.
Wheel & Canister
The two components behind the bigger builds: two wheels make a cart, two canisters make a stabilizer.
The Stable Handbook
A full Modonomicon guidebook covering every system, breed, ability and item, with live 3D previews of every coat and cart.
Shapeless recipe: 1 Book + any Better Horses item. A vanilla Chest counts, so you can make one on day one.
Configuration
A JSON config (config/icys-better-horses.json) with ten toggles: stabilizer, medkit, hooves, owner-only riding, multi-riding, mounted combat, horse transparency, gender-gated breeding, horse PvP and cart pickup.
Disabling an item doesn't delete it, it drops into dummy mode, still craftable and equippable, still rendered, just inert. Servers can trim the mod down without breaking anyone's existing world or stealing their items.
Install Cloth Config (and Mod Menu on Fabric) to edit everything in-game, including all seven keybinds.
Older versions of the mod are available all the way from 1.20.1 up to 26.2 — but not every version is maintained.
Better Horses 2.0 is available for:
Fabric: 26.2, 26.1.2 NeoForge: 26.1.2, 1.21.1
it will be ported to fabric 1.21.1, and forge 1.20.1 down the line.
Q: Do I need this on the server?
Yes. Better Horses adds entities, items and world data, so it has to be installed on both sides.
Q: Will 2.0 come to Forge 1.20.1?
It's the oldest version I still maintain, and it takes the longest to port. It'll come when it's ready.
Q: Where was AI used in this mod?
AI was only used in fixing bugs that i couldn't fix myself, as well as helping me port the mod to other versions. The codebase and architecture is entirely my own. The assets, including the models, textures, icons and UI are also all hand made by real, talented artists that are credited in the description. please do check them out!
Q: Can I use your mod in a modpack?
Yes, feel free to include it.
Q: Can I repost your mod to another site?
No, you cannot.
- goozt: horse cart animations
- funado: cart textures, most of the adult horse models and textures
- mrsketchystuff: UI backgrounds and the textures for most items
- FreshLX: for allowing me to repurpose the fresh animations anims.
⚠️ GeckoLib and Modonomicon are required dependencies for this mod.
Icy's Better Horses
A complete overhaul of horse progression, travel, breeding, ownership, and mounted gameplay for Minecraft.
Icy's Better Horses turns horses from disposable transport into long-term companions that you can bond with! Five horse classes, fifteen real breeds with their own abilities and genetics, carts, combat, and a ton of QOL stuff that make travel by horse feel immersive!
if you only want the fancy models and animations, without the rest of the mod, check out Icy's Horse Breeds
Better Horses 2.0 is here
The largest update the mod has had, 2.0 is about the horses themselves.
Horse Classes
Every horse now belongs to one of five classes, and the class decides the range its speed, health and jump roll from, plus a set of perks shared by every breed in it.
| Class | Speed | Jump | Health | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Race | 11-15 blk/s | 3-5.5 blk | 15-20 | The Fastest legs |
| Western | 8-15 blk/s | 2-4 blk | 15-30 | The all-rounder |
| War | 9-15 blk/s | 2-5 blk | 25-40 | The toughest |
| Pony | 8-13 blk/s | 2-4 blk | 25-40 | The best at rough terrain |
| Draft | 7-10 blk/s | 1-3 blk | 35-50 | The Largest |
Remodelled horses
The horses themselves have been rebuilt with new models, new coat textures across every breed, and a custom animations repurposed from FreshLX's fresh animations, and some of our own!!
Breed Abilities
On top of the class, each of the fifteen breeds has its own ability which grows twice, at bond 40 and again at bond 100.
- Clydesdale: barding grants 25% more armor, Resistance to its rider, and the ability to swat arrows out of the air!
- Shire / Belgian : a powerful slam that punches a three-wide, three-tall hole straight through a wall
- Percheron: soul sand, cobwebs, berries and honey blocks don't slow this draft horse down! and its charge gets more dangerous the more momentum it has!
- Icelandic: its warm coat will never let you freeze, and that same thick coat will shrug off most harmful potions!
- Mustang: outlines nearby hostiles, heals itself without food, and when it loves you enough, it heals you too
- Morgan: bonds twice as fast
…and 10 more. Arabian, Thoroughbred, Quarter, Friesian, Andalusian, Haflinger and American Paint all have different niches.
Mounted Combat
To charge, you need to ride at a full gallop, and a charge meter beside your hotbar fills as you gain enough momentum. your horse class decides how much damage it does (max: War 1.5x | min: Race 0.6x). Your horse can also kick from behind. if you hurt a player, their tamed horse at bond 40 or above will come to fight you. when riding, the horse can also panic and throw you, less often the more it trusts you, but war horses dont spook, which is a great reason to get one!
All of it is one config switch if you dont want it on all the time.
Gaits
Press the walk cycle key to toggle between 4 gaits.
Walk (~2 blk/s), Trot (~4.4), Canter (~6.8), then Gallop, which is the horse's own top speed.
Bigger carts, and ploughing
Only the draft horses get the big carriage, which can hold a total of six entities(if they fit). Every other class pulls the small two-wheeled cart, and you can swap between them at any time with a keypress, configurable.
Right-click a small cart with any hoe and a plough pops up for you to use! Drive over grass, dirt, coarse or rooted dirt, podzol or mycelium and it turns a three-wide strip into farmland as you go, but i recommend that you don't gallop during this.
Trusted Riders
/horse trust PlayerName lets someone ride every horse you own, now and later. They're treated exactly as you are — gear, saddlebags, carts, commands, but they can never disown it.
Other 2.0 changes
- 14 advancements
- The Hitchpost has been removed. It was outdated and the command wheel does the job better
- A rear key, a free-look key, and a swap-cart-size key
- Persistent horse storage, a live roster, and the Stable Handbook guidebook
- A long list of fixes
Ownership, Bonding & Commands
Tame a horse and it becomes permanently yours. that's what switches the rest of the mod on for that horse.
Bond
Every owned horse has a Bond stat from 0 → 100, saved with the horse:
| Source | Gain |
|---|---|
| Standing near your horse | +1 per minute (within 10 blocks) |
| Name Tag | +10, once per horse |
| Golden Apple | +2, repeatable |
Every 20 bond adds +15% speed and jump, up to +75% at max bond. Bond 40 and bond 100 are also where the breed abilities open up. And these values are configurable in game.
Horse Whistle
Your active horse answers from anywhere. Within 32 blocks it walks to you; beyond that it teleports. Whistling also clears Stay. if your horse is in combat, a whistle makes it de-engage and rush back to safety, incase you accidentally pick a fight with a warden.
Command Wheel
A radial menu on any horse you own:
- Follow
- Stay
- Wander
- Set Home
- Return Home
Owner-Only Riding
Nobody takes your horse. A non-owner who tries to mount as the primary rider is bucked off, and can't open its gear or shear off its saddle. They can ride along as a second rider while you're in the saddle, or be trusted outright. Servers running shared stables can turn this off.
Horse Info Screen
A full profile of the horse you're riding: gender, breed, coat, bond, speed, jump and health, each with an animated bar and exact value.
Bars fill toward the mod's ceilings of 26.25 blk/s, 9.71 block jump, 50 HP so a short bar tells you there's room to grow through bonding or breeding.
to see any horse's stats, Hold an Upgraded Saddle and look at said horse for a Horse Stats overlay above your hotbar. this way you can choose the best one to tame.
Genetics & Breeding
Every horse carries persistent genetics that survive saves, syncing and breeding.
- Gender
- Gender-gated breeding
- 15 real breeds
- Biome-locked spawning
- Mixed breeds
- Stat inheritance
- Coat inheritance
Existing horses from old worlds are assigned a breed automatically based on their current biome.
Full breed list, coats and biome ranges are in the Stable Handbook and on the wiki.
Travel & Riding Improvements
Vanilla horse travel, minus the friction:
- Auto-ride: double-tap W and the horse keeps going while you steer with the mouse. Any movement key will cancel it.
- Free look: mounting no longer snaps your camera. Stand still and you get up to 90° of free look before the horse turns to match you.
- Transparent horses?!: look down and it fades to near-invisible while ridden so you can see whats under you. configurable.
- Water: horses float instead of sinking, and swim noticeably faster.
- Leaves: no collision while riding.
- Raised step height: horses now walk up a step instead of hopping over little things like path block to a block.
- Mounted mining: matches your on-foot speed for most blocks.
- Two riders per horse: Drafts horses can have 2 riders and a chest, the other horses can either have 2 riders or a rider and a chest.
- Rear on command
Equipment
Upgraded Saddle
The core of the whole tack room: 5 diamonds, a saddle and 3 copper. It unlocks four gear slots on the horse: chest, hooves, medkit, and stabilizer/cart, plus the stats overlay, pretty much the entire mod begins with this item.
Chest & Ender Chest
Drop in a Chest for 27 slots of storage that walks around with you, or drop in an Ender Chest instead and those slots become your ender inventory. Draft horses carry more storage than the others.
Horse Cart
Craft a cart, hitch it to your horse, and pull it behind you.
- Four seats on the small cart, six on the large wagon.
- Fit a Chest for a full double chest of cargo, or ninety slots on the larger one.
- Carts function much like boats, so mob transportation is easier.
- Fit a hoe to get a plough, which gives you a much easier way to till farmland!
- Park one on the ground as a standalone prop; it still takes a chest, making a market-stall decoration
The cart shares the stabilizer slot.
Horse Hooves
Walk on powder snow instead of falling through it, take reduced fall damage, and gain surer footing. Hooves accept Frost Walker for freezing a path across open water.
Horse Stabilizer
Fully animated survival gear for cliff country. On a serious fall, steam jets fire and mechanical wings deploy, cutting or entirely negating the damage. Mountain travel becomes a route instead of a hazard.
Horse Medkit
Automatically triggers below 50% health, applying Regeneration, Instant Health and Resistance. A war horse's medkit lasts twice as long.
Wheel & Canister
The two components behind the bigger builds: two wheels make a cart, two canisters make a stabilizer.
The Stable Handbook
A full Modonomicon guidebook covering every system, breed, ability and item, with live 3D previews of every coat and cart.
Shapeless recipe: 1 Book + any Better Horses item. A vanilla Chest counts, so you can make one on day one.
Configuration
A JSON config (config/icys-better-horses.json) with ten toggles: stabilizer, medkit, hooves, owner-only riding, multi-riding, mounted combat, horse transparency, gender-gated breeding, horse PvP and cart pickup.
Disabling an item doesn't delete it, it drops into dummy mode, still craftable and equippable, still rendered, just inert. Servers can trim the mod down without breaking anyone's existing world or stealing their items.
Install Cloth Config (and Mod Menu on Fabric) to edit everything in-game, including all seven keybinds.
Older versions of the mod are available all the way from 1.20.1 up to 26.2 — but not every version is maintained.
Better Horses 2.0 is available for:
Fabric: 26.2, 26.1.2 NeoForge: 26.1.2, 1.21.1
it will be ported to fabric 1.21.1, and forge 1.20.1 down the line.
Q: Do I need this on the server?
Yes. Better Horses adds entities, items and world data, so it has to be installed on both sides.
Q: Will 2.0 come to Forge 1.20.1?
It's the oldest version I still maintain, and it takes the longest to port. It'll come when it's ready.
Q: Where was AI used in this mod?
AI was only used in fixing bugs that i couldn't fix myself, as well as helping me port the mod to other versions. The codebase and architecture is entirely my own. The assets, including the models, textures, icons and UI are also all hand made by real, talented artists that are credited in the description. please do check them out!
Q: Can I use your mod in a modpack?
Yes, feel free to include it.
Q: Can I repost your mod to another site?
No, you cannot.
- goozt: horse cart animations
- funado: cart textures, most of the adult horse models and textures
- mrsketchystuff: UI backgrounds and the textures for most items
- FreshLX: for allowing me to repurpose the fresh animations anims.
Screenshots
Gallery
-
image-attachment_f8cc82a9-3c3a-4dc9-a177-83bb03597430.png -
image-attachment_62f3028f-985d-4435-a33e-1ca8736bb4c8.png -
quarter.png quarter.png -
image-attachment_430dabaa-bd87-4736-8062-1b07e39df329.png -
image-attachment_d490832d-3239-4b32-9427-7663db81ded1.png -
image-attachment_5ffcd8d5-cf7a-4365-a02a-021828f308fd.png -
Screenshot 2026-08-10 031802.png Horse management screen -
Horse Inventory Screen + items Horse inventory screen and all the new textures for items in the mod -
translucent horses when looking down! horses become see through when looking down for better visibility -
Screenshot 2026-08-10 031822.png Horse info screen! -
andalusian .png andalusian .png -
arabian.png arabian.png -
morgan.png morgan.png -
mustang.png mustang.png -
percheron 2.png percheron 2.png
-
All the breeds All the breeds so far in 2.0 -
belgian drafts -
haflinger -
icelandic -
Horse info Screen -
Horses can Glide! The stabilizer makes the horses glide down instead of falling to their deaths! -
appaloosa -
Horse inventory UI + item textures Here you can see the new horse items + the new horse inventory screen -
Horse Management Screen -
transluscent horses! horses become see through when you look down, making it easy to see the ground underneath
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