Horse don't spawn naturally

I also started a new map specificially because of the horses, but after playing for a few days now, I haven't had the luck to find some yet.
However I notice a vastly increased number of cows, almost as if cows are spawned instead of horses.
So I go with the screwed up spawning rates.

Seems to affect 13w16b as well.

Started also a new world to search them in 13w16b. Couldn't find any.

Been looking a lot as well. Had one map spawn me in a plains biome and there were plenty of horses, but if I went away and let them despawn, there wouldn't spawn any new ones.

Other than that I haven't found any, although I've been through a lot of plains, so either something's off with the spawn rates or they are just way too rare.

When wolves were first introduced they had exactly the same issues. The reason back then was that they did spawn like livestock (i.e. virtually only on chunk creation) but despawned like hostile mobs (i.e. whenever the player was not around); I'm pretty sure we're seing the very same mechanism at work again. Should be easy to fix, so please do, Mojang!

With 13w17a, flying far into the sunrise, at last I did manage to find first a single wild horse and later a pack of two, all in plains biomes. They still seem to be pretty rare though, and I can confirm that they still do have a habit of despawning in the absence of the player.

Has anyone tested in 13w18c? I've been holding off on playing further until this was fixed.

I strongly suspect this is actually just another manifestation of MC-14269.... which claims that it's deliberate. Probably as a way of making horses extraordinarily rare, and available only to players willing to either go through really tedious searches or cheat. I don't particularly like this method of content-exclusion, but poor judgement isn't a code bug, so it's unlikely to be fixed.

What's the deal then with making the saddles and armor more difficult to obtain? If it was intentional that horses themselves are nearly impossible to come by, there wouldn't be any point in making the equipment rare as well. As it is now, finding a saddle is still easier than finding a horse in the first place. You do occasionally stumble across the former when exploring caves, but it appears to be virtually impossible to stumble across a horse by pure chance.

As for MC-14269, the original mod seems to feature quite a deal of infighting between creatures, so I suspect their spawning habits are not restricted to chunk creation time. At any rate it allows to customize the spawn rates of creatures. So while the despawning habits of vanilla Minecraft wild horses might be as intended, I suspect (and sincerely hope) their current spawning habits (apparently chunk creation only) are unintentional.

I just tested with 13w16c 13w18c: Started a fresh Creative standard world, flew into the sunrise, and lo and behold! Right where I hit the first plains biome, there was a pack of four horses waiting for me already. The rather smallish biome also featured another pack of two a good deal away. Crossed a strait into a nearby significantly larger plains biome to find no horses whatsoever, but returning to the first biome the horses were all still there. It took me a while to find another plains biome, but there I did encounter an abundance of horses right away (near a village): A pack of 13 ⚠️ horses & donkeys, two smaller packs, and a solitary one, over 20 all in all.

Returning to the first plains biome with its 4+2 horses, I found that one of them was missing by now, but I suspect it died rather than despawned (I did witness one of that pack take damage earlier).

I think we might be good now.

Having tamed one of the horses now, I moved away and back again to find another horse gone; like the first missing one, it was a foal. I later discovered that foals occasionally take damage for no sane reason when climbing, so that might explain the missing two.

Resolving as fixed.

Interesting... I'm not sure how the issue can be fixed if it worked as intended, but I guess one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak.

@Paul Hughes: Either in 13w16a the horses didn't spawn at all, then this ticket is correctly resolved as "fixed" (because now horses do spawn) or in 13w16a horses did spawn but people didn't search enough, then this ticket would've been to be resolved as "invalid"...

@Kumasasa: In Creative, I was able to find them with exceptional rarity, and also documented their anomalous despawning. As I'd suggested earlier in this thread, I suspect what most people reasonably interpreted as total failure to spawn was actually something to do with the spawning/despawning behavior. In an issue thread on the subject of spawning/despawning (MC-13716), it was resolved "works as intended"; but now people are reporting (here and on the forums) that horse spawning appears to happen at a more normal rate. I haven't had a chance to sit down and look for them in my standard testing world to see if they're willing to appear, so I can only go on those reports... but "fixed" and "as intended" seem to be conflicting resolutions. Maybe it was done intentionally and then someone decided to change it? Idunno.