Kylie Langton

To accurately measure horse speed, health and jump realtime without any discreptancies I use a mod called http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1291893-zyins-hud I have tested all available speedometers and none ever end up being accurate enough.

Patrick you clearly misunderstand the issue then. my entire gametime at the moment is spent breeding and finding horses and I would not expect people to do the same. I have the best horses on my server, I travelled to every biome in a 50k map to find the best ones, which ended up being 6 horses and not one is cap. it can take between 50-1000 horse breedings to get a foal with the same stats as one of the best parents. the last map I played on my server with two almost cap speed horses (14 blocks) I bred well over 3000 horses before I got a foal with 14 block speed. That is not perfect, this is a game and should be player friendly and progression should not be this slow or expensive. Progression also should not require you to need a mod in order to see progression, which is what is needed to even make breeding semi-effective with horses.

By the time you are able to breed a better horse, your map would be out of gold (The server I am on has a mod shop that sells gold, so that is the only reason I do not), And the time spent to make that one foal that has the same or better stats than the parent can take you 3weeks to 8 months depending on the RNG of the current system. I took 5 months to get that 14 block foal born, and it was still marginly worse than the parents. I don't think it is fair to expect everyone to breed horses all their game time.

This issue still exists in the latest versions. Breeding is still unrewarding and unless you have a mod to show stats is very tedious and frustrating.

Still noticing this issue in 1.6.2 - Adult horses are getting stuck in blocks and suffocating upon re-entering chunk.

I have attached another image of Breeding results as of 1.6.2 - July 19 2013 which was done in creative.

This time I made sure to colour the stats to clearly show the results compared to the parents. As you can see there is a lot of red, which is the amount of times the foal is worse than the parents. in 64 foals there were 10 foals which had stats neither better or worse than both parents with 6 of those have stats better in one area but never all 3, in most cases the foal would be better in one, worse in 2.

This is pretty poor, I am not sure who updates the wiki, but the wiki says the foal can be born better than the parents, but none of these results did the foal ever exceed the parent in all stats, and being better in only 1 attribute is not exceeding.

You could argue that all stats being variable balances out breeding, but all it does is enforce people to just catch one better. I am able to find a horse with 15 hearts and a run speed of 13.97 blocks per second with 4 block jump height before I could even breed a horse to be 1 point better.

This still reinforces the fact that spawned mobs will always be better and easier to obtain. Which negates the whole purpose of breeding. I love the concept but not the current methodology . it would be better to have all stats increase or decrease simultaneously and have a 1 in 10 chance for a better foal.

@Andrew Anthony - as nemesit said, you can no longer use wheat to breed. At this present stage it is approximately 1 in every 60 foals will be slightly better than both parents, this is a wild guess and I believe it to be more than 60.

Even more frustrating is that every group (health, speed, jump) will change so even though you may finally get a horse with faster run, its health and jump could be worse than the parent.

Another update - finally got one with slightly better stats. This took me more than 12 stacks of golden apples and carrots to achieve in surivival mode. I can understand adding difficulty to getting better foals, but this seems a bit excessive, especially with the difficulty in obtaining gold. I doubt anyone would be as patient and determined as I am with breeding better horses.

Parent 1
Movement: 0.2861759696540014
Health: 23.884621246761167
Jump: 0.7660536715135388

Parent 2
Movement: 0.2890115841860407
Health: 23.653863740283494
Jump: 0.7637059616547069

Result
Foal
Movement: 0.29452453100491977
Health: 23.84616166234822
Jump: 0.72963024811971

An update on this - I have still been unable to produce a foal with stats matching or exceeding the fastes horse. This is with attempts on breeding from two second fastest horses to get a faster foal and with breeding the fastest horse with the second fastest foal. At this rate it appears rare to the point of impossible to get a foal to be born with matching speed as the fastest possible horse. Is it possible the mechanics are flawed and are not properly generating the speed variables?

I have attached them as jpg for you as pastebin wasn't able to produce the correct formatting I had in excel (I couldn't figure it out) hopefully this will work. The digits are taken from generic.maxHealth generic.movementSpeed and horse.jumpStrength details within each horses entity file.

From the results I produced I found the chance of a horse having better stats (faster horse) was only apparent when breeding extremely slow horses, when you bred fast horses there appeared to be no foals born better or on par with the fastest horse (column 17 breeding1.jpg fastest horse with 0.28 the closest horse was 0.26) If needed I can do another round of testing again and breed the fastest horse with the fastest foal.

I will test this theory and upload a second spreadsheet once I have finished.