Minecraft horse taming guide: All you need to know

Minecraft's horses arrived in the 1.6.1 Horse Update and have been through plenty of revisions since then. Despite this, they remain a great way to travel across the game world. However, they'll have to be tamed before they're willing to ferry you away to distant horizons. With that in mind, how can you tame horses in Mojang's sandbox title, and what other mechanics are at play in its taming system?

The taming system for horses in Minecraft might seem complex for beginners at first, but it's quite simple all things considered. A few things go on within the system that can't be visibly seen, but they're not particularly difficult concepts to understand.

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How to tame a horse in Minecraft

Taming a horse in Minecraft is a pretty simple process (Image via Mojang)

Before taming a horse in Minecraft, you'll have to find one. Fortunately, these animal mobs can be found in a variety of different biomes, including plains, sunflower plains, savanna, savanna plateau, and windswept savanna biomes. Horses can also occasionally be seen near villages, where they can be found in stables built by the villagers.

Once you've found a horse mob, you can tame it by attempting to mount it. Taming is required before horses can be given equipment, bred, or ridden with full control. By right-clicking (or pressing the "use" keybind) on a horse with empty hands in Java Edition, you will hop on the mob's back and ride it temporarily before it is either tamed or bucks you off its back.

In Bedrock Edition, you can perform this same action by pressing the "use" button on your controller, and you can even hold an item in your hands if it isn't one that can be used on horses. Just like in Java, horses will allow you to ride on their back temporarily before either being tamed or bucking you off.

To fully tame a horse in Minecraft, you may need to hop on its back multiple times due to its hidden "temper" stat. When a horse spawns, it has a hidden temper value between 1 and 100. When you mount a horse and try to tame it, the taming mechanic selects a threshold number between 1 to 99. If the horse's temper is higher than the randomized threshold value, the horse is tamed.

If you're dealing with a particularly uncooperative horse, there's a way to increase its hidden temper value, and that's via feeding it. Horses are capable of eating six different food sources in Minecraft, five of which will increase their temper value to make taming an easier process. These foods and their temper increases can be found below.

Food Item	Temper Value Increase
Sugar	+3
Wheat	+3
Apple	+3
Golden Carrot	+5
Golden Apple/Enchanted Golden Apple	+10
Hay Bale	N/A

It should be noted that hay bales, while edible by horses, won't increase their temper. Moreover, hay bales cannot be fed to horses that are at full health in Bedrock Edition.

By feeding a horse the other listed food items, you can have a much easier time taming it and potentially even tame it with one mounting. Additionally, each time you're bucked off, a horse's temper increases by 5.

Once you've successfully tamed the horse, it will dispense heart particle effects and stop attempting to remove you from its back. From here, you can equip the horse with a saddle by placing one in your hands and pressing right-click/use item on the mob. The same can be accomplished with horse armor. With a saddle, you can ride the horse and control its speed and jumps, making it a crucial item.

Moreover, once a horse is tamed in Minecraft, it can be bred with other tamed horses. When you feed two horses golden carrots, golden apples, or enchanted golden apples, they will enter Love Mode and breed if they are close enough together. This will result in a foal, which will take roughly 20 minutes to grow into an adult horse, though you can speed up the growth process by feeding it.

Breeding horses to get foals is an excellent way to create better horses in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

Because each horse has its own health, speed, and jump strength stats, you're encouraged to tame multiple horses to find the best one for your playstyle.

Additionally, if two horses breed in Minecraft, their offspring's stats will represent the average between its two parents within a window of variation. Given this fact, breeding tamed horses is a great way to get the best horse in the game.