🐴 BetterHorses – Advanced Horse Breeding & Storage Plugin

BetterHorses is a Minecraft plugin that completely reworks the vanilla horse system by introducing realistic genetics, mutations, breeding mechanics, and item-based horse storage. Designed with realism and flexibility in mind, every single feature and value is customizable and toggleable, it’s perfect for survival servers, RPGs, or just better vanilla gameplay.

If you have any questions or need help feel free to join my discord server: https://discord.gg/gBEKWGanM7

✨ Features

• 🧬 Genetics & Mutation
  Horses pass down Health, Speed, and Jump Strength to their offspring.
  A configurable mutation factor adds random variation to keep things interesting and realistic.

• 👫 Gender System
  Every horse has a gender (♂ / ♀) assigned at spawn or birth. Two horses of the same gender cannot breed

• 🏳️ Language Customization
  Every text generated by the plugin can be customized in the language.yml file.

• 🦴 Growth System
  Horses now realistically grow up and increase in size over time, making the transition from baby to adult seemless, the final size of a horse as well as the time it takes to grow up can be customized in the config

• ✂️ Castration System
  Players can use /horse neuter to castrate a horse item.
  Castrated horses are marked and cannot breed, just like same-gender pairs.
  The status is permanently stored in the item and displayed in the lore.

• 🔥 Horse Traits (Abilities)
  Horses can be born or created with special traits that provide passive or active effects such as:

  • Hellmare – Leaves a trail of fire when the ability is used
  • Fireheart – The horse and its rider are immune to fire
  • Feather Hooves – The horse and its rider can glide
  • Frost Hooves – Freezes water below the horse
  • Dashboost - Increases the horse's movement speed significantly for a short amount of time when the ability is used
  • Kickback - The horse knocks away all enemies when the ability is used
  • Ghosthorse - You and the horse enter the realm of the undead and become invisible for a short amount of time when the ability is used

  Active traits can be used by pressing F (or the swap hands keybind).

  All traits are fully configurable and toggleable in the config.yml:

  • Enable or disable the whole trait-feature
  • Set trait chance
  • Enable/disable individual traits
  • Define duration, cooldown, radius, intensity and more

• 🎒 /horse despawn
  Converts a tamed horse you're riding into a saddle item that stores:

  • All core stats (including current HP)
  • Gender
  • Owner UUID
  • Saddle & Armor
  • Color & Style
  • Trait
  • Neutered status
  • Custom name (if set)

  A horse can only be despawned by its owner.

• ✂️ /horse neuter
  Castrates the horse item in your mainhand. Castration is permanent and cannot be undone.

• 🧲 /horse spawn
  Spawns a horse identical to the original using the stored data in the horse item. Additionally a horse can be spawned by rightclicking while holding the horse item.

• 🛠 /horsecreate [health] [speed] [jump] [gender] [name] [trait]
  Administrator command to generate a custom horse item with your own stats, name, and optional specific trait.
  If no trait is provided, one is selected randomly based on configured chances, traits can only be selected if enabled in the config.

⚙️ Configuration

Inside your config.yml:

# BetterHorses config

# Customizes how big the maximum positive or negative mutation effect is (e.g. 0.05 = ±0.05)
# e.g. health-factor 3 means the health of the child can be up to 3 HP higher or lower than the average HP of both parents
mutation-factor:
  health: 3.0
  speed: 0.05
  jump: 0.05

# Max stats a horse can reach
max-stats:
  health: 300.0
  speed: 0.4
  jump: 1.2

# Settings that determine horse growth
horse-growth-settings:

  # If false, horses will remain their Vanilla size, this feature only works for Paper 1.20.6 & Java 21 or above
  enabled: true

  # The time in minutes that needs to pass until a horse is fully grown
  time-until-adult: 3

  # The maximum size a horse can reach, this is the scale applied to a vanilla sized horse
  # If the value remains 1, an adult horse will be vanilla sized
  max-size: 1.3 # 30% bigger than vanilla

# General settings
settings:

  # Customizes the original item a horse item is
  horse-item: SADDLE

  # Allows two horses of the same gender to breed
  allow-same-gender-breeding: false

  # Allows spawning the horse by rightclicking with the horse item
  allow-rightclick-spawn: true

  # If enabled, players riding a horse cant be hit
  rider-invulnerable: false

  # Fixes a vanilla bug where horses cant automatically climb from a path block onto a full block
  # because it exceeds their 1-block step height, only applies to mounted horses
  fix-step-height: true

  # Traited horses will have particles around them, disabling this will result in slightly better performance
  trait-particle-indicator: true

  # The amount of time in seconds that a horse needs before it can breed again (set to 0 for no cooldown)
  breeding-cooldown: 300 # 5 minutes

  # If true, male horses will ignore the breeding cooldown
  male-ignore-cooldown: true

  cooldown-display:
    # If false, the trait cooldown isn't displayed at all
    enabled: true

    # If true, the trait cooldown is shown as a bossbar when using an ability that is currently on cooldown
    show-bossbar-indicator: false

    # If true, the trait cooldown is shown above the hotbar when using an ability that is currently on cooldown
    show-hotbar-indicator: true

# Horse Abilities
traits:
  # Set this to false to disable the whole trait feature
  enabled: true

  hellmare:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.005 # 0.5%
    duration: 5
    cooldown: 90
    radius: 2 # Radius of the fire below the horse

  fireheart:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.01 # 1%

  dashboost:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.01 # 1%
    duration: 10
    cooldown: 30

  featherhooves:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.01 # 1%

  frosthooves:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.005 # 0.5%
    radius: 3 # Radius of the ice below the horse

  kickback:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.005 # 0.5%
    radius: 4
    strength: 6
    cooldown: 20

  ghosthorse:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.005 # 0.5%
    duration: 5
    cooldown: 30

  skyburst:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.003 # 0.3%
    radius: 4

  revenantcurse:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.005 # 0.5%
    cooldown: 30
    duration: 10

  heavenhooves:
    enabled: true
    chance: 0.001 # 0.1%
    strength: 0.4
    particles: true

🧩 Requirements

Up to Version 4.1:

• Minecraft (Spigot) 1.17 - 1.21.6
• Java 17+

Version 5.0 and above:

• Minecraft (Spigot) 1.20 - latest
• Java 21+

🚀 Installation

1. Download the BetterHorses-5.4.jar from this repo or from the Releases section.

2. Place it into your server’s plugins/ folder and restart the server to generate the config file.

3. Adjust the values in the config.yml and language.yml file.

📚 Commands

🧠 Plugin API

BetterHorses includes a simple developer API that allows other plugins to create horse items programmatically – no command needed.

🔧 Method

ItemStack horse = BetterHorsesAPI.createHorseItem(
    double health,
    double speed,
    double jump, 
    String gender,      // "male" or "female"
    String name,        // name of the horse
    Player owner,       // owner of the horse
    Inventory inventory,// inventory to place the item into
    boolean dropIfFull, // drop if inventory is full
    String trait        // optional trait name, or null
);

📌 Roadmap Ideas

• Breeding cooldowns
• Genetic features