Horsey Number Go Up
Part 11 ~ 16 July 2025
Played: 23 March 2025
Author's Note: This entry was written before the recent viral popularity of Horse Race Tests and Umamusume. (I really wish I could unsee Umamusume.) My Minecraft horse exploits are not inspired by nor related to these projects!
~ Lemming
I managed to carve out a good chunk of time to play this weekend, so I got back to work on the arduous task of breeding horses for marginally better stats. My method for organising the animals had been somewhat haphazard up to this point, but over time I settled on a strategy that seemed both effective and thematic:
- Keep the 12 best adult horses (based on my assessment overall, favouring speed slightly over jump and both of these over health) outside of the pens, leashed to fence posts and signed with their stats for reference.
- Breed these 12 to get 6 baby horses. Move these into pens (one each) to grow up on their supply of hay and water.
- Once the babies reach adulthood, check their stats against the other horses and cull the 6 worst of the now 18 horses.
- Repeat :D
- The two original horses get a happy retirement! They are part of the history of this world after all :)
As for the results? Well, refer to the title. They aren't all winners, for sure, but pretty much every generation has yielded an improvement. I've bred some 100 horses by now, and the stats are approaching theoretical limits. It's remarkable progress, really! Makes me wonder why there aren't more such specimens in the wild. Is there something about these gold carrots that gives horses superior genes??
This horse farming is slow work, mind you – it takes 20 minutes for a foal to grow up. So in between times, I've been busy as a bee. Or should I say, 27 bees? I popped across the river to grab a bee's nest and set it up near the stable, and with all the idle time at the stable I've expanded the apiary with another 8 hives. I imagine this is something of a nuisance for the horses whose home is becoming infested with these guys... I'll move all this into an auto farm sometime, maybe in another dimension to avoid the day/night cycle.
There's still more... yes, I had that much time waiting around for horses lol. I FINALLY got around to building the library. It's usually one of the first things I do when starting a new world! Though with my... talents *cough* *mods*, I've gotten by just fine without it. I mostly just want librarians to sell me glass lmao. Anyway, I went with this lovely purple and grey striped wool floor for the build, and dipped into the villager breeder for the first time since filling the foundry in Part 4.
And now that we're in to librarians, I'd like to show you what just might be the coolest trick in my book yet: CYCLING TRADES. Have you ever hired a librarian, had them offer a useless book, and had to break their lectern and place it back to get them to offer something different? I've done it thousands of times. Well, NO MORE. Just click this little circle arrow – or a hotkey – and they reroll straight away! Life changing stuff :D
