Realistic Horse Genetics

Horses carry genes for coat color and for speed, health, jump strength and size. Coat options include several base colors, spotted patterns and many others. Rare recessive genes can surface in foals, so an unexpected color may appear even when both parents look ordinary. Hidden genes such as flaxen, seal brown, sooty and rabicano can also shape a horse's appearance without being visible on the parents.

Foals inherit their stats from both parents rather than following the vanilla pattern where a good parent usually produces a weaker foal. Some pairings reliably produce foals that match the parents, and inbred horses lose quality, so breeding with an unrelated horse is the usual way to keep a line strong. Clicking a tame horse with a book shows its genetic information. A config option named useGeneticStats can be set to false to fall back on the vanilla system. Horses also come in many sizes, from miniature horses to draft horses, with most spawning around 12 to 15 hands.

Realistic Horse Genetics is open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only. It needs Forge or NeoForge and runs on both the client and the server, so the server and every player must install it. Files exist for 1.12.2 – 1.20.4, with the latest Forge build for 1.18.2 dated 2024-10-28 and the latest NeoForge build for 1.20.4 dated 2024-10-18.