Everything You Need to Know About Horse Breeding in The Sims 4: Horse Ranch
Whether you want to breed horses to keep them on your lot or sell them to earn more money you’ll need to understand how to breed these horses! The process is so easy and you just need two horses and a sim who is willing to care for a baby horse once in a while. Let’s dig in!
What Do You Need to Start Breeding Horses?
There are two things you need to start breeding horses. These are a Mare and a Stallion, these are two types of horses. If you want to specifically adopt these horses you can hover over them in the adoption menus and it’ll tell you which they are.
Once you have these two horses available to you you’ll want to find encourage to under the friendly interactions menu where you’ll find encourage to breed with and a menu will pop open and give you any horses that are available to breed with.
If you want to breed with a horse that isn’t in your household you need to make sure that there is a relationship built first or they won’t appear in that menu.
You’ll know that your horses are breeding when they go toward each other and some cute interactions happen with the horses facing one another. At this time so cute hearts will be flying around the air. If they don’t breed when you ask just try again or work on their relationships, you should also make sure the horses are in good moods, a sad horse wouldn’t want to make a baby!
How to Care for a Pregnant Horse
Once you successfully get your horse pregnant you’ll get a notification to let you know. During this time you aren’t going to be able to do anything truly active with them including riding or barrels. There isn’t really anything different about pregnant horse care, just keep making sure they have food and socialization and they’ll be happy.
After a few in-game days your horse will go into labour and you’ll get a notification for that too. This works just like when a sim is pregnant, it will take a little while and they’ll get uncomfortable moodlets during this time. Just keep them calm and socialize with them to make yourself feel better!
How to Care for a Foal (Baby Horse)
After your horse is born you’ll have to care for them, of course, unless you decide to sell them immediately. This horse will be born with the dazed emotion which like, vibes, because I’d be dazed if I fell out of a horse too.
For the most part this is just like caring of a full-grown horse, except for feeding them. Your horses can feed from their mothers, which they will sometimes do autonomously. However, you can still feed them yourself. You start off by being able to bottle feed your horses which is more annoying than them eating from the food trough. You are going to need to teach your foal to eat from the trough which takes a little bit of time.
How To Get More Money From Breeding Horses
Selling your horses is a decent way to make money in The Sims 4: Horse Ranch but it can be a lot of work. The problem is, the more skills and competition wins your horse has the more money they can sell for. This means you should wait and start gaining skills and compeitions before selling a horse if you want to get the most money.
However, if you want to sell horses immediately after birth you’ll want to make sure you do one thing. Make sure that one of their parents has the champion horse trait. When you have a horse born from a parent with this trait, the foal will be born with the champion genes trait. This trait immediately makes these horses worth slightly more money than before.
These horses also gain skills more quickly than regular horses, so you could also train a couple skills in them after they age up and they will sell for more money.
Breeding Traits
There are a ton of different horse traits for you to play around with but did you know there are certain traits you can only get through breeding? There are two types of breeding traits, the first are inherited traits and the second are random traits.
If you have a horse with a high temperament skill their off-spring can be born with the well-mannered foal trait. This will make this horse easier to deal with because they are going to have a head-start on the temperament skill.
A horse who has the champion horse trait will give birth to horses with the champion genes trait. These horses are going to gain skills quicker and are worth more money.
If your horse’s parents don’t have either of those traits themselves then their off-spring will be assigned a random trait which could be the playful, hardy or curious traits.
Make Breeding Better With Mods
As with most things in the game there are mods for horse breeding that will make the experience more interesting. With PW’s Horse Breeding Tweaks your breeding experience can be so much more streamlined and fun.
There are four major things that this mod is doing to do for your breeding experience:
- No Breeding Cooldown
- Lets you breed your horses as many times as you want (as long as you can fit the horses in your household) without a cooldown in-between
- No Relationship Needed for Encouraging to Breed
- Lets you breed your horses with other horses without having to get to know them first
- Better Champion Gene
- Increases skills gains from x1.25 to x2.0
- Champion Gene Trait Sells for More
- Makes a fully trained horse with the champion gene trait sell for 40,000 simoleons
This mod makes horses so much easier to breed and lets you make more money when doing this!
