SSP – Horsing Around

Hi again! Today I tamed horses. And bred horses. And bred more horses. And tamed all those horses. Over, and over, and over again.

In Minecraft, there are three important statistics to a horse: speed, jump height and health. Health and jump height are obviously quite easy to measure: for health, use the horse HUD to see how many hearts it has. For jump height, make poles of different heights to see which is the highest the horse can clear. Measuring speed is another story.

To get the optimal speed for a horse, you need to set up a “horse course,” which is essentially a short road for a horse to run across with trip wires on either end. The trip wires activate a hopper mine cart at the beginning of the run, and deactivate it at the end. The amount of items the hopper mine cart was able to let through during the time the horse ran is the measurement of its speed. Typically, people use sticks as their item of choice.

I used this design for my horse course. It’s fast and easy to set up, and really has no downsides. The video’s pinned comment states that the approximate conversion from “sticks” (the unit for measurement for horse speed, in this case) to $m/s$ is: $760÷sticks=speed$

For example, a 71 stick horse (mediocre speed) would be about $10 m/s$ fast. The max speed is between 52-54 sticks, or $14.57m/s$. It can vary due to tick delay.

Health in Minecraft is measured in half-hearts, so while you might think the player has 10 health because they have 10 hearts, they actually have 20 health. Same goes for horses, a horse that has 11 hearts actually has 22 health (or 23, because a horse with an odd number of health won’t display its last half-heart).

The best horse I was able to get today was a 55 stick ($13.8m/s$), 5 block jump height, 24-25 health white horse with black dots. I gave it netherite horse armour, from the short netherite mining session I did earlier today, which netted me 14 ancient debris (3 ingots with 2 scraps leftover). I also used an ingot to upgrade one of the diamond nautilus armours I collected last night, completing my nautilus armour collection. I still have to find copper horse armour.

I also found a zombie horse today. I think netherite armour looks best on zombie horses, but I’m using my only netherite horse armour on my 55 stick horse, so I gave it green leather armour (zombie horses must wear armour to prevent them from burning in daylight).

The main reason I attempted to breed the perfect horse is so that I could maximize the balance between damage using my shiny new netherite spear, and style. I’ll have to do some more testing with other mounts, like the nautilus, camel and camel husk.

My next priority is moving all my villagers to a building in my city, so I don’t have to keep traveling between my old base and my current base. The city is at coordinates 0 0, while the old base is at -1350 2100. Using my nether highway makes the trip much faster, but it is still an inconvenience when I’m building in my city and need to restock on materials from the mason villagers.