Horse

**Horses** are tamable fauna that can be used as transport and or be ridden by players to augment maneuverability. They use a modified vanilla minecraft:horse to suit the tactical and realistic vision of the game. Wild horses can usually be found in steppes or grasslands and can be tamed and bred. Unlike in vanilla:minecraft however, *they cannot breed with donkeys to create mules or hinnies as the model for that mob is reserved for the deer in the server.*

Once tamed, a horse may be given a saddle to control its movements that function more like minecraft:boats. Unlike vanilla minecraft, mounted horses in this server move based on accelerating velocity of WASD keys, allowing the player to turn up to 330° without turning the horse itself just like if they were on a boat. Additionally, tamed horses can be outfitted with armor but may impair their maneuverability such as speed or turn rate. Certain blocks such as tall grass, water, mud or sand slow down the speed of the horse as it is unsteady ground.

One also needs to use a horse to be able to activate the abilities of the Lance, while other weapons are specifically designed to neutralize the horse such as the Spear and the Poleaxe.

## Maneuverability & Handling

Riding a horse is more akin to piloting a boat. Rather than having one's mouse control the direction, the horse will slowly accelerate in velocity if the forward key is held down and turn left or right based on those assigned keys. All horses are functionally identical so their difference is entirely dependent on the weight of the armor and weight of the rider. Horses that have just a saddle will still be slower than their vanilla counter-parts. In addition, certain environments such as blocks and obstacles will slow or stop a horse from moving further towards it, making terrain an important consideration when employing horses.

Additionally, horses have severely reduced ability to jump compared to their vanilla minecraft counterparts. An unencumbered horse may jump about 1 9⁄16 blocks, or just above the height of a fence.

### Horse Armor & Rider Armor

Horse armor points decreases movement and turn speed by 1%. The horse's mounted player's armor reduces the speed by .5%. Acquiring a full set of steel armor for both the horse and rider would decrease the overall speed by 21%, which is still faster than a player sprint-jumping by 39%.

Wearing horse\_iron\_armor impedes a horse's jumping ability from 1 9⁄16 blocks to 11⁄4 blocks.

### Obstacles & Environment

Environmental objects and entities can slow down a horse's speed considerably if a horse steps on them or is passing through them. Some of these obstacles will outright make a horse refuse to go through them.

Passable blocks such as tall grasses and tall plant blocks will slow down a horse's speed, as will mud which will drastically cut the horse's speed by half.

Sand blocks will only slightly slow down horses and other dangerous blocks such as lava, magma or three-block deep water will make a horse outright refuse to go further and even attempt to swim back towards the nearest solid ground once in contact with it - at which point the rider is dismounted anyway.

If a block has at least 3 empty spaces, a horse will also refuse to go further and rear at all further attempts to move towards the cliffs. You can attempt to bypass this by jumping just before the cliff if you think you will survive the fall.