Black Desert Online Horse Taming and Breeding Guide

A guide to taming and breeding horses in Black Desert Online.

Taming Preparation

Getting Started

Horse Taming a fun activity in Black Desert Online that not only allow you to get additional horses for your trade wagons but also allow you to breed horses together into higher tiers. To get started in horse taming you will need to meet the following requirements

1. Be Level 20

2. Training Beginner Level 5 (Press P and look under Profession)

If you are not yet Beginner Level 5, just ride the donkey you get from Velia around until you get to level 5. You need to be Beginner Level 5 to use the rope.

3. Have about 20-30k silver.

The rope you need to purchase costs 1500 silver each. This isn’t much but if it is your first time you may fail a few times so having say something like 10 ropes (15k silver) would be a good start. You also need some silver to buy the Raw Sugar and Mineral Water to make Lump of Sugar.

4. Be willing to travel far

Depending on the time of the day, there might be plenty of other players trying to tame the same horses. Once tamed, the wild horse(s) will disappear and take 2 hour to respawn. You might have a better shot going to the high level zones which requires a bit of traveling.

Capturing Rope and Lump of Sugar

Capturing Rope and Lump of Sugar are all you need to start horse taming.

Capturing Rope

You can purchase this from any Stable Keeper in cities and towns like Olivia, Velia and Heidel. To find the Stable Keeper, press the NPC button near your minimap and select Stable. This will direct you to the closest Stable Keeper. Click on the shop icon when interacting with the Stable Keeper (not all staple keepers have the shop function but the ones in towns/cities do).

You want to purchase about 10 Capturing Ropes when starting off. This should cost you 15k silver. You only need 1 Capturing Rope per taming attempt but having 10 will give you a nice buffer zone for screwing up etc.

Lump of Raw Sugar

Lump of Raw Sugar is something you have to make yourself. It reduces the likelihood of the roped horse resisting your advance to mount it. To make Lump of Raw Sugar, you need to purchase 1 Minerial Water and 10 Raw Sugar (not Sugar) per Lump of Raw Sugar. This costs about 2030 silver per Lump of Raw Sugar. You buy them from the cooking NPC in a town/city which you can find again by using the NPC button and select cooking.

Once you have purchased them, press L to open the Processing Window and click on Heating then select the Mineral Water and Raw Sugar. You cannot split stacks here but don’t worry it won’t eat the extras.

You probably want to make 10 Lumps of Raw Sugar to go along with the 10 Capturing Ropes. This will give you 10 attempts at taming.

Finding Wild Horses

Now that you are armed with Capturing Rope and Lump of Raw Sugar, it is time to find some wild horses to tame. Here are some locations where you can find the Wild Horses. In each location anywhere from 1-4 horses can spawn and they have a respawn time of 2 hrs after they have been tamed.

1. West/North of Heidel

These areas are highly contested and you are unlikely to find much horses.

2. South of Olvia

If you can’t find any near Heidel and don’t have the means to travel to some far locations then you might be able to find one on the mountains south of Olivia.

3. South of Glish

4. East of Trent Up the Mountains

5. Southeast of Calpheon, in between Marni Cave Path and Marni Farm Ruins

6. South of Epheria Port

Horse Taming

Armed with a capturing rope and Lump of Raw Sugar (I would put them on hotbars for ease of use), you encounter your first wild horse. What do you do?

Wild Horse Tiers

I believe the wild horses are only Tier 1-3 right now in NA/EU so sometimes you may get lucky and get a Tier 3 but to advance further you will need to go into horse breeding. Use this chart to see which color of the horse responds to which tier to know the tier of the wild horse you are approaching. Sometimes it isn’t worth it to get a Tier 1 horse for example.

Video Demonstration

This video will demonstrate the technique described below and allow you to see some aspects of taming that cannot be described sufficiently with words.

The Taming Processing

The First Minigame

When you encounter the wild horse, you want to be fairly close and equip your Capturing Rope (putting it on the hotbar by dragging it from the inventory and placing it on your hotbar is recommended). Make sure the horse isn’t running away from you and then aim your rope at the horse and press the left mouse button. If done properly you will get a minigame where you need to press spacebar when the the grey thingie is inside the red portion. This is an exercise in timing/ping and may take you a few attempts to get it right. You only get one try of the minigame per rope.

Make sure the horse isn’t moving around or running away from you as otherwise the horse can get out of range as soon as the rope latch on to it and you fail immediately.

The Second Minigame

Next part is very important. Do not press spacebar right away. This is the biggest reason why so many people fail taming their first time. You want to start walking towards the horse and watch for its animation. When you see the horse raise its front hooves and only when it raise its hooves, you press the spacebar and start the second minigame.

I wasted so many capturing ropes by pressing spacebar right away and then the taming would immediately fail.

When you press the spacebar, the second minigame starts and you want to spam the spacebar so that the indicator stay at the right side of the bar. You need to maintain this for 10 seconds which is very easy as you are spamming the spacebar and pressing no other buttons (make sure you are not holding down W).

Depending your distance from it, you may need to do this second mingame again if the horse raise its front hooves again.

Mounting/Feeding Lump of Raw Sugar

The last part is basically get close enough to the horse and then use the Lump of Raw Sugar. I couldn’t use it directly from my inventory and had to hotbar it in order to use it. If all goes well, you can click R to mount the horse. This last part can also fail in two ways.

If you approach and mount the he horse too quickly (i.e. you were close to the horse when you lassoed it with the rope), taming can fail because you got on the horse too quickly.

Taming can simply just fail and the horse just kick you off. Lump of Raw Sugar reduce the chance of this happening.

Registering

Once you successful tamed the wild horse, bring it to the nearest stable (use the NPC look up function). When talking to the Stable keeper, you will get the option to Register the Wild Horse. Unfortunately you won’t know the gender of the captured horse until it is registered.

If you are running low on stable spaces. make sure you purchase a Horse Ranch at one of the town/cities. The increase in space wil only affect the stable at the city in which it was purchased. Elsewhere will still have the 3 slots by default.

Storing Horses in Stables

If you store your horse in a specific stable, you must retrieve it from the same stable. There is no magic transportation device that bring your horse from one stable to another. If you are unsure which stable has your horse, just check in any stable and it will tell you where it is stored.

Selling

If you are running out of spaces in the stable or unhappy with your captured horse you can sell it at stables in town/cities. Generally Tier 1 Males won’t sell well but Tier 1 Females and higher can sell pretty fast. The reason for this is that all the pre-order Tier 5 horses are males and females are less common and can only breed once (twice for males).

Horse Gear

If you raise your amenity high enough with the stable keepers in towns/cities you can purchase basic horse gear for 10k-30k silver. The Heidel one (Izaro near the docks) for example requires 100/300 Amenity which is pretty easy to raise with the right topics.

If you want better ones you will need to craft them via Horse Gear Workshop which I will cover in a later guide.

Saddle increases Turning speed/HP/stamina

Stirrups allow you to fight on horseback and increases braking

Horseshoe increases movement speed

Champron increases acceleration

Barding increases DP

Breeding Horses

Breeding Horses allow you to get higher Tier horses. There is a distinction between tier and level. You can level a horse to a maximum of 30 levels by running around but you cannot changed the tier of the horse. The tier is determined at birth/capture so to speak. If you want a higher tier horse, breed two lower tier horses that have high levels.

Breeding Rules

Females can only breed once but males can breed twice normally (might be able to reset this with a pearlshop item). This is one of the reasons why female horses are so much more in demand. You can bypass breed the horses one more time past their limit via Exchange, which kill both the parents.

In addition to the tier of the parents, the level of the parents when they are bred can affect the tier of the offspring. For example if you bred two level 10 Tier 2 horses, you will always get a Tier 3 horse. Breeding Level 30 Tier 4 horses will give you a chance for Tier 7 horse. If you breed two Tier 1 horses, there is a chance to get back Tier 1 offspring if the parents are low level.

There is a simulator for horse breeding you can play around: http://www.blackd.de/horse/

Self-Breeding Setup

You need to make sure the following is setup for breeding.

Have a female and male horse Both horses must be at the same stable You have an extra room in the stable for the foal Both horses are full on stamina. You may need to use the recover option in the Stable or feed them carrots.

Then you need to click on your male horse in the stable and select Register at Breeding. This will register them for the Breeding Market which then your female horse can apply for mating. This can create issues where other players can snipe your male horse to mate with their female horse. Fortunately there is a way to list it for only yourself but then you need to pay 35k silver.

Breeding takes about 2.5 hrs to complete.

Breeding with Another Player

If you don’t have a male horse, you can simply use the Breeding Market to breed your female horse with someone else’s male horse that is listed. Just click the apply button to start breeding.

Exchange Horse

If you run out of breeding attempts on your horse, you can breed them one last time via the exchange button. This will kill both parents and produce a new horse immediately without wait. You only want to this when you run out of breeding attempts on your horse. It will cost 35k silver to do the exchange.

Tiers and Appearance

Different tier horses have different appearances. This isn’t a complete list of all tiers but give you an idea of what to expect. Reader Ayalet also compiled a chart of all the tier horses and their appearances for reference.