Horse

Horses, called Mares if female and Stallions if male, are tameable herbivores with a fast movement speed. A Horse will increase the carrying capacity of any caravan it's part of by 84 kg. The horse is also the fastest rideable pack animal, applying a 1.6 speed factor to their rider.

Horses can come in a variety of different colours : White, Gray, Black, Brown, and Light Brown.

Acquisition

Horses can be found in temperate forests, temperate swamps, arid shrublands, and boreal forests. They can either be tamed by a handler or self-tame in a random event, and can be bought and sold in other faction bases and from bulk goods traders. Horses purchased from traders will be already tamed.

Summary

Horses are pen animals. Once tamed, pen animals cannot and do not need to be trained any further. But if left outside of a pen or caravan hitching spot, pen animals will eventually roam outside your colony. Making a caravan is not required to tie animals to a caravan hitching spot.

Horses are also pack animals, and will carry up to 84 kg of weight in a caravan. They can additionally be ridden for up to 160% caravan speed, the highest of any animal (tied with the thrumbo).

Analysis

Horses are the easily best pack animal in the game. They are tied with thrumbos for the highest caravan speed bonus in the game, and thrumbos refuse to carry goods. In addition, horses carry the most weight per unit nutrition. Optimally, you should have at least 1 horse for every colonist you send on a caravan.

They also make for a great slaughter animal.

Nutrition

When slaughtered, a horse yields 67 meat and 25 leather as a baby; 168 meat and 48 as a juvenile; or 336 meat and 96 leather as an adult. 1 meat is equal to 0.05 nutrition.

An adult horse consumes 0.68 nutrition per day, and a female creates up to 0.15 offspring per day.

When offspring are slaughtered as babies, a mare will produce 0.5 nutrition of meat per day, giving an optimal nutrition efficiency of 74%.
If the offspring are allowed to grow to adulthood, they will consume an additional 1 nutrition per day, but will instead yield 2.52 nutrition per day as they are slaughtered, resulting in an optimal nutrition efficiency of 150.6%.

When considering a population of equal numbers of males and females, these nutrition efficiencies fall to 37% for baby slaughter and 107.1% for adult slaughter.

Horses are even better than cows. Their biggest competitors for the niche of a low work, high nutrition efficiency animal would be gazelles and ibexes. They take more work to slaughter, but offer better nutrition efficiency.

Training

This animal can be trained as follows:

Guard:
Attack:
Rescue:
Haul:

*As of version 1.1.2610, all animals can be tamed. The percentage of likelihood of success depends on factors such as the Animals Wildness Percentage, Pawn Handling Skill, and others. More information can be found on the animals page.

Health

Body part	Health
Head	44
Skull	44
Brain	18
Nose	18
Neck	44
Jaw	35
Eye ^[1] (left, right)	18
Ear (left, right)	18
Body	70
Kidney^[2] (left, right)	26
Lung^[2] (left, right)	26
Liver^[2]	35
Heart^[2]	26
Spine^[2]	44
Stomach^[2]	35
Limbs (left, right, fore, hind)	53
Appendage (left, right, fore, hind)	35

↑ Located inside of Head.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

Version history

1.1.0 - Added as part of the integration of the Vanilla Animals Expanded - Livestock mod into the basegame.
1.3.3066 - Trainability changed from advanced to none, Horses are now ridable and increase caravan speed.
- Body Size: 2.0 -> 2.4
- Base Hunger Rate: 0.85 -> 0.425
- Wildness: 0.5 -> 0.35
- Manhunter chance: 0.1|0.013 -> 0|0
- Gestation: 28 -> 6.66
- Maturity age: 0.45 -> 0.333
- Nuzzle mtb: 120 -> never