Vanilla* Horses

Ride horses in your world again!

This mod is a long-needed update to horses that still stays within the spirit of vanilla Minecraft. It improves horse movement, lets you customize horse armor, adds horseshoes for walking across rivers, and more.

Overview

Horses are slow compared to endgame modes of transportation like elytras. They should be attractive early- and midgame, but they’re impractical in face of common terrain features like forests and rivers. They’re also very outdated—except for breeding tweaks in 2023 (JE 1.19.4/BE 1.19.70), they’ve seen no meaningful improvements in their mechanics since their first introduction in 2013 (JE 1.6.1).

This mod catches up horses to modern Minecraft and makes them a viable, competitive and pleasant mode of transportation.

(Bonus: This also makes the Frost Walker enchantment useful instead of a novelty. Applied to horseshoes, it lets your horse run across water with ease.)

Black horse with gold-trimmed netherite armor and horseshoes standing on a frosted river

All Changes

Horse Movement

Remove leaves collision in certain cases for ridden horses (and other ridden animals), especially under trees
- Leaves lose collision if at your horse’s eye level and above a non-collidable block.
- This means your horse can navigate forests with ease as well as run on treetops as before.
Automatically leash horses (and other rideable animals) when automatically dismounting underwater, if leads are in the player’s inventory
Horses (and donkeys and mules) move faster in water—horses in real life are excellent swimmers!

Horse Armor

Add netherite horse armor , crafted by upgrading diamond horse armor
Support enchanting with all generic and armor-specific enchantments (e.g., Protection, Thorns)
Support trimming with all armor trims
Add durability according to its material
Miscellaneous fixes for existing bugs:
- MC-16829: The horse armor model does not show the enchantment glint effect
- MC-275395: Some model parts of horse armor do not have a visible 0.1F cube deformation
- MC-275574: Rendered horse armor textures are asymmetric

Horseshoe

Add horseshoes , crafted with copper ingots
Speeds up horses (and donkeys and mules) when equipped in the new horseshoe slot
Support enchanting with all generic and boots-specific enchantments (Depth Strider, Feather Falling, Frost Walker, Soul Speed)
De-facto fixes for existing bugs:
- MC-268935: The frost walker enchantment doesn’t function on horse armor
- MC-268936: The soul speed enchantment doesn’t function on horse armor