BetterHorses is a Minecraft plugin that completely reworks the vanilla horse system by introducing realistic genetics, mutations, abilities, breeding mechanics, and item-based horse storage. Designed with realism and flexibility in mind, every single feature and value is customizable and toggleable, it’s perfect for survival servers, RPGs, or just better vanilla gameplay.

For support feel free to join my
Discord
server or visit my
GitHub
.
✨ Features
- Genetics & Mutation
Horses pass down Health, Speed, and Jump Strength to their offspring.
A configurable mutation factor adds random variation to keep things interesting and realistic.
- Language Customization
Every text generated by the plugin can be customized in the language.yml file.
- Gender System
Every horse has a gender (♂ / ♀) assigned at spawn or birth. Two horses of the same gender cannot breed
- Growth System
Horses now realistically grow up and increase in size over time, making the transition from baby to adult seemless, the final size of a horse as well as the time it takes to grow up can be customized in the config
- Castration System
Players can use /horse neuter to castrate a horse item.
Castrated horses are marked and cannot breed, just like same-gender pairs.
The status is permanently stored in the item and displayed in the lore.
- Horse Traits (Abilities)
Horses can be born or created with special traits that provide passive or active effects such as:
- Hellmare – Leaves a trail of fire when the ability is used
- Fireheart – The horse and its rider are immune to fire
- Feather Hooves – The horse and its rider can glide
- Frost Hooves – Freezes water below the horse
- Dashboost - Increases the horse's movement speed significantly for a short amount of time when the ability is used
- Kickback - The horse knocks away all enemies when the ability is used
- Ghosthorse - You and the horse enter the realm of the undead and become invisible for a short amount of time when the ability is used
- Revenant Curse - When the ability is used, attackers get paralyzed
- Skyburst - When the horse jumps, enemies around it are thrown into the air
- Heaven Hooves - When jumping the horse begins to fly, similar to flappy bird
Active traits can be used by pressing F (or the swap hands keybind).
All traits are fully configurable and toggleable in the config.yml:
- Enable or disable the whole trait-feature
- Set trait chance
- Enable/disable individual traits
- Define duration, cooldown, radius, intensity and more
- /horse despawn
Converts a tamed horse you're riding into a saddle item that stores:
- All core stats (including current HP)
- Gender
- Owner UUID
- Saddle & Armor
- Color & Style
- Trait
- Neutered status
- Custom name (if set)
- Growth Stage
A horse can only be despawned by its owner.
- /horse neuter
Castrates the horse item in your mainhand. Castration is permanent and cannot be undone.
- /horse spawn
Spawns a horse identical to the original using the stored data in the saddle item.
- /horsecreate [health] [speed] [jump] [gender] [name] [trait] [growth]
Administrator command to generate a custom horse item with your own stats, name, and optional specific trait.
If no trait is provided, one is selected randomly based on configured chances, traits can only be selected if enabled in the config.
- Note: Compatible builds for folia or earlier minecraft versions can be found on the discord server, earlier versions might not support all features listed above