Gameplay / who the horses are, and where they came from

The breed book

Nearly every wild horse in this world belongs to a breed — a real one, with a name, a shape, a set of colours it runs to and a country it came from that is not here. This page is the field guide to all forty-nine of them, and the story of how they arrived. The breeds page is the machinery: weights, stat curves, founder rolls, crosses. This one is for reading.

Nothing here is native

Start with the thing the game never says out loud: these are not wild animals that happened to evolve into a Clydesdale. A Shire is a thousand years of somebody choosing which colt to keep. A Falabella is a deliberate, patient argument about how small a horse can be. Every breed in this book is an artefact — the surviving output of a civilisation that had time to care about the difference between a carriage horse and a plough horse, and no longer exists.

They were brought here. Not by the people who made them, as far as anyone can tell, and not recently. Somebody else — a race nobody has a name for and nobody living has met — gathered up the stock of a collapsed world and moved it, wholesale, into this one. Whole breeding programmes, lifted and set down. Then that race went away too, or stopped coming, or is still here and simply not introducing itself.

What is left is a world full of horses that were designed for jobs that no longer exist, doing extremely well. The draughts have nothing to pull. The coach horses have no coaches. The desert breeds are hundreds of leagues from any desert their ancestors would recognise, and they are fine — the herds are healthy, the foals are strong, the lines have not collapsed into one muddy brown average the way an abandoned population is supposed to.

They are also, unmistakably, still fond of people. A wild Shetland that has never seen a human being will come and eat out of your hand if you crouch and wait. That is not how a feral animal behaves. Whatever was bred into these horses over all those centuries, being glad to see us was part of it, and it did not wash out.

What you actually meet

A horse that spawns in the wild is almost always a member of a breed, not a random draw from the whole gene pool. The world picks a breed appropriate to the biome, then rolls a founder within that breed — so a herd on the badlands is a Mustang herd, and it looks like one, and its foals will look like one.

That is why the wild population has structure instead of soup. It is also why a breed is worth learning to recognise: the name tells you what the horse is likely to be carrying, roughly how big it will grow, and what it is good at, before you have laid a hand on it. A minority of wild horses are Feral Mixed — the descendants of horses that got out and interbred — and those are the genuine grab bags.

See herd spawning for how a band is assembled, and crosses and mixes for what happens when you put two breeds together yourself.

The things that still work

The horses are not the only thing that got left behind.

The hay portal is the clearest case. A door made of hay bales, built to a pattern nobody taught you, that opens onto somewhere else — and the somewhere else is full of horses. It is not a natural feature. Somebody made it, for a reason, and the reason had something to do with moving stock. Whether it is magic or machinery is a distinction that may not have meant anything to whoever built it. How it works is not knowable from this side. That it works is not in question: you can walk through it.

The breeding carrots are the same story in a smaller package. Feed one to a mare and the foal she carries is different, in the specific way the carrot said it would be. That is not husbandry. That is something reaching into an animal and adjusting it, and then being eaten by a horse, and the horse being perfectly happy about it. The recipes survive — the gene splices, the research papers, the whole apparatus of the carrot workshop — and they still do exactly what they were built to do, centuries after the last person who understood them stopped writing anything down.

The honest position on all of it is: it works, and nobody knows why. The mod does not explain the mechanism and is not going to. That is deliberate — a leftover you understand is just a tool, and the interesting thing about these is that they are older than the explanation.

The cowboy and the horseman

There are two people in this world who know more about horses than they have any business knowing.

The horseman keeps a workstation, deals in genes, and can tell you what a horse is carrying by looking at it. The cowboy turns up with stock to sell, from somewhere, and the stock is always good. Neither will say where they learned. Neither is surprised by anything you bring them.

They may be the last of the race that brought the horses here. They may be perfectly ordinary people who inherited a trade and a set of instructions they follow without understanding. The mod does not settle it, and you should not expect it to — but it is worth noticing that they are the only two who treat a hay portal as unremarkable. See the villagers page for what they actually do.

The forty-nine

Grouped by where they turn up. Heights are in hands; rarity is the wild-spawn weight, not a judgement. The mechanical detail for each — colour genes, stat scores, disorder risks — is in the breeds table.

The open country

Quarter Horse 14.5–16.0 hh · extremely common: The horse you will meet first and most. Bred for a quarter-mile and nothing else, and it shows — a standing start out of a Quarter Horse is closer to being fired than to accelerating. So common now that it is effectively the wild default across the grassland, which is what happens when a breed is both useful and easy.
Thoroughbred 15.5–17.0 hh · very common: Every one of them descends from three stallions, and the old world kept the paperwork proving it for three hundred years. The paperwork is gone. The horses are still fast, still thin-skinned, and still faintly ridiculous about weather.
Standardbred 14.5–16.5 hh · very common: Built to keep one gait, at speed, for an hour, in front of a cart. There are no carts. It does it anyway, on its own, across an empty field, and it is difficult not to read something into that.
Hanoverian 15.8–17.2 hh · very common: A committee horse — centuries of an actual registry deciding which stallions were permitted. Athletic, sane, and slightly institutional about it. Wild bands of them are unusually orderly.
Morgan 14.2–15.5 hh · very common: Descended from one stallion who was, by every account, better at everything than he had any right to be. Compact, willing, and famously difficult to discourage.
Tennessee Walking Horse 14.8–17.0 hh · very common: Bred for a gait that is comfortable to sit for a whole day. The people who needed to sit for a whole day are gone; the gait is not.
American Paint 14.5–16.0 hh · very common: Loud, patterned, and carrying more white-marking genes than is entirely safe — a Paint herd is the one place you are most likely to see the lethal white cross go wrong. Beautiful and a genuine breeding hazard, in that order.
American Miniature 7.0–8.5 hh · very common: A full-sized horse in every proportion and none of the scale, carrying practically every dilution and pattern gene the mod has. Somebody spent a very long time making these, for no reason anyone can now reconstruct.
Belgian Draft 16.0–17.0 hh · common: Among the strongest things that has ever walked. It has nothing left to pull and grazes placidly through a field it could have ploughed in an afternoon.
Percheron 15.5–17.8 hh · common: A draught horse that moves like a much smaller one. Greys out with age almost without exception, so an old Percheron band is a field of white.
Gypsy Vanner 14.0–15.5 hh · common: Bred by travelling people to pull a home and be safe around children. Feathered legs, enormous mane, unbothered by anything. Wild bands drift rather than range — the habit outlasted the wagons.
Friesian 15.0–17.0 hh · uncommon: Black, and only black, and dramatic about it. Nearly died out twice in the old world and was rescued both times by people who could not stand to let it go. It is still here. They would be pleased.
Andalusian 15.0–16.5 hh · uncommon: A war horse and a parade horse at once, which was always the point. Thick arched neck, heavy mane, and an opinion of itself that is not entirely unearned.
Lipizzan 14.5–16.2 hh · uncommon: Born dark and turning white over years. Trained, in the old world, to do things above the ground that no horse needs to do. Occasionally a wild one will do something in a field that looks a great deal like practice.
Hackney 14.5–16.0 hh · uncommon: Enormously high knee action — bred to look impressive in front of a carriage. Wildly impractical, entirely committed.
Knabstrupper 14.5–15.5 hh · uncommon: Spotted, from a single spotted mare, and every one since has been an argument about how to keep the spots. Circus stock in the old world, which is the sort of provenance that does not survive a collapse and did.
Falabella 6.0–8.0 hh · uncommon: The smallest horse there is. Not a pony — the proportions are all horse, shrunk. It is hard to look at a wild Falabella band and believe nobody made them on purpose, because somebody did.
Cleveland Bay 16.0–16.5 hh · rare: Bay, always, with no white to speak of — the oldest English breed and the most stubbornly uniform. Rare here as it was rare there.
Suffolk Punch 16.0–17.5 hh · rare: Chestnut without exception, because every one descends from a single stallion foaled in 1768 and chestnut is all he had to give. A closed book of a breed, still reading out the same answer.
American Cream Draft 15.0–16.0 hh · rare: Cream-coloured with amber eyes and pink skin, and fixed that way — the whole breed is homozygous for the dilution that makes it. There is no such thing as an American Cream Draft that is not cream.

The high and windswept country

Welsh Pony 11.0–14.5 hh · very common: Hardy, quick, and far cleverer than is convenient. The wide height range is real: the breed was four separate types in the old world and they have been reconverging ever since nobody was left to keep them apart.
Haflinger 13.5–15.0 hh · common: Chestnut with a flaxen mane, every time, like a decision. Mountain stock — sure-footed on ground that makes bigger horses think.
Irish Draught 15.5–17.0 hh · uncommon: A farm horse that could also hunt, because the farm could only afford one horse. That double duty is bred right through it, and it is why the breed crosses so well with everything.
Connemara Pony 13.0–14.5 hh · uncommon: From a coast with almost nothing on it, and it shows: small, tough, astonishing over a jump. Wild bands take the worst ground available and seem pleased with the arrangement.
Dales Pony 13.5–14.5 hh · rare: Bred to carry lead ore down out of the hills. Black, feathered, and absurdly strong for its size. There is no ore to carry and it still walks the same routes.
Dartmoor Pony 11.5–12.5 hh · rare: Small, level-headed, and old — on its home moor long before anyone was writing breeds down. Of everything in this book it is among the least obviously designed, which may be why it took to being wild so easily.
Exmoor Pony 11.5–12.8 hh · rare: The most ancient-looking thing here: mealy muzzle, hooded eye, a winter coat in two layers. Nearly gone in the old world — a handful of animals at the worst of it — and now running loose in numbers on hills it has never seen.

The cold country

Shetland Pony 8.0–10.5 hh · very common: Pound for pound the strongest horse in the world and entirely aware of it. Bred on islands with no shelter and no spare food, which produced an animal that is very difficult to kill and very difficult to argue with.
Trakehner 15.5–17.0 hh · common: The old world nearly lost these in a single winter, walking them out of a war across frozen water. A few hundred made it. Everything you see in the pine forest is descended from those.
Clydesdale 16.5–18.0 hh · uncommon: The tallest thing in the book, with white feathered legs and a walk you can hear coming. Draught power for a country of hills.
Norwegian Fjord 13.5–14.5 hh · uncommon: Dun, with a dorsal stripe running up into a mane that grows two-toned and stands upright on its own. One of the oldest breeds anywhere, and it looks like the horses people painted on walls.
Icelandic Horse 13.0–14.0 hh · uncommon: Has two gaits nothing else has, is never called a pony by anyone who keeps one, and comes from a place that banned imports for a thousand years to keep it clean. That isolation is still legible in the genes.
Canadian Horse 14.0–16.0 hh · rare: “The little iron horse” — small, dark, and effectively indestructible in cold that stops other breeds. Nearly extinct twice. Doing better here than it ever did at home.

The dry country

Arabian 14.5–15.8 hh · common: The oldest documented breed there is, and the one in the ancestry of nearly everything else in this book. Dished face, high tail, one fewer vertebra than it ought to have. Bred by people who kept their mares inside the tent.
Akhal-Teke 14.5–16.0 hh · uncommon: Thin-skinned to the point that the coat throws back light like metal — the sheen is real and is not currently modelled, which is a known loss. Bred for desert distance on very little water.
Mustang 13.5–15.5 hh · uncommon: Not a designed breed at all — escaped stock that went feral and got sorted by the country instead of by people. Which makes it the closest thing here to what happened to all of them, run in fast-forward.
Lusitano 15.0–16.0 hh · uncommon: Bred to stand its ground in front of a bull. Brave in a way that is difficult to describe and immediately obvious to ride.
Karabakh 14.0–15.0 hh · rare: Mountain-desert stock with a golden chestnut coat that is nearly a breed marker on its own. Very old, very rare, and quietly one of the ancestors of a great deal else.
Kiger Mustang 13.0–14.5 hh · rare: A pocket of feral horses that turned out to be carrying old Spanish blood almost undiluted — dun, striped, primitive-marked. An accident that preserved something on purpose.
Caspian Pony 9.0–11.5 hh · rare: Assumed extinct for a thousand years, then found again in a handful of villages. Tiny, fine-boned, and built like a miniature Arabian because it is very probably where the Arabian started.
Przewalski's Horse 12.0–14.0 hh · rare: The one entry that does not belong in a book about breeds. It was never domesticated, never designed, and has a different number of chromosomes from everything else here. Whoever moved the others brought this too, which raises a question nobody can answer: why take the one horse that was never yours?

The wet and wooded country

New Forest Pony 12.0–14.5 hh · common: Semi-wild even in the old world — owned on paper, loose in practice. Of everything here it made the smallest adjustment to the new arrangement.
Appaloosa 14.5–16.0 hh · uncommon: Spotted by a gene that also mottles the skin, whitens the sclera and stripes the hooves, so you can identify one at rest. Bred by people who were very good at it and had the breed taken from them.
Shire 16.5–17.8 hh · uncommon: The other contender for tallest. Bred to move impossible weight at a walk, and gentle out of all proportion to its size.
Camargue 13.5–14.5 hh · uncommon: Born dark, greys out to white, and lives in salt marsh. Foals are almost black; the adults are the colour of the sky over the water they stand in.
Marwari 14.5–15.5 hh · rare: Ears that curve inward until the tips touch — not modelled yet, and the most missed omission in the book. A war horse from a hot country, and exported almost never.
Paso Fino 13.0–15.5 hh · uncommon: A four-beat gait so even you could carry a full cup at speed. Bred over four centuries by people crossing an ocean and needing to stay comfortable once they arrived.
Puerto Rican Paso Fino 13.0–15.0 hh · rare: The island line of the same idea, kept separate and finer-boned. Two breeds that share a name and an ancestor and have not been the same thing for a very long time.
Banker Horse 13.5–14.5 hh · rare: Feral on barrier islands, drinking from holes it digs in the sand, descended from stock that came off wrecked ships. It has been surviving an abandonment for four hundred years, which makes it the most qualified animal in this book to have an opinion about what happened here.

Reading the book against the game

None of the above changes a number. A breed's biomes, rarity, height band and gene weights are all in its JSON file, and that file is the truth — if this page and a breed file disagree, the file wins and this page is wrong. What the entries add is the reason a breed is shaped the way it is, which is the part the numbers cannot carry.

The lore is deliberately thin in one specific place: it never explains the mechanism behind the portal or the carrots, and it never confirms what the cowboy and the horseman are. Those gaps are load-bearing. Filling them in would turn a world with something older than you in it into a world with a backstory, and the first is worth more.