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How to Fully Implement Zombie Horses

The zombie horse stands as a difficult-to-implement mob, which is kind of a shame.  The skeleton horse however managed to get fully implemented with the fun “skeleton horse trap” in lightning storms, as well as having them be a strange but inventive mode of underwater transport.

So, for the other undead horse, they could perhaps spawn in only one of these two possible settings:

• In a cursed village, maybe with a horse stall structure (though these are very rare)
• As a rare mount for trident-wielding drowned (would be a pretty daunting variant to the skeleton horsemen!)

And as for functionality in-game, some mechanics could be drawn from the zombie villagers: what if zombie horses could be cured into a random living horse?  While the zombie horse could have more limited health and aquatic adaptability like its skeletal relative, a zombie horse could be cured into a living horse with a lot more health (the horse could transform at partial health, so the player will have to feed and heal it to full health).

WolveReigner781 shared this idea.

• October 28, 2018 01:23
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  ReadyStarling62 commented

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  • October 31, 2018 03:23
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  First of all, I love that you are trying to make zombie horses an actual thing. I also love how thematically appropriate the ideas are for where you would find the mob, but the first suggestion is much better than the second in my opinion. The second idea is less thematically appropriate, because these are zombie horses, not drowned horses. (Though the idea of drowned horses that act like submarines, swimming through the water, is actually not half bad.) Secondly, drowned on zombies would feel (again, in my opinion) too close to skeleton horsemen, which are already a pretty obnoxious mob to fight. The idea of putting the horses in a zombie village, on the other hand, makes zombie villages more special and makes more sense thematically than the other idea.

  The other problem I saw was the usefulness of the zombie horse is basically the same as the skeleton horse. I propose that instead it could sniff out the closest villager/village. This would make sense with its zombie nature of seeking out and killing villagers, and would be kind of like ender pearls or woodland mansion maps now. Also, in combination with the zombie horses in villages idea, you are rewarded for exploring and finding a structure by getting a reward that makes exploration a bit easier. If that not solid game design then I don't know what is.

  The other mechanic that you mentioned was choosing whether or not to cure a zombie horse. If they are as rare as in your suggestions, then I don't really see a situation where a player would not already be able to have found several normal horses already, and therefore rather keep there rare, zombie horse than cure it. This isn't to say that the idea is completely without merit, but I see it more like shearing a mooshroom; this has little to no use, but is a really neat feature.

   

   

   

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  CreativelyJake commented

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  • March 05, 2019 01:49
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  yes!