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horse breeding change - heritability of the stats

Current situation

Currently when you breed horses, the offspring has stats beeing an average of the 2 parents + a random "third set".

This has a consequence: even if you chose the 2 best horses you have as parents, the offspring will be worse/medium/mediocre. Even if you do it again and again, the horses you get will not be better than the first horses you start with.

Proposal of a change:

I would suggest a system of 2 genes per stat in a horse. When you breed 2 horses, you have a consistent genetic transmission to the child: 1 gene per stat inherited from each parent .

You could have a dominant or a recessive character for a gene in a horse.

+ Replace the "random third set" (used when you breed 2 horses) by a mutation mechanics of the inherited stats, (increase or decrease a stat on a gene by a small quantity)

What would be the benefit from the change

You can have fun by breeding horses in order to have better and better horses stats (health, jump height and speed) , by testing your horses and selecting them generation after generation.

That way you would also add a potential pedagogical content about artificial selection and Evolution (it is not a debate, Mankind practices it that way on the domestics animals for ages)
It introduces a real use of the horse breeding mechanics, and also an incentive to breed your horses.

With better horses you can explore the map with more ease

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• March 15, 2021 18:02
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  • November 09, 2021 12:48
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  This or any system that promotes breeding for better stats past the average would be lovely. Would make things like selling horses on servers a new occupation and breeding horses worthwhile.
  
  Another good change on this might be making horse stats more visible, which is the part that makes Llama breeding less frustrating despite being similarly random with tendency to an average.

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  • March 04, 2023 19:20
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  I suspect I know what they were going for, but I also strongly suspect the person who did this didn't understand the math they were creating.
  
  In real life, domestication and breeding for desired traits beats hunting the wild for desired samples all day. In the implementation they create an asymptotic limit to how good a horse you can breed that means the better the more likely a much worse offspring. So you are better off just finding random horses than you are trying to breed good ones.
  
  Even worse, the Minecraft implementation isn't fun. It's tedious and frustrating. This isn't good gaming math.
  
  I don't think it needs to be as complicated as proposed. Simply having a chance for each stat to always improve or degrade would do it. I think what the intention was, was to have children generally inherit from the parent with a chance to get better or worse but they mangled it.
  
  Say you have a stat that is a float between 0.0-1.0 where 1.0 is the best stat and zero is the worst.
  p1 is this stat for parent 1. p2 is the stat for parent 2. p3 would be the child stat. R is a pseudorandom value between 0.0 and 1.0.
  
  p3 = min( max( absolute( p1-p2)/2 + 1.1*(R-0.5)*(p1-p2), 0.0), 0.0, 1.0);
  
  What you end up with (if I haven't mangled it) is an even probability centered on creating offspring that is the average of it's parents. i.e. R will have an average value of .5 which will turn the second part of the equation to zero on average. But there is also a chance for a plus or minus 10%.

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  • May 31, 2026 00:24
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  Yeah, It is way to complicated. It is annoying how long it takes to breed a super horse.