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An overview of your horses.
Learn how to train your horses.
Learn about your horses' stats.
Learn how to breed your horses.
Learn about the results of breeding.
Learn how to paint your horses.
Learn how to make and use leases.
Overview
To see the stats on your horses, you can either click the horse button on the main menu, or choose to see your stables or pastures within your ranch overview. In either case, you will be shown a list of horses and you can click on view, to get more stats on an individual horse. A third way to access the stats for an individual horse is to click on the horse in your graphical ranch view.
The stats for the horse contain a great deal of information in the left column, and the right column contains a list of commands you can execute for this horse. The left column lists the parents of the horse, as well as its earning and how many times it's won/placed/shown in events, as well as the number of events that it's entered. It also has an overall personality telling how hyper it is, as well as a quirk (if it has one), and its current mood.
The physical characteristics are also shown with the height, color, build and breed type of this horse. Further down, the condition, pulse and energy of the horse tell what kind of shape the horse is in currently.
Then, the stats for the horse are shown, namely the current stat, what percent of its base stat the current stat is, and how good that stat is in comparison to other horses in general.
Finally, the diet for the horse is shown at the bottom, and it is set to a reasonable diet to start, but perhaps some tweaking can modify the horse's attitude if it's necessary to make a horse hyper for an event, or to help the horse regain energy more quickly. If you modify the horse's diet, make sure the numbers add up to 100, and know that too much of anything can make the horse sick. Don't give the horse too much hot oats, and make sure it does get sufficient oat hay, and not too much alfalfa or grain. A balance of food is good, and you can experiment to see what combinations of food improve your horses's recovery, and which ones can make it ill. It is recommended that you tweak the starting food values and slowly learn what works and what doesn't.
The right column contains a list of commands and actions you can take for this horse. At the top, there's an option to name your horse if you haven't done so already. You can only name a horse once, so make sure you know what you want to call it before you name it. Horses can also be trained, and clicking on the train button will bring up the training window that's described more in the training helpfile.
The tack button brings up the tack interface that lets you equip your horse. Tack does play a small role in events, so you should not just ignore this since it might make the difference between winning and losing between closely matched horses in an event. The tack interface lets you equip and remove tack from horses, and is described more in the tack helpfile.
The trials button brings up the interface used to create an event. A trial event is an event you create and immediately run a single horse in. The idea behind trial events is to let players make a bit of money off their new horses, and to allow them to see how their horse will fare in events. Each horse can be entered into as many trial events as you would like, but only the first few will give money upon completion. It's probably a good idea to run each horse in as many trial events that pay money as possible, just to earn extra cash. Information about creating, entering and judging events can be found in the events helpfiles.
Bloodlines show the parents and grandparents of the horse, as well as any children the horse has. This can be useful for tracking the pedigree of a horse. Since all breeds in VHR descend from one of the three foundation breeds, horses of certain breeds will have long pedigrees. It is also possible to create "foundation pairs" which are horses of a breed chosen by the player that don't have any bloodlines. These are expensive to create, and cost thousands of tokens so that they are very rare.
The next action that can be taken on a horse is healing it. Horses can have different kinds of conditions from mild things like bruises to more severe things like pulled tendons and broken legs. Each time you treat a horse, its treatment amount goes up, and once it's beyond the required level to fix the horse's ailment (which is a hidden number), the horse will be healed when it's turned next. Veterinarians get a bonus to the treatment amount each time they heal, and they have no limit to how high they can make the treatment level. Thus, only veterinarians can heal the most serious injuries. Veterinarians can also vaccinate horses which is useful since it's possible for unvaccinated horses to get disease. Players can make their horses more sedate or more hyper (raise or lower attitude) which can be useful when the horse is being entered in different kinds of events. Finally, horses can be sterilized.
If horses meet the requirements, they can be bred. More information on breeding can be found in the breeding helpfile.
Horses can also be put up for sale or for stud. The way the auction system works here, horses are put up at a certain starting bid price, and each time a player bids on the horse, their bid must be at least some minimal bid value above the previous bid. The seller can also set a buyout price, and if this buyout price is met, the horse is automatically sold. Stallions can also be put up for stud, and the player can set how many stud times she wants to sell, as well as setting the price. There is no auction here. Other players just pay the stud fee or not. More information on the marketplace can be found in the marketplace helpfiles.
Horses can also be put up for lease. When making a lease, the player must specify what horse to lease (although the current horse will be selected if the player is coming from the a horse's overview page), and then the duration of the lease must be set, along with an optional purpose behind the lease. The price can also be set and if the price is positive, the person who leases the horse pays the price, and if it's negative, it means the owner pays the price. This is so that you can negotiate leases for things like vaccinations where you pay the price for your horses to be vaccinated, and also leases where another player wants a certain kind of horse for breeding or competing, and they can pay a price to get to use your horse. Then the person who will receive the lease must also be specified. It is also possible to begin this process by looking at someone else's ranch. The leasing process is explained in more detail in the ranch helpfiles.
You may also paint a horse, and this is covered in the painting helpfile.
If you haven't bred a horse, you may release it if you don't want it and don't feel like trying to sell it.
You can also set up different filters to categorize your horses. These are used with the various horse lists described elsewhere. They let you specify if a given horse will be used for breeding or training or other things. There are even three filters that you can just use for whatever you want (category 1-3).
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Training
Once you've either bought or bred a horse, you should start training
it. Training a horse will raise its stats, and if and when you choose a
specialty for a horse, it will learn how to compete in certain events better
than other horses. To begin training a horse, view its information page, and
click on the "Train" button on the right. You can only train horses that
are in your stable, and remember that only horses in your stable will be
turned when you take a turn. Horses can only be trained 6 times per turn,
so choose what you want to train carefully. Horses do live for a few hundred
turns, so they should have plenty of opportunities to be trained.
The training menu will display the current condition of the horse and its
stats. You will then be given a list of training options. Training a horse
takes place in four distinct phases.
In phase 1, you can only break the horse in. This will continue for a few to
several training sessions until the horse has gained enough experience. Then,
once the horse is ready, at phase 2, you will be given the option to choose
a specialty for the horse. You don't have to pick one right now, but there
will be events that require certain training specialties to enter. Whenever
you choose a specialty, you lose half the experience the horse has gained
past level 3. Thus, you don't have to pick a specialty right away for your
horse, but you will lose experience levels if you wait too long.
After you've chosen a specialty, you will be in phase 3 and have a longer
list of training options. Some types of training are too intense for young
horses, so they will only become available when the horse reaches two and
a half years old which is when the horse is in phase 4 of training and can
train in anything.
When the horse training options are visible, they list some stats after the
training type name that tell what stats are affected by that training. Use
this information to tailor a training program that will increase the stats
in the way you want. It is recommended that horses be trained in many areas
so that all of the horse's stats can be raised over time. Also note that
whenever you train a horse in anything, its training level will go up,
albeit more slowly at higher levels. The horse's specialty, or lack thereof,
has no effect on the results of the training, nor will certain kinds of
training increase the horse's training level in its specialty faster than
others. However, the horse's intelligence will affect how quickly it gains
levels. All horses will gain levels at the same speed at the lower levels,
but at higher levels, more intelligent horses will advance more quickly.
The intelligence doesn't affect the stat gains the horse has, but it does
affect how quickly the horse will advance to higher levels.
Training a horse also tires it out, and this will be visible by looking at
the updated energy amount. Horses with better endurance that are in better
condition get tired out more slowly. A horse cannot be trained if it is too
tired, but it is possible to attempt to train a horse on the edge of
exhaustion. If the horse's energy is low (like 1/4 to 1/5 of the way across),
then it is wise to be careful before training it. If a horse is trained
too much and gets exhausted, its condition will go down and it will recover
energy and condition more slowly for a few turns. Horses with high endurance,
however won't run into these problems as much, so it's mainly an issue with
starting horses that aren't as powerful. Horses don't recover all of their
energy and condition during one turn, so it is likely that starting horses
will only be able to be trained a bit each turn.
It is also possible to train a horse repeatedly in one area by clicking the
"train all" button. What this button does is repeatedly train the horse until
a limit is reached where the training fails. Be careful of this. As stated
above, horses can become exhausted and then fail to recover much of their
energy and condition for a few turns. This option is mainly presented
as a way of training more advanced horses that can go through a full cycle
of training each day without becoming exhausted.
Training a horse increases some of its stats by a bit (a small amount like
0.03 or so). However, there are ways to speed this up. Players receive "bonus
turns" every hour they are not online, and if you train a horse when you have
bonus turns available, it receives a small bonus to its training. When you
actually take a turn, a bonus turn gets used. It's possible to "store" bonus
trained horses in the pasture even when you run out of bonus turns, but it
will still cost a turn to turn the horses, so this wasn't deemed a big enough
issue to prevent people form removing horses that have been trained today from
the stables.
Another way to increase the training of a horse is by learning certain
skills. As with bonus turns, these increase the training stat bonuses by a
small amount.
The current skill bonuses are:
- The driving skill improves driving training.
- The racing skill improves track breeze.
- The English skill improves dressage, jumping and endurance.
- The western skill improves western, cattle, and trail obstacle.
- The horsemanship skill improves halter, arena obstacle and disciplines.
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Horse Stats
VHR has a large number of stats that can be trained so that horses can compete and do well in events. There are six primary stats that can be trained, and several other stats that describe the horse.
Primary Stats:
- Strength: This stat tells how much the horse can pull and how well it can jump and carry. Most events judge on strength somewhat, but it is most useful in driving and jumping events.
- Endurance: Endurance determines how far and how fast a horse can run over long distances, as well as how long a horse can exert itself. Endurance is most useful in endurance, racing and certain driving events.
- Intelligence: It is how smart the horse is, and is useful in dressage events. It plays a small role in other events as well, but another important feature of intelligence is that it determines how high a horse's training level can go. Horses receive experience when they're trained, but this experience amount decreases per training session as the horse gains levels. Horses with low intelligence will find it extremely difficult to reach the highest training levels (currently 15).
- Speed: This is a measure of how fast a horse can run over short distances. Endurance plays a much larger role in long-distance running, but this is useful in shorter events usually held on tracks.
- Surefoot: Surefootedness is a description of how likely a horse is to keep its feet or stumble when attempting a tricky maneuver. Although surefootedness is not usually the most important stat being judged in an event, it is judged as a part of almost all event types.
- Movement: Movement is how the horse carries itself. Although surefootedness is a description of whether or not a horse is likely to stumble, it doesn't capture how graceful a horse is. Movement describes the gracefulness of the horse, and is most useful in dressage, gaited and western pleasure events. These are events where the judging is not on how fast or high a horse can go, but on how well it performs more precise tasks.
Other Stats:
- Personality: The base mood that this horse has, ranging from very mellow (coldbloods) to very hyper (hotbloods). Generally, the mood of the horse will tend toward this value.
- Mood: The current mood of the horse. This can be changed by things such as the horse's diet and the training and whether it's given sedatives or things to make it hyper.
- Height: How tall the horse is in hands.
- Build: How stocky or slender the horse is. Different breeds have different values for this characteristic, and heavy builds perform better in driving events, while more slender breeds perform better in events requiring speed or agility.
- Breed Type: This specifies the overall breed type for this horse.
- Condition: This number represents the general health of a horse. It can change if the horse gets a disease or is injured in an event, or even if the horse is exercised too much or is given the wrong kind of food. If it is not too low, it tends to rise as a horse is rested, and will rise even more if a rested horse is exercised. On the other hand, an injured or sick horse is trained, then its condition will generally worsen. Healing or treating the horse's injuries will help, but only players with the veterinarian skill will be able to fully heal a horse that's very sick or injured. A horse's condition should be as close as possible to maximum when the horse is entered into an event since it is a consideration in all events. Endurance events rely on the horse's condition especially since they are so strenuous.
- Energy: How tired the horse is. A horse will use up energy when its trained or competes in an event. Its energy also determines how effective the training will be and how well it will do in an event.
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Breeding
Breeding is a central part of VHR, as it's how you improve your horses' stat over time. Only unsterilized horses can be bred, so geldings and sterile mares will not be breedable. Horses must also be 2.5 years old before they can breed, as well.
Stallions can be bred once they are 2.5 years old and if they have breedings available left over. When you view a stallion you own, you will see a message in the middle of the right column stating how many breedings the horse has left. Stallions gain 4 breedings per turn, and they can be stored up, so a stallion can be bred as many times as you would like during a given turn if it has breedings available.
Mares can be bred once they are at least 2.5 years old and if they are in heat. Mares go through a heat cycle whereby they are in heat for a few turns out of every dozen turns or so. You can see whether or not a mare is in heat by looking at the middle right message when you're viewing the horse.
In either case, if the horse can be bred, the "breed" button will be visible just below the message about the breeding status of the horse. Clicking this button will show you the breeding interface which will list all of the horses you have available that can be bred with this horse. So, for example, if you want to breed a stallion, you will be given a list of all mares you own that are in heat and not pregnant at the moment. Alternatively, if you want to breed a mare, you will be given a list of all stallions you have at your ranch that have breedings available so you can pick one.
Another way to breed horses is to go to the marketplace and search for stallions that are available for stud. If you pay the stud fee, then the breeding screen comes up just as before and you can pick a mare to breed with the stallion. It is strongly recommended that once you pay the stud fee, you immediately breed with a mare when the breeding menu comes up. Although the last stud you've paid for is recorded until you use it, so you could feasibly pay the stud fee and then come back later and breed a with mare, this is not recommended since if you forget and pay another stud fee, the previous stud data will be lost. These fees will not be refunded if you forget and don't breed with a stud you've paid for.
If you choose to breed the horse, then the mare becomes pregnant and the stallion loses one of its available breedings. The mare will then need to be turned several turns forward before the new foal is born. You can tell how many turns are left by looking in the middle of the right hand column in the horse display screen.
When the foal is born, it is given stats based on the parents' natural and trained stats, as well as the base breed stats of the parents. The color of the foal will be the average of the parents' colors, with a slight random variation. The stats of the new horse will be based on the parents' stats and the parents' breeds. To make the stud market more viable, stallions are born 10 percent of the time and mares are born 90 percent of the time. However, if a player has the breeding skill, then there is a larger chance of birthing a stallion. It also costs $2000 to birth a foal, but much of that cost can be made up by running the horse in trial events later on.
Note: If either parent is painted, then the foal will also be listed as painted so players can avoid buying this horse in the marketplace if they want to avoid horses that have been colored. Because the painted status of each parent is checked both when the horses are bred and when the foal is born, stallions cannot be painted for one real day after they've been bred. This is so that if a stallion is put up for stud and it's not painted, people who pay the stud fee for that horse won't end up with a painted foal if the owner decides to paint the horse later. But, again note that this only lasts for one day, so it is recommended that you quickly have the mare give birth before the owner of the stud can paint the horse and cause the foal to be marked as painted.
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Crossbreeding
One of the major components of VHR is the breeding of horses to get new breeds. All players start with some horses in their ranch, but those horses only come in three types: Arabian. Belgian, and Przewalski. Every other breed must be bred (or possibly bought if you wish to spend tokens on foundation pairs).
There are three ways of accessing the crossbreeding information, and they
can be found in your ranch view near the bottom. They are "Crossbreed" "Parents" and "Foal Types". These are abbreviated "CB", "PA", and "FO" in the buttons that appear on these pages.
To begin looking into crossbreeding, first pick one of the three options
from your ranch page.
- Crossbreeding gives you a menu that allows you to pick two breeds to see what kind of foal they will produce.
- Parents gives you a menu that lets you pick a single breed and then it lists all of the pairs of breeds that can be bred to make this breed.
- Foal Types gives a menu where you can select a breed and see what kinds of foals it can produce when bred with other breeds.
One implicit rule here is that breeding two of the same breed yields the same breed, even if it isn't listed.
Also note that in the upper-right corner of these pages, you will see buttons with CB, PA and FO. You don't see a button if it would take you to the current screen, but in the other cases, those buttons return you to the race select screens so you can start over with crossbreeding something different if you wish. The regular crossbreeding (CB) option only yields one breed each time it's selected, so that information just gets presented at the bottom of the page.
The other two types can present long lists since the PA or parents command returns a list of all possible pairs of parents that can be bred to make the breed in question. You will notice looking at the lists that the pairs do appear twice. The reason for this is that the breeds are sorted using the first name in the breed, so it was hoped this would make it easier to find what you wanted, since let's say you want to create a Friesian and you have an Oldenburg. You could then go to the parents search and click on Friesian and then look at the horses on the left-hand side of the list and eventually you see that you can breed an Oldenburg with an Ardennes, Belgian or Gelderlander to get a Friesian.
The foals code works similarly. You pick a breed and then the other breeds it can be bred with are listed in alphabetical order. It is not sorted by foal type, so if you know you want a certain kind of foal and have one kind of parent you want to use, it's better to do a parent search of the foal breed like described in the previous paragraph.
When viewing this output, the breeds will be listed in two columns and there will be PA and FO buttons to the left and right of the breeds. These allow you to check the parentage of something and then keep working backwards or forwards (or sideways if you wish) to see how the horse breeds interrelate.
Note that in some cases, there's no information about what happens when you breed certain pairs of horses. In those cases, the horses become "Grade" horses which are generic horses from certain groups. There are some "Grade" rules intermixed with the regular rules, but generally these are the mutts of the horse world.
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Painting Your Horse
You can click on the paint button in your horse's information page and it will bring up a menu with some sliders that let you change the color of your horse. Since many players only want natural horse colors, when you paint your horse, it gets a flag set saying that it's been painted. This lets people exclude painted horses from their searches when they look for horses in the marketplace.
It is possible to remove the painted flag from a horse, but this will cost many hundreds of tokens (and the amount will be presented to you when this option is available in the painting screen). That way, it is possible to paint a horse and have it treated as a natural color, but it will be very expensive to do so, so it won't be done very often per person. If we or the players feel that removing the painting flag is being done too often, then the cost may go up to try to make it more rare.
When horses are bred, the color of the foal is the average of the parents' colors, along with a small random change. Because of this, when a painted horse is bred, its foal is also be marked as painted.
To change the color of the horse, it is recommended that you right-click on the horse you want to paint so you get a closeup view of it. Then, you can adjust the sliders to change the color. Once you have the color you like, you can click "Save Changes" and have those changes sent to the server. If you are working on your horse and you change the color, but decide you want to start over with this painting session, you can click on "Last Saved Color" and the game will reload the stored colors the horse had the last time you saved the colors.
If the horse is not painted, then you must check the box that says "Yes, really paint it." because what you are doing can only be undone by spending tokens. When you do something that costs tokens in the game, or that costs tokens to undo in the game, you are generally forced to click some extra button, or in the case of removing the painted flag, enter the horse's ID number digits in reverse order. The reason for this is to make sure that people don't accidentally do something that will cause them to spend tokens or need to spend tokens later on.
Horses are not born immediately after breeding. It takes several turns before a mare gives birth. The painted status of the parents is checked and recorded both at breeding time and birthing time, and if either parent was painted at either time, then the foal is marked as painted. This is just something to be aware of so if you breed with a horse put up for stud in the marketplace, you should try to bring the mare to term quickly to avoid the possibility of the owner of the stud stallion painting the horse in the meantime. However, the game will not allow stallions to be painted for one real day after they've been bred, so you have a bit of time to turn the mare before this becomes an issue.
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Leases (Contracts)
Leases or contracts are agreements between players transferring control of a horse from one player to another for a short time. The purpose of leases is to allow players to work other other players' horses for a short time in such a way that the owner doesn't have to worry about whether or not she will get the horse back.
To lease out a horse, you may either start at the other player's ranch by clicking on the "Make Lease" button, or you may click on the "Lease" button you can find when looking at the information for one of your horses. If you start at the player's ranch, you may then select the horse you wish to lease. If you start with a horse, then you may select the player's ranch at the bottom of the page. Note that you can only create leases on your horses, so other players can't attempt to lease a bunch of your horses just to annoy you. However, they can keep offering leases
After the horse and playe are selected, set the length of the lease in turns and/or days, and the
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