Horse taming boils down to a few simple steps.
- Put your rope and sugar on your ability bar (you’ll thank me later)
- Find a horse
- Get sort-of-close to the horse (if you’re too close it will run away. As you get more experienced you’ll learn to get as close as you can without scaring it off)
- From your bar, equip the rope, then click to throw the rope at the horse
- We wait until now to equip it because you move really slow while it’s equipped
- This will bring up the first minigame, just press space when the bar is in the red zone (it’s basically the same as the fishing minigame)
- If you’ve succeeded in the first minigame, walk towards the horse. The goal is to walk all the way to it
- As you get closer, a second minigame might happen (probably more than once). For this one you just need to spam spacebar as fast as you can.
- Once you get all the way to the horse, use 3-4 sugar lumps from your bar, and then try to mount the horse
- If you’ve succeeded, take the horse back to a Stable Keeper to register it. You don’t get any Training xp until the horse is registered. If you failed, then repeat every step again with a new rope. (You will know when you fail horse taming because the horse kicks you in the face and runs away)
Just reading about it might make it seem sort-of complicated, but once you do it once or twice you’ll have it down.
If you would prefer a visual guide, Violet Astray also made a video guide for catching horses.
Taming Tips
While that is pretty much everything you need to know about catching horses, there’s a few extra tips that can make it go more smoothly for you.
First off, once you finish catching a horse (you’ve done the minigames and hopped onto its back), you do not have to ride the horse all the way back to a Stable Keeper. You can immediately hop off the horse’s back, get on your own horse, and ride back much faster. The tamed horse will follow you all the way there. Even if you can’t see it following you, just wait a little bit and it will eventually teleport to your location.
Tamed horses are extremely slow before they are registered, so this will save you a ton of time (especially if the horse was caught a long ways away from a Stable Keeper).
Additionally, no horse taming guide would be complete without bringing up what is possibly the most controversial topic in the Life Skill -- sugar lumps.
There are basically 2 camps of people in the training community.
- People that think feeding X amount of sugar lumps vastly increases the odds of catching the horse.
- People that think sugar lumps have no effect on taming success rate.
It’s important to understand that both camps of people are tinfoil theorists.
That said, I belong to the second camp.
Here’s the general idea for how taming success works (remember this is all tinfoil, and literally no one can tell you the exact way things work).
- As soon as you throw the rope a timer starts. From there you do the minigames and approach the horse, and the timer is ticking in the background the whole time.
- If you try to get on the horse before 30 seconds have passed, you will fail.
- If you hop on around 32-38 seconds, your chances drastically go up.
It is extremely likely that lumps of sugar actually have no effect whatsoever on success rate. However, feeding the horse sugar has an animation time of a few seconds. This means that using sugar lumps is more likely to put you in the correct timeframe for when you should hop on the horse.
This means that, rather than spending your time and silver on making sugar lumps, you can simply use a stopwatch to time how long it’s been since you started the taming process.