LLS Equestrian getting-started guide: buying your first horse, tack, daily care and every recipe

LLS Equestrian adds a Riding Horse you keep rather than just ride: it has real gaits, real coat genetics, a bond with you, hooves that grow, and moods you can read from how it stands. There’s a lot in it, so this guide walks through a first week in order: getting a horse, tacking up, riding, the daily routine, and the stable. Every recipe is at the end.

It’s written against version 0.1.0, the first tester build. Vanilla horses aren’t changed; the Riding Horse lives alongside them.

Day one: buying a horse

Riding Horses don’t spawn in the wild. You buy your first one from the Horse Dealer. He comes every other day, from 8am to 8pm, and sets up a short walk from your bed. With the Farm Sim Pack he rides in with the animal trader on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday instead.

He sells a Bill of Sale for every breed, as a mare or a stallion:

Breed	Emeralds	What it’s like
Shetland Pony	24	Short legs, a big head, short busy strides
Quarter Horse, Paint, Appaloosa	32	Compact stock horses; the all-rounders
Thoroughbred	40	Tall and lean; the fastest gallop
Clydesdale, Belgian Draft	40	Big drafts, slow and powerful
Arabian	44	Small and fine; the most stamina
Warmblood	44	Big and athletic; the best jumper
Friesian, Gypsy Vanner	48	Feathered legs and showy, high-stepping action

Use the Bill of Sale on the ground where you want the horse, and it’s delivered there, tame and yours. A first horse doesn’t need to be expensive: a Quarter Horse at 32 emeralds does everything well.

He also sells the gear for a first day: a saddle (8 emeralds), a Western saddle (10), a bridle (5), a saddle pad (4), leg wraps and an ear bonnet (3 each), a grooming brush (1), the Horse Whistle (2) and a Breeding Certificate (2).

Tacking up

Each piece of tack goes on separately:

Right-click (or tap) the horse holding a piece to put it on. Holding a different piece of the same kind swaps them, and the old one comes back to you.
Crouch and right-click to open the horse’s screen, and drag pieces in or out.

Piece	What it does
Saddle or Western Saddle	Needed to ride. The plain vanilla saddle gives the English look
Bridle	Finishes the look; it isn’t needed to ride
Saddle Pad, Leg Wraps, Ear Bonnet	Show tack. Dye them any of the 16 colours
Turnout Blanket	Keeps off rain and mud while it’s out

Pads, wraps, bonnets and blankets come white. Put one in a crafting grid with any dye to recolour it, as often as you like.

Riding

Get on and double-tap forward to step up a gait: walk, trot, canter, gallop. Tap back to step down, hold back from a stop to rein back, and let go to slow and stop. On a controller or a touch stick, a light push walks and a full push builds up on its own, but the gallop always needs the double-tap, so the horse never bolts by accident.

There’s no stamina bar. A horse has wind: a gallop lasts about ten seconds, then it drops back, blows and flicks its ears, and lets you know when it’s ready to go again. How long it lasts depends on its breed, its genes, and how well you’ve been looking after it.

There’s a second seat behind you for a friend. Only the owner drives.

The daily routine

Five minutes a day keeps a horse at its best. You don’t lose anything for skipping a day, but the care adds up.

Brush it

Use the Grooming Brush on your horse. Brushing cleans off grime, the dust, mud and sweat that builds up from rain, rolling, mud and hard work, in six stages from dusty to filthy. A swim washes mud off too.

The first strokes each day also raise its bond.

Pick its hooves

Use the Hoof Pick on all four hooves, a click each; the horse lifts each one in turn. Picked hooves stay healthy. Unpicked ones grow faster and can get thrush.

Give it a treat

An apple, carrot, sugar or golden carrot from your hand. It munches, heals a little, and the first three each day raise bond. Don’t overdo it: more than six treats in a day risks colic.

Two stable treats work differently:

Horse Cookie: it lasts 20% longer before tiring, for the rest of the day
Peppermint: it gets its breath back faster after a gallop, for the rest of the day

Only the first of the two each day counts. They don’t raise bond.

Why bond matters

Bond runs from 0 to 10 and grows with daily brushing, treats and time in the saddle. It only fades after three days with no care at all, and then slowly.

A horse’s genes set how much stamina and health it could have. Bond unlocks them: a quarter of its potential at bond 0, all of it at bond 10. So a well-bred horse you’ve looked after for a fortnight outlasts the same horse fresh from the dealer by a long way. Stamina can’t be trained by riding; bond is how you get it.

Hooves and shoes

Hooves grow and wear like real ones:

They go from freshly trimmed to overgrown over about eight days, faster if they’re not picked, and faster again if you ride on stone, roads, paths or gravel without shoes.
Use the Hoof Rasp on all four to trim them back. It pulls worn shoes off first.
Use four Horseshoes from your hand to shoe it all round, with a trim. A shod horse can ride on hard ground all day: the shoes wear instead of the hooves, and it throws them when they’re worn through.

Neglected hooves make a horse tire sooner, and worn bare hooves on stone can bruise and leave it lame.

The stable

Stalls

A stall is wherever you lay bedding: Straw Bedding or Shavings Bedding. You don’t need to build anything else. At dusk your horses walk to the nearest bedding and bed down for the night.

Bedding gets dirty. Muck out the droppings with a Muck Fork; the manure composts. A horse bedded on dirty bedding gets grimy.

Troughs

Horse Trough for feed, Water Trough for water
At noon your horses walk over to eat and drink
Two troughs placed side by side join into a double that holds three times as much

A horse that misses meals or water tires sooner, a fifth more each day it goes without, until it’s fed and watered again. It never starves.

Calling and finding it

Horse Whistle: your nearest horse within about 96 blocks canters over.
Horse Radar: pairs to one horse and points the way, out to 256 blocks and beyond. A blinking amber dot marks where it was last seen when its part of the world isn’t loaded.

When it’s ill

Horses fall ill now and then, mostly when they aren’t looked after. A sick horse hangs its head. Use the Vet Kit on it: it reads the horse’s temperature, pulse and breathing and tells you what’s wrong.

Illness	Remedy, once a day	And
Cough	Cough Syrup	Keep it out of the rain
Thrush	Hoof Tincture	Pick its hooves
Lameness	Liniment	Rest it
Colic	Colic Drench	Walk it for a minute

Nothing is fatal. At worst a horse is laid up and can’t be ridden until it’s treated. Foals don’t fall ill.

What next

Breeding: a Breeding Certificate on your stallion, then the signed certificate on your mare. The foal inherits real genes from both, so a black horse can secretly carry chestnut. How the coat genetics work.
Training: riding raises Speed and Jump from Green to Elite, and the round pen and lunge line train it from the ground. See the Equestrian page for the full training table.
Gait text on screen: /scriptevent llseq:readout turns it off, and on again.

Every recipe

Recipes marked shaped need the layout shown; the rest are shapeless.

Tack

Item	Recipe
Western Saddle	Shaped: leather across the top; leather, iron ingot, leather in the middle; leather in each bottom corner
Bridle	Shaped: leather across the top; leather in each middle corner; an iron nugget in each bottom corner
Saddle Pad	Shaped: white wool across the top; wool, leather, wool on the second row
Turnout Blanket	Shaped: wool, leather, wool on the top row, then two full rows of white wool
Ear Bonnet	Shaped: string in each top corner, three white wool across the row below
Leg Wraps	Shaped: wool, string, wool in one row
Dyed tack	Any pad, wrap, bonnet or blanket + a dye

The plain saddle is the vanilla saddle, from the dealer or found in chests.

Care and vet

Item	Recipe
Grooming Brush	Stick + 2 wheat
Hoof Pick	Stick + iron nugget
Hoof Rasp	Stick + iron ingot
Horseshoe ×4	2 iron ingots
Horse Cookie ×4	Wheat + carrot + sugar
Peppermint ×4	2 sugar + fern
Vet Kit	Leather + paper + iron nugget
Cough Syrup	Honey bottle + sweet berries
Hoof Tincture	Glass bottle + charcoal + ink sac
Liniment	Glass bottle + glow berries + slime ball
Colic Drench	Glass bottle + sugar + dried kelp

Stable and finding your horse

Item	Recipe
Straw Bedding ×4	3 wheat
Shavings Bedding ×4	2 planks, any wood
Muck Fork	2 sticks + 3 iron nuggets
Horse Trough	2 planks + carrot
Water Trough	2 planks + bucket
Horse Whistle	Sugar cane + iron nugget
Horse Radar	Compass + leather
Breeding Certificate	2 paper + gold nugget

Training and arena

Item	Recipe
Lunge Line	Lead + 2 string
Lunge Whip	2 sticks + string
Round Pen Panel ×6	Shaped: two rows of three iron bars
Round Pen Gate	2 round pen panels + iron ingot
Round Pen Kit	2 iron blocks + round pen gate
Ground Pole	2 sticks + white dye
Jump Pole	3 sticks + white dye + red dye
Cavaletti	Ground pole + 2 sticks
Show Barrel	Barrel + red dye
Arena Cone ×4	Orange dye + 2 dried kelp