Wild-caught horse breeds start unruly and calm down as you bond with them. Bonding is slower. Draft Health, Mustang Stamina, and breed Handling also adjusted.
Re-introduces the rarely used horse attribute, unruliness (different animation state) to horses that would logically and realistically would be skittish/wild for a long time after being caught. Wild-caught breeds behave differently from stable and common breeds. Also adjusts Health, Stamina, and Handling on a few specific breeds. Everything below was chosen with four things in mind: immersion, realism, lore-accuracy, and balance.
Unruliness
Newly caught/acquired horses of the affected breeds start unruly (skittish/restless animation state) instead of calm. This is the core immersion goal of the mod: a wild-caught horse shouldn’t behave identically to one bought from a stable.
Unruliness decreases as bond level with the player increases, for the wildest breeds like Arabian, Mustang it goes away when reaching rank 4 of bonding, for other breeds it happens earlier. The intent is to make wild horses act differently from tame ones until the player actually earns their trust.
Breed selection for this list is based primarily on in-game lore: whether the breed spawns wild, with real-world temperament used where it would fit logically.
Affected breeds: Mustang, Nokota, the wild-only Arabian coats (White, Red Chestnut, Warped Brindle), the Perlino Andalusian, Appaloosa, American Standardbred, Hungarian Halfbred.
Kentucky Saddler, Morgan, and Tennessee Walker also spawn wild but are deliberately left calm, because NPCs commonly ride them, making them unruly would leave ambient NPC riders looking skittish everywhere, hurting immersion instead of helping it. All draft breeds stay calm too.
Bonding
XP required per bond level is higher than vanilla across all breeds. Vanilla bonding maxes out quickly enough that the “trust” mechanic barely registers before it’s over. Slowing it down is a balance change meant to give that mechanic actual weight. (This uses the same bonding values by default as my Slower Horse Bonding mod progressive variant)
Mustang, Arabian and Nokota require more bonding XP than the other affected breeds on top of that, so they take the longest to reach bond rank 4 and stay unruly the longest. This ties bonding difficulty directly to how wild a breed is, which adds to how different and varied horses feel.
Other stat changes
Draft breeds (Belgian, Suffolk Punch, Shire) got a Health increase. They’re the largest, most powerfully built horses in the game but had average Health in vanilla, so this is a realism fix to bring their stats in line with their actual size and role.
Mustang got a Stamina increase, reflecting the breed’s real-world reputation for endurance.
Handling was adjusted on several breeds:
Up on Andalusian, Morgan, Kentucky Saddler, American Paint, and Appaloosa, all real-world breeds known for agility.
Down on Ardennes, a heavy draft breed that shouldn’t handle like a riding horse.
Vanilla Handling was flat across roughly half the breed roster, so this also serves balance by giving breed choice more practical difference.
Install:
drop it in your `lml` folder (needs Lenny’s Mod Loader).
Credits:
ChunkLeChuck
Downloads
| Name | Format | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Realistic-Horse-Taming-And-Traits-1.1.1.rar | RAR | 6.34 KB |
To start download click the filename. To open archive files use one of these programs: WinRAR, 7-Zip, WinZip. Some mod archives may need to be extracted before the mods will work.
