Horse Breeding Guide

Introduction

To obtain a higher-tier horse, you can either buy a horse from the horse market or start horse breeding yourself.

Other Horse Guides:

Before you start Horse Breeding

Before we begin I would like to explain a few things:

Horse Deaths	The number of horse deaths does not affect the breeding results anymore.
Breeding Count	Horses have a breeding count and will not be able to breed “safely” once it hits 0. To check a horse’s breeding count either press “P” whilst mounting the horse, or check the stats in your Stable. Under your horse’s stats, it will say “breedable” with the number of times that horse can breed. Female horses can only breed once while male horses can breed two times. You can reset the number of times a horse can breed using a Pearl Store item which costs 330 pearls for a male and 640 for a female. You can only reset the breeding amount once.
Level	The horse level highly affects the results. I recommend leveling both horses to level 27 – 30 before breeding them if you want the best results.
Tier	The horse tier will also affect the results and you should try to breed two horses of the same tier to get the highest results. The female tier is more important however and will affect the results more (higher tiers only). For example: Breeding a tier 7 female with a tier 6 male will give better results than a tier 6 female and a tier 7 male.
Courser Horses	Breeding using a courser horse can give the foal an additional skill when it is born. 1 courser parent = 50% chance of an additional skill 2 courser parents = 100% chance of an additional skill
Training Mastery	Higher Training Mastery increases your chances of obtaining a higher-tiered horse from Breeding/Horse Exchange. The benefits of Training Mastery are applied when you start the horse breeding/exchange. Mastery clothing is not recommended if you are a beginner to the Training Lifeskill because it is expensive to invest in. However, if you have any Mastery Accessories from other life skills, use them when you start breeding for extra chances.

How to Start Horse Breeding

There are 3 different ways of breeding horses in Black Desert:

Breed a female horse you own with another player’s male horse from the Breeding Market (your female horse will require at least 1 breeding count)
Breed a female and male horse in your own stable. (Both horses will need at least 1 breeding count)
Horse Exchange Method – Pay 35,000 and LOSE both horses to receive a foal (more info below)

To begin, you will need to check in your Female Horse at a Stable Keeper (and Male horse if you are using your own).
- The horses do not need to be at the same Stable Keeper but make sure the Stable Keeper allows you to access the Breeding Market (check below for a list of locations)
- Make sure there is also an empty stable slot for the foal
Equip your Life Skill Mastery gear and use any Training Mastery buffs available to increase your chance of a better foal.
Make sure that both of the horses have a “Breedable” count of at least 1.
- You can use the Horse Exchange method instead if your horse has 0 Breedable counts but this will destroy both the parent horses (check below for more info)
Recover the horse’s stamina to full – you will get an error if the horse is not fully recovered
If you are using your own Male horse, click the horse and then the “Register at Breeding” button.

Make sure you select “Show Only Me” when you register the Male horse. This stops other players from being able to breed with your horse.
- This will cost you 35,000 silver, but you will get the silver back in the mail once the breeding process has finished.

Now go to the Breeding Market by clicking the “Breeding Market” button at the bottom.
Here you can see all the horses on the Breeding Market and can select which horse you would like to breed with. You will have to pay another player to use their horse to breed with your female.
If you used your own Male horse, click the “My Horse List” button at the top.
Select your Male horse and click “Request Breeding”.

Select your female horse from the pop-up window and click “Request Breeding”.

The breeding process takes 2 hours and 24 minutes. You can bypass the timer by paying 130 pearls, but this isn’t recommended.

Once the breeding has completed, click the Female horse in your Stable and then “Collect” to receive the foal.

You can now remove the Male horse from the Breeding Market to put it back in your stable.
- To do this, go back to the Breeding Market and “My Registrations” to collect your horse.
- You will receive the 35,000 silver when you collect the horse.

Horse Exchange

Horse exchange is another option and type of horse breeding.

If your horse has a Breeding Count of 0, you can still Exchange them to immediately obtain a new foal instead.
The horse obtained from the exchange is influenced by their parents just like normal Horse Breeding.
You do not have to wait 2.5 hours for the breeding time and it will cost 35,000 silver.

Exchanging horses will destroy both of the parents.

Go to the Stable Keeper and use the “Exchange Horse” button. You can then select the male and female horse you would like to use, and enter the name of the new horse.

Horse Breeding Guide

Horse Breeding Stable Keepers

The horses don’t need to be in the same stable to breed, but they need to be in Stables that allow you to access the Breeding Market.

Stable Keepers in main cities and towns can be used to access the Breeding Market:

Velia
Heidel
Port Epheria
Calpheon City
Keplan
Trent
Altinova
Valencia City
Shakatu
Sand Grain Bazaar
Grána
Duvencrune
O’draxxia

Balacs Altar
Awina’s Tail
Wind Nol’s Perch
Eilton
Pilgrim’s End
Sherekhan Iron Mine
Bronte’s Bolt
Nampo Moodle Village
Nopsae’s Byeot County
Dalbeol Village
Asparkan
Muzgar

Imperial Steed

An Imperial Steed is a special horse that has a low chance of being obtained alongside a normal foal when you breed horses.

You can level up the Imperial Steed to level 15 and sell it at a Stable using Imperial Horse Delivery

An Imperial Steed sells for 120 million silver and also rewards other Training materials
The Imperial Steed cannot be exchanged on the Horse Market or Breeding Market
The Imperial Steed only has 1 skill called “Imperial Stature” to indicate it is an Imperial Steed horse
The higher the tier and level of horses when breeding, the higher chance of obtaining an Imperial Steed

Horse Breeding Guide

Imperial Steed Rewards

Sell to a Stable Keeper with Imperial Horse Delivery when the horse is level 15 or higher
Obtain 100 million silver and all of the following items:

Obtained Item	No.
Mythical Feather	10
Flower of Oblivion	100
Royal Fern Root	100
Stonetail Fodder	20
Spirit Pouch of Ferocious Beast	20
Pure Forest Breath	20
Rainbow Gem Fruit	20
Breezy Conch Seaweed	20
Deep Blue Hoof Root	20
Golden Seal – [Imperial Training]	8
Wind Spirit Stone Fragment	50
Earth Spirit Stone Fragment	50
Water Spirit Stone Fragment	50

Horse Breeding Guide

Horse Breeding Calculator

I highly recommend using the breeding calculator by Famme because it is easy to use and see exactly what horses you can obtain with all the percentages.

Link: http://www.somethinglovely.net/bdo/horses/

To use the calculator, enter the tier and level of both the male and female horse.
Click the horse icons to change the horse coat for more accurate results.
Input your Training Mastery %. You can find your current % in your character profile window (P) > Life Skills > Hover over Training.
Change the Breeding Rate % in the top right to 16.
Underneath you will be told possible results you can get and the chances of each (3F refers to a tier 3 female horse, 5M is a tier 5 male horse).
The highest tier you can get from breeding is tier 8.
You will also be able to see 2 charts in the details tab which show what level of horses are required to hit the next breeding “milestone”.

Horse Coats & Color Theory (Advanced)

All horses have 3 different color values which affect their appearance: Red, White, and Black.

There is a theory that using “purebred” horses when breeding will give you higher chances of a higher-tiered foal. It is still unconfirmed, but with lots of testing, many players including myself do believe this theory to be correct. There was also a small reference to it on the old Korean wiki which was written by the developers themselves.

Purebred Horses:

icon

6A

icon

7A

icon

7B

icon

7C

8C

8E

For a full list of all Horse Tiers with their Color Values and chances of learning skills, I recommend using the Horse Skill Learning Percentags Google Sheet. You can also find more information and resources in the Horse Community Discord.

BDO Player “Bouwplan” wrote a very detailed explanation of Color Theory on the old forums in July 2016. Unfortunately, you can no longer access the source, but the explanation is written below:

Seems like people are still confused about the color theory, so i will explain it to the best of my abilities.

For this example i used my chart over at https://imgur.com/a/DaeiQ.

I will point out horses from my chart in the following manner: T stands for Tier, followed by the tier number and the letter associated to the horse. So for example the green horse (“the Hulk”) in Tier 4 would be, T4-E.

Each horse has 3 different colors with a value assigned to them. The lower the tier, the lower the values.

In this topic the word “purebred” will be mentioned quite a few times and it simply means that it only has a value greater then 1 in only 1 of the color values.

All following horses are considered purebred horses: T1-A, T4-B, T4-I, T5-J, T5-K, T5- L, T6-A, T7-A, T7-B, T7-C, T8-C, T8-E

As you can see in the list, each horse has a value assigned to it and for the first example i am going to take 2 horses from the 5th Tier, T5-C and T5-D.
T5-C has a Red value of 4, White value of 1 and a Black value of 1.
T5-D has a Red value of 3, White value of 0 and a Black value of 2.

These values are something we need to add up, in order to give us insight of the possible foal it can produce (this also after having leveled up your horses to the appropriate levels).

This would give us the following: a combined Red value of 7, a combined White value of 1 and a combined Black value of 3.

To make it a bit easier to see, i will shorten it down to 7/1/3

During the roll for the foal, it will choose a color channel, this can be either Red, White or Black, before it picks a number between 1 and the maximum number of the combined values.

For this example that would be either 1-7 if it picked Red, 1 if it picked White and 1-3 if it picked Black.

At all times when breeding horses, the desired horse’s value must be matched or exceeded in at least 1 of it color channels (so in either Red, White or Black).

The horses you could expect as a result is as following:

Any horse that has a Red value between 1 and 7 if the chosen color was Red.
Any horse that has a White value of 1 if the chosen color is White.
Any horse that has a Black value between 1 and 3 if the chosen color is Black.

Remember that it picks only from 1 color and as you can see, that leaves you open for a lot of potential horses. The dominant color of the parents, does not have to be the dominant color of the foal, as long as there is a color that matches in 1 of the 3 colors.

This is the reason that purebred horses are highly sought after. Let us take the white purebred horse. At tier 4, they have a color value or 0/4/0, Tier 5 it would be 0/5/0, Tier 7 0/7/0 and tier 8 0/8/0. As you can see, it is the amount of the tier the horse is.

The benefit of these purebred horses are the 0’s in their color values. What this does is skip that color and only picks the color that has a value higher then 1. This increases the chances of getting the next purebred horse. Say you go for Tier 7, then having 2 white tier 5 purebred horses will give you a better chance on getting the Tier 7 white purebred horse. Again i’d like to stress that you still can expect a horse with 1 in white and be dominant in another color (T5-H for example).

Hope this helps, and good luck in your horse breeding efforts!

2 Comments

diabormagics says:

29th Jul 2023 at 7:34 PM

Looking for a full overview of where I can breed and I’m pretty sure the location list of where you can breed is outdated. Every guide I check only has these locations up to Duvencrune, but many areas aren’t covered. I think I have bred in Grána before, for example. Maybe O’draxxia, Eilton and other places are possible, too.
At least I did not know about Trent so that’s nice, thanks. Wonder mostly if there’s any other place in the new regions that is not a big/main city accomodates breeding.

Log in to Reply
- diabormagics says:
  
  1st Aug 2023 at 8:36 PM
  
  I checked all stables myself except for the ones in Land of Morning Light because I have not really touched that content yet. The up to date list up to that point for where horses can be registered for breeding is: Velia, Heidel, Port Epheria, Calpheon City, Keplan, Trent, Altinova, Valencia City, Shakatu, Sand Grain Bazaar, Grána, Duvencrune, O’draxxia, Balacs Altar, Awina’s Tail, Wind Nol’s Perch, Eilton, Pilgrim’s End, Sherekhan Iron Mine and Bronte’s Bolt.
  
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Global Labs

Developer Talks

Horse Breeding Guide

Introduction

Before you start Horse Breeding

How to Start Horse Breeding

Horse Exchange

Horse Breeding Stable Keepers