BDO: The Horse Breeding Game I’ve Been Looking For
Those of you who have been following this blog for a bit know that I’m a fan of pet breeding games, specifically horse breeding. I enjoy the idea of creating family lines, instilling skills or stats in offspring, and messing with in-game genetics. In the past, I’ve played several browser based games, such as Horse World Online, and I’ve even dabbled in the old horse racing sims back on the PS1 such as Gallop Racer.
I wasn’t following Black Desert Online too closely until Weakness wrote about the fact that you could tame horses in the game. After that, it didn’t take much encouraging for me to try this sandbox out. What I didn’t know was there was also a training and breeding system in the game – as well as a whole character skill dedicated to training.
Horse Taming and Breeding in BDO
Now, it doesn’t seem like it’s a system that highly stresses genetics, though I have seen some pretty neat looking horses at higher tiers. But I do like how putting time into training your horses increases their ability to produce better tier horses. That means that it takes dedication and that horses have worth.
I also like that there’s a breeding market and a player horse market where capturing and training horses to sell is an actual thing. Interestingly, the game itself puts prices on the horses when you enter them into the market. This means that you can never just start undercutting or pulling down the worth of horses because the game sets the price – I’m assuming based on tier and level.
And thought taming can be frustrating at times when you can’t find a horse or you just can’t catch the one you’re after, I like that wild horse spawns are also controlled by the game. This means there are only so many wild horses to go around, which also increases their value. Of course, finding (or breeding) a female is even more rare – I’ve had 1 female out of the 5 horses I’ve tamed.
I decided to create a page that’s dedicated to the horses I breed and tame in my virtual stables… simply because I’m used to that kind of functionality in breeding games. It’s fun to trace family lines and remember the horses that came before.
Farming Frenzy
I soon came to grips with the fact that after you’ve leveled a horse to about level 5, carrots become a huge necessity. These restore your horse’s stamina and allow you to continue training. But at 500 silver each, they get to be quite pricey!
I finally completed the farming quest that I picked up last week that instructed me to breed a high quality wheat seed. Turning that in gave me a carrot seed in exchange. This quickly got me on the path of setting up a farm that would help cover the cost of carrots for my training runs.
I plunked down the 10 contribution points for a large plot and got to planting carrots and wheat (for fertilizer). Crops only grow while you’re online, but thanks to the auto-run tracks you can set, I can be training horses on my laptop while doing other things on my desktop. My garden is the final stop on one of the tracks, so I can check to see if it needs pruning or whatever when I’m back near Heildel.
The first time, I lucked out and bred a high quality carrot seed, which produced a nice bunch of high quality carrots – much, much more efficient than the normal carrots! I’m also making some extra income from selling high quality wheat and special wheat when I get it.
I’m really enjoying the farming aspects, and like how you can place it just about anywhere, even on top of someone else’s farm. When you step into the farm gate area, it phases in – a very neat idea – and you only see your own crops, even if your plot overlaps someone else’s. This works really well, and there’s never a lack of space due to this system.
Easter Event
I was interested to see that BDO is holding an Easter Egg event for free housing items. This is a much better first impression on me than ArcheAge – the AA Halloween event shortly after launch had 100% of the housing and cosmetic items locked in the cash shop. I was so bummed about that.
You do have to work for your loot in this event, but it wasn’t too bad. The one item I really wanted was the chandelier… mostly because housing is so, so dark inside. So any extra light I can get for free is a boon. I know there are candles you can get somewhere, but I haven’t found them yet.
To get the chandelier, you have to collect 40 raindrop eggs. The guide says you can pick them up from the ground or catch them while fishing. So, I found an egg spawn that was uncontested and next to water, and just camped it while fishing. I never did catch a raindrop egg while fishing for some reason (did catch a few rainbow eggs), so all of the eggs I collected were from that spawn spot. It’s on a 10 min timer, and can drop between 1 and 3 eggs each time, so it took a while. In the meantime, I leveled fishing nicely, and made a small profit off of what I reeled in.
After putting up my new chandelier, I decided the house I had in Heildel was was too small for what I needed. I did some research on forums to find bigger houses, and eventually relocated to a new residence. I forgot to take pictures of it, but it’s a nice house with an upper and lower level and a fireplace for a little extra light.
Continuing the Story
A Black Spirit spoiler here – you’ve been warned!
I also started cleaning up all the remaining quests I had in Heidel. This included heading to a Wizard’s tower where something pretty freaky happened with my Buddy, the black spirit.
I’m getting more and more curious about who my character was before… and the pact I’ve made with the black spirit that has taken my memories from me. Buddy is a bit disturbing as he changes through the game, but he does have my interest.
BDO doesn’t have the sprawling epic storyline of a game like FFXIV, it does have a story to tell on a more personal level. Balancing that is the huge amount of smaller slice-of-life stories and massive world building the game does as you gather knowledge of places and the people who live there.
None of these are super deep, and I doubt they are meant to be, but I appreciate the work that went into fleshing out the details of the BDO world. I also appreciate that they are optional and well journaled. So if you just want to skip on by all of it, you have that option. If you want to delve deeper and read all the knowledge pop-ups, you can do that, too. You can go even deeper and play the amity mini-game with NPCs to work up your relationship with them if you so enjoy it.
I love that you can do what you want to do in this game, and it’s all totally valid in making progress of some sort.