Black Desert Online: Advanced Horse Breeding Guide and Resources

Posted on April 15, 2016 by Aywren

-Updated April 2017-

In this guide, I want to talk about some of the more advanced information I’ve learned over the past month in training and breeding horses in Black Desert Online. I’ve poured over spreadsheets from other breeders and I’ve kept my own on my Stables Page.

If all you want to do is just tame, train and breed, then you probably don’t need to delve into some of the advanced speculation I’ve come across. But if you want to know as much as you can about it, I’ve compiled information here from many different sources, especially the horse breeding thread on the official BDO forums.

Stables for Horses

Once you start breeding, you’re going to need space, and that means putting contribution points into expanding stable slots. You can do this at specific cities that allow for stable expansions. These cities include:

Velia 5 stalls
Heidel 7 stalls
Calpheon 8 stalls
Trent 7 stalls
Glish 7 stalls (No breeding)
Altinova 7 stalls
Keplan 7 stalls

Other stables allow 3 non-expandable stall slots, but may not allow for breeding, exchanging or deleting horses.

Horse Skills

The type of skills your horse learns (along with level, tier, and gender) effect the overall worth of your horse on the market.

Earning skills each level, and which skills are earned, are all RNG.

However, certain skills are locked behind certain tiers and (very rarely) coat colors. For example, only T6 horses can learn Two Seater.

Advanced Breeding Calculations

There is some math behind the breeding algorithm.

I can’t tell you all that went into this math, but I do know that the Horse Breeding Calculator is based off these calculations, which revolve around leveling horses enough to reach specific thresholds. For details on this information, check out this Reddit post.

Here’s a quick overview of the logic as I understand it:

Basically, there is a breeding threshold reached at every 50 points (50, 100, 150, 200, 250, etc), which you earn by leveling your horses. It is the sum of both horses’ levels.
These thresholds increase the possibility of breeding better horses or more female to male ratio.
So, if I level a T1 horse to 10 and a T1 horse to 10, I get a breeding grade of 270 (based on the calculator).
300 is the next threshold. So, in order to reach the next threshold, I need 30 more points (which the calculator determines is 7 more levels).
These levels can be split between the two horses, or can be trained all on one horse. All that matters is the sum of the points.
That also means that leveling both horses to 15, for example, is a waste of time, since all you need is one horse to 15 and the other to 12 to reach the 300 threshold.
So in the long run, it’s a time saver to determine what are the lowest possible levels you need to reach the threshold you’re breeding for.

So why wouldn’t you just want to level everything to 30 and be done with it? Because this is such a time consuming task, it’s better to use the calculator to shoot for certain goals.

For example, a pretty solid way to breed lower tier females is to breed a level 10 T1 horse to a level 10 T2 or T3 horse. Here, you can see that you have a pretty good chance of getting a female rather than a male.

But if you level up to the next threshold, this will change. You now have the chance to get a T4 male, but your chances at getting a female drop significantly.

So plan ahead on what you need – do you want to push to the next tier, or do you need to spread out the gene pool and breed females?

Horse Coats by Tier

Each tier has specific color coats that you will only find at that tier.

The folks on the BDO forums have passed around this chart that the breeding community seems to refer to as the ultimate guide to coat colors.

So, you will sometimes see breeders refer to horses by their tier number followed by the coat letter. Such as, “I just bred a 4C with a 4K and got a 4P.”

Each coat also has specific stats tied to that coat color. So there is such a thing as “better” horses per tier. Here’s a sample of that for some T4 horses:

Breeding for Coat Color

Can you breed for a specific coat color? Yes and no.

This gets pretty confusing. Based on information gathered by overseas players, it’s speculated that each horse coat color has three color attributes attached to it: Red, White, and Black. You can check out this chart to see more information.

So, for example, this horse has 1 Red, 1 White, and 1 Black.