I thought I’d used up all of my luck on awakening my Dream Horse on the first try. Seems maybe not. Once I earned all the skills that I really wanted while leveling up my unicorn, I turned to finishing up leveling my line-bred T8 female.

She was just two skills short of a Courser, with 16 skills at level 27. I had about 6 skill change coupons left over, and I knew it was going to be a stretch at this point to try for Courser – just from my experiences with my first Courser.

But what do you know… 6 coupons turned out to be just enough! I now have my second T8 Courser and she’s on the long track towards Dream Horse!

This time around, I really, really doubt it will be as easy as the first. I’m slowly getting the things I need for my first attempt through quests, gathering and Imperial Horse Trade. Since I already have one Dream Horse, I’m not in a huge rush to get a second. It would just be a very nice to have.

The other streak of luck this weekend… I bred Kizmit and her daughter turned out to be my second bred T8 female (pictured above). Then, in exchanging a T6 and T7 after that, I earned my first T8 male!

Anyhow… this isn’t about my luck at breeding. This is about what you have to do when you get a keeper horse – training the horse skills themselves – such as Sprint and Instant Acceleration.

Tips on Training Horse Skills in BDO

Your horse has a chance to learn a skill every time they level up. Some come pre-learned 100% but the important ones, you have to train.

You can see skills by pressing “P” on the keyboard while mounted.

To level skills, you basically just have to use them over and over until they get to 100%. So, to level Sprint, for example, you must have a saddle equipped (and it must not be broken), and you press W when riding to Sprint.

At a low level, the skills have a chance to fail. When this happens, you have to stop everything and play this mini-game where you press W and S to regain control over your horse. If you fail, you’ll get thrown from the horse.

This is a real pain in the tail, and quite time-consuming. So, I did some searching to find some better ways to go about this and found these things…

So the most important takeaway from this video is that you can train a horse against a wall. As long as you are using the skill, you don’t have to be running all around to get this done.

But the bad advice in this video is the keep jumping, especially with the Streak Jump skill enabled (you can go into your skill area and click the lock icon to disable any ability you want). Do not follow the advice about constantly jumping with Streak Jump! You will eat through your horse’s stamina so fast (faster than a carrot cooldown) that you’ll be paying out the nose to restore their stamina every few minutes.

The second video I found has better advice on jumping, especially for Instant Acceleration.

In fact, this would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for all the running around. So here, I combine tips from these two videos!

1- Find a corner inside of a building to train your horse

Find a corner in a building in a safe location (any city/town/settlement), away from other people so you don’t annoy them. Then shove your poor horse’s head in it for a few hours to train. You can expect it to take that long, even when using this method.

2- Stock up on Oasis Carrots

This was all I needed to regen my horse’s stamina during training. You can pick these up for 1 silver each from the same vendor that sells the Oasis Gear – Ellie – who is usually near the stables in big cities. Hugely cheap!

Oasis carrots have been removed as of November 2021.

3- Use the Jump Technique

Check out that second video up there on how to use the jump technique to interrupt the failed skill horse game. If you jump at the right time, you’ll bypass the fail game all together and will save a huge amount of time and sanity. Especially if you need to train Sprint and two forms of Instant Acceleration!

If your horse has Streak Jump, lock it down to turn it off so that you won’t be eating through stamina faster than your carrots can restore.

As you use the skill, even when it fails, you can level it. As you level the skill, it gets to a point where you hardly ever fail up in the higher 90s. But still be ready to jump just in case.

Fail Game Tips

I also learned that if you do end up having to mess around with the fail game, being as hands off as possible is the best way to deal with it. Tap only lightly up or down. In fact, there were some games I removed my hands from the keyboard and won by doing nothing.

I know the jump method works for Sprint and the Instant Accelerations, but for other skills, like Drift, you may have to deal with the fail game. Thankfully, most of those skills I’m not too worried about just yet!