Breed adorable foals as a hobby or as a lucrative business!
One of the biggest features of the new Horse Ranch expansion is Sims 4 horse breeding! Sims can make a very good living breeding and selling trained competition horses with impressive pedigrees. In fact, horse sales are such a big focus that all horses have a monetary value attached to them that increases based on skills, certain traits, and competition wins. Breeding your champion horses and selling their highly valuable offspring will make your Sims wealthy in no time!
We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about breeding top quality horses!
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Sims 4 Horse Breeding Guide
There’s a lot to think about when breeding horses, especially if you’re breeding for profit. You’ll need to take into account the dam and sire’s traits, skills, and competition history when pairing up horses for breeding in order to get more valuable foals. Read on to learn how to be a successful horse breeder!
Mating a Mare and a Stallion
In order to start Sims 4 horse breeding, you first need a mare and a stallion. Click on either your mare or stallion and under Friendly interactions, select Encourage To > Encourage to Breed With and select the other horse.
If the breeding is successful, you’ll see them touch their muzzles and hearts swirl around them. Don’t be discouraged if your horses don’t breed on the first try; just keep building your bond with both horses and give them more time to get to know each other. Horses are highly social animals and will autonomously interact with each other often.
After a successful Sims 4 horse breeding attempt, it will take several in-game hours before you’ll know if your mare is expecting a foal or not. If she is pregnant, you’ll get a notification about it.
Pregnant Mares
While your mare is pregnant, you won’t be able to ride her or train with her on jumps or barrels. She also won’t be eligible to enter any equestrian competitions. Make sure she’s comfortable and happy during her pregnancy by brushing her, interacting with her, keeping her feed bin full and her stall clean like you would normally do.
Mares are pregnant for about three in-game days. You’ll see her belly slowly expand over those three days as her foal grows. Sometime on day three, your mare will go into labour. Just like with Sim labours, this process can take a few hours. Your mare will be very uncomfortable while she’s in labour but your Sim can help soothe her. There is a new social interaction on your mare during labour called Soothe Horse in Labour.
When your mare gives birth, her foal will appear beside her and you’ll be prompted to give the new colt or filly a name! The foal will inherit one random trait from its dam and one from its sire. It will also possess a third base trait of its own. This is why taking your horses’ traits into account for Sims 4 horse breeding is important if you want a good chance of getting foals with a specific type of personality!
As for the foal’s appearance, its body shape and coat colouring appear to be 50/50. Our filly had her dam’s coat colouring and her sire’s body build. There was no mixing of coat colours or patterns.
Foal Care
Foals are adorably clumsy and unsteady on their hooves when they’re first born but they actually aren’t a lot of work to keep healthy and happy. They get a lot of care from their dam, who nurses and grooms them to keep them fed and clean but Sims can also bottle feed and brush their foals. Foals can be trained to eat hay by hand-feeding them prairie grass or calling them to eat from a patch of prairie grass or a feed bin.
However, this doesn’t mean you can neglect your foal! Foals need to learn how to interact with Sims and the earlier you start working on their Temperament skill with them, the better. A big part of Sims 4 horse breeding is making sure your foals grow into adult horses with the Well Mannered Foal trait. A foal only gains this reward trait when they age up if they have high Temperament skill. This trait is highly coveted for breeders because it gives the horse a boost in all skills.
Foals cannot be ridden or enter equestrian competitions. You’ll have to wait for them to grow up to start building the Agility, Jumping, and Endurance skills with them. You can see how many days away your foal is from aging up by hovering over their portrait in your Sim’s relationship panel.
Breedable Traits
If you’re going to be delving into Sims 4 horse breeding for profit, you’ll need a good understanding of how to breed certain traits into your foals to increase their value. The benefit of Sims 4 horse breeding is that there are certain traits a horse can only get by being bred and raised from a foal.
In addition to their three base traits they’ll get when they’re born (which is partially influenced by their dam and sire’s base traits), foals can be born with additional traits called breedable traits. Breedable traits are traits that can only be acquired through Sims 4 horse breeding. Check out our Horse Traits Guide for a full breakdown of all horse traits, but here’s a summary of breedable traits.
- Playful: Foals can sometimes be born with the Playful trait, which means they love to play with toys and Sims.
- Curious: Foals can sometimes be born with the Curious trait, which makes them more likely to investigate many different objects. They’ll also love using jumps and barrels when they grow up.
- Champion Genes: You’ll only breed foals with Champion Genes if their dam or sire has the Champion Horse trait. Gain the Champion Horse trait by winning 20 equestrian competitions in order to start breeding foals with Champion Genes. Both traits greatly increase the horse’s value and boost all skill gain.
- Well Mannered Foal: Foals are not born with this trait but they can age up with this trait if your Sim spent a lot of time building their Temperament skill as a foal. This trait boosts all skill gain.
Horse Value
Players who really want to get into Sims 4 horse breeding as a lucrative business will need to understand how to increase the value of their horses. The horse value system is quite detailed so this portion of our guide may undergo further changes as we learn more about it but here’s what we’ve gathered about horse value so far!
Horses start with a base value of $1,000. This base value increases based on certain factors. If you want to make the most of Sims 4 horse breeding, you’ll want to increase that base value as much as possible so you can sell the horses you breed at a higher profit. You accomplish this by being selective about the horses you choose to breed together.
Ideally, these are the factors you want to consider heavily with Sims 4 horse breeding:
- Pick a dam and a sire with traits that are favourable for competitions to increase your odds of getting a foal with those same traits. Having good base traits will help them build certain skills faster and do better in competitions.
- If possible, don’t breed horses that do not have the Champion Horse trait. You only want to be breeding the best of the best to get quality foals with the Champion Genes trait. These traits have a direct impact on a horse’s monetary value.
- The more competitions your horses have won, the more valuable they become (and by extension, the more valuable their foals will be). So don’t retire your horses after 20 competitions to get the Champion Horse trait. Continuing to win competitions seems to further drive up the value of the horse.
- You can sell foals but we don’t recommend doing this. You’ll fetch a higher price if you raise your foal to an adult and get some competition wins on their record, first.
- In short, highly skilled horses with lots of competition wins and good traits will have more valuable foals!
Sims 4 horse breeding can really make your Sims obscenely wealthy. The most valuable premade horse in the game is Duke Gooseman, valued at $17,400 but we’ve seen some players’ horses valued for up to a whopping $45,000!
Loved our Sims 4 horse breeding guide? Want more info on daily horse care? Check out our Horse Care Guide!