Horsing Around – Horse Riding Rework

Horses in Minecraft finally ride like real animals. Horsing Around replaces vanilla horse riding: your horse walks, trots, canters and gallops, carries real momentum, tires out, and refuses to run you off a cliff. It’s still the vanilla horse, ridden with the keys you already know.

I’ve always loved the horses in Red Dead Redemption 2, and riding in Minecraft never felt anything like them. This mod is my go at changing that.

Gaits

Speed builds up and fades out through each gait instead of switching on and off, and a well-bred horse still outruns the rest.

Turning

The horse goes where you look: wide at a gallop, on the spot at a walk, and a hard cut if you look sharply to one side.

Stamina

Galloping drains a bar where the jump bar used to be. Run it out and the horse drops to a canter until it gets its wind back.

Jumping

Press jump and it jumps, with no bar to charge, keeping its speed through the air.

Footing

From a trot it steers round trees and rocks, slows for walls and climbs ledges up to two blocks high. It won’t take a drop that would hurt it or walk into lava. Fences you’ll have to jump.

Water and trees

Horses swim with their heads up and climb out on the far bank. Leaves slow you instead of stopping you dead. At speed you’ll trample small animals, but never players or your own pets.

The rider

Horse and rider lean into turns. The rider keeps their feet in the stirrups and hands on the reins, folds over jumps and draws a bow like an archer. The hoofbeats change with the gait.

Camera

Getting on switches to an over-the-shoulder view with a crosshair: arrows, swings and anything you throw go where it points. The camera pulls back as you speed up and leans in for a bow or spyglass. Press O to swap shoulders.

Controls

Which mounts

Horses, donkeys, mules, skeleton horses and zombie horses. Everything else you can ride stays vanilla. Making a horse mod? Add your horse to the entity type tag horsingaround:managed and it rides this way too.

Servers

Install it (and Fabric API, on Fabric) on the server and in each player’s game. Players without it can still join and ride as normal. On a server without it, your horse rides like vanilla and the mod tells you so.

Settings

Horses ride the same for everyone. You can change the camera, how much the view moves and how loud the horse is, and if motion bothers you, all of it turns down. Open the settings from Mod Menu (on NeoForge, the Mods screen) or with the “Open horse settings” key.

Other mods

Tested first against Fresh Animations (Entity Model Features + Entity Texture Features), and the rider follows the animated horse. If another mod also changes how horses ride or riders sit, Horsing Around handles its own horses and leaves the rest of that mod alone. Shoulder Surfing takes over the camera whenever it’s on.

With Icy’s Better Horses, pick whose riding horses use under Riding in the settings (on a server, the server picks). Pick Horsing Around’s and Icy’s breeds ride this way, with all of Icy’s features still working. Pick Icy’s and Horsing Around leaves horses alone.

Every mod it’s tested with

Automated test rides run alongside Sodium, Iris, Lithium, C2ME, FerriteCore, ImmediatelyFast, Entity Culling, More Culling, Not Enough Animations, Emotecraft, Better Combat, First-person Model, Shoulder Surfing Reloaded, Camera Overhaul, Freecam, Do a Barrel Roll, AppleSkin, Raised, Better Mount HUD, Jade, Xaero’s Minimap, Horse Expert, Horseman, Bareback Horse Riding, Mounts Stay Still and Icy’s Better Horses.

Something not getting along? Open an issue.

Requirements

• Fabric: Minecraft 1.20.1 to 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.14.25 or newer (or whatever your Fabric API needs) and Fabric API. Mod Menu is optional.
• NeoForge: Minecraft 1.21.1, 26.1.2, 26.2 or 26.3, with NeoForge for that version.

Buy me a coffee, get a hat

The mod is free and will stay that way. Buy me a coffee with your Minecraft username in the message and within a day or two you’ll get a cowboy hat in your horse settings, in any colour you like. Everyone on your server who has the mod sees it. It’s only cosmetic: your helmet is hidden under it but still protects you.

Privacy

At startup the mod downloads the supporter list (supporters.json in this repository) from GitHub to know who gets a hat. Nothing about you is sent. If it can’t connect, it uses the last list it saw.

License

LGPL-3.0-only, which adds its permissions to the GPL-3.0. Releases up to 0.5.2 are MIT.

How it’s made

The code is written by AI, but every decision is made by me, a person partway through a computer science degree. I decide what the mod does, how each part of it should feel, and when it’s good enough to release. This is not just a one shot prompt AI slop project, I am putting effort into making it as good as it can be, and AI is a great tool for doing exactly that.