a Guide to Breeding Horses

This week is a great week! On May 11, 2010 the new, limited-time ”Best-of” Mystery Box came out. And what, you may ask, has me so excited about it? Well, it has the White Stallion, which hasn’t been seen since Valentines Day. I didn’t have one, so I blew more FV than I should have on mystery boxes until I got him. What a handsome guy too!

So for those of you that don’t know, the white stallion makes it possible for you to create foals for your friends. It’s like the wandering stallion, but permanent. What’s especially exciting is that Zynga has announced that the nursery building will eventually have the ability to make your calves and foals “grow up”. As of this writing though, it’s a feature that’s coming soon.

So how does horse breeding work? The quick answer is to fill your stable with horses and either a wandering or white stallion. When you harvest the whole stable, you have a chance to get either a baby, free xp for you and your friends, or a helper such as farmhands. Most of the time, you just get money.

Ok, but how do you REALLY breed horses? That’s what this article is really about. If you have friends that seem to crank out a couple rare foals every day – this is how they do it. I’ve heard it called “Stable Rotation” so that’s what we’ll call it too.

What you need:

1) A Stable. If you still need to build it, you can find a gifter at this link.

2) Common horses. These are the standard brown and greys. You’ll need a lot of them.. one for each attempt. They need to be OUTSIDE of your stable. You will use these to set your stable from 0% to ready status.

3) At least one special horse or pony. Special horses include the clydesdale, percheron, pinto, (brown) pony, pink haired pony, and purple hair pony.

4) A Stallion. Either a white or wandering. White is better. If you don’t have one, you’ll constantly be having to look through your friend’s walls for wandering ones. Breeding programs that involve white stallions also give you access to the white foal. You can’t get that by using a wandering stallion.

An overview of what to expect- What this trick does is take an empty stable and set it to 100%. From there, you fill it with the special horses that you want to make foals from.

Step 1: Make sure your stable is empty and the common horses are outside waiting. You need the commons to be at least 34% ready before you can start. 100% is too much. If they’re 100%, harvest them and wait til 34%.

Step 2: Put a common horse (one that’s at 34% or higher) into the stable. The stable will become “ready”.

Step 3: Put all your special horses into the stable, regardless of readiness. I’d recommend taking the common horse out so you don’t end up with common foals.

Step 4: Put your White Stallion in, or go find a Wandering Stallion from the newsfeed. You can sometimes talk your friends into telling you when they post one if you promise them a foal. There’s another way two, which i’ll mention below.

Step 5: Choose “Collect Horsehair” on the stable. Wait until you get a message.. you will always get a message but sometimes it takes a while. Most of the time you will just get a token amount of money, but if you’re lucky you’ll get xp, farmhands or a foal.

Step 6: Completely empty the stable and start again at Step 2. Do this for as long as you have the patience. (and spare commons)

If you want to save your foals to give to specific people, you can do that. Each link is good for 5 foals, but a person can only take 1 each. To get the link for your foal, you need to set the privacy settings on your wall post to “Just me”, and then post it. This way, only you can see the actual post – it’s hidden from everyone else.

From there, go to your own wall, and right-click on the words “Adopt the (whatever) foal” A context menu will pop up, which looks different depending on your browser. For Chrome, select “Copy link address”. For Firefox, select “Copy Link location”, and for Internet Explorer, it’s “Copy Shortcut”.

From there, you can private-message your friends and paste that URL that you just copied into the message. Foal links expire after 8 hours – so don’t hold onto it for too long.