Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-27130828-20161217175227

Currently in the mod, a player can travel at incredible speeds, jump incredible heights, and run for hours without ever needing to eat because of horses. While all of the stated are good things, there should be more drawbacks to riding horses. I have traveled huge distances on horses without ever getting off and only eating if I take damage. I have ridden straight through hostile territory on a very fast horse without being harmed. With that being said I believe that giving horses a hunger will solve a lot.

What it will solve

1.) Horses should have to eat to continue to run. Horses can run straight through barren landscape no problem. This makes traveling through places like the Near Harad desert a joke. Horses should have another bar over their hearts that tell you how much hunger they have. The mechanics would work just like human mechanics, where the horse slows down at 3 bars of hunger and begins to die when the hunger bar runs out. This would make players have to feed their horses or stop and let them graze.

2.) Horses should have to eat to heal. Right now horses heal automatically no matter how long they've been running. Feeding them different foods causes them to heal instantly. With hunger, their saturation has to be full to heal. I do think that some foods should still heal instantly, sort of like golden apples or health potions for humans. These foods could be sugar and other harder to get items.

How to Implement it

A player can feed the horse grain, apples, hay bales, or other foods to regain hunger. Another option that can be coded in is the horse could eat grass. The horse could eat grass similar to how a sheep eats grass, eat tall grass, or both. I don't know how hard it would be to code horses eating tall grass. The amount of food bars given back by these methods can be determined by Mevans.

By implementing this horses will become much less overpowered. No longer will the player be able to plow through cold snowy biomes, desert, or hostile areas. The players will either need to bring food, find a safe place to let the horse graze, or follow a river in the desert to find grass. I think that by adding this, it will make the mod more realistic and more fun to play. 