Mounts

Middle-Earth is a vast realm, and walking to get from place to place can take a very long time. Fortunately, the Lord of the Rings Minecraft Mod adds many different varieties of mounts to the game; in fact, you'll be able to find a mount in virtually any biome of Middle-Earth. Some of these are simply improved versions of vanilla mounts, such as the horse, while others are completely new, such as the warg.

Note that to ride some mounts, you will need an appropriate level of alignment with their faction.

NPC's using mounts[]

Many different NPC's are capable of riding mounts in the mod. The most common mount used by good factions is the horse, most famously used by Rohan, although other good factions such as Gondor also use horses. Dwarves, disliking horses, prefer boars, and hobbits, being too small for horses, prefer ponies. The Elves of Mirkwood, meanwhile, ride Elk. Evil factions such as the Easterlings may also use horses, but many Orcish factions prefer wargs, and some even ride spiders. In the southlands of Harad, more exotic animals, such as camels, used by Southrons, and the rhinos of the Half-trolls, may be ridden into battle.

Riding NPC AI[]

In a broad sense, there are two categories of NPC riders. The first, consisting mainly of Orcs riding spiders and Wargs, are very similar in AI to the Spider Jockey of Minecraft vanilla, where the aggressive animal controls how both mobs move. In this case, the mount and rider attack together.

The second type of NPC rider is the one where the mount is not aggressive in and of itself, which includes most horses, elk, and the like. Here, the rider's AI comes into play, and the attack AI is the same as that for a non mounted NPC, but the rider can see 50% further than normal, and can travel much faster due to the high speed of the mount.

If an NPC dies while mounted, the mount can't be interacted with by the player, and will eventually despawn.

Taming[]

Most mounts are tamed in a similar process; the player jumps on with an empty hand, and will be thrown straight back off again. Repeating this process a few times will eventually convince the mount that being ridden isn't so bad after all, and it will become tame. Feeding the desired mount in advance will speed up the process. Pre-tamed horses can be found in a few generated structures.

Swimming[]

Before Update 35.3, mounts could swim across bodies of water with their rider on the back. Now ridden mounts sink and both, mount and rider take damage after a while. They can only cross shallow or narrow water when mounted. Otherwise they have to be dismounted, and then pushed or pulled across on a lead.

Breeding[]

As of Update 35.3, foal stats are now a random value between the parents' stats with a chance to be slightly better or worse. So it's possible to breed a herd of your own excellent mounts. For more details, please check the page about breeding.

Trivia[]

The anglo-saxon rad-rune ᚱ (= letter R) means "ride". Tolkien used those ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ for some texts in the initial drafts of "The Lord of the Rings", later on, he replaced them by cirth runes.