The Buy Mode catalog now contains many useful items to help you care for your horse. If you want to, you can set up a whole horse ranch on your lot! See the New Objects chapter for full details on all the objects, but let’s take a moment to see how some of these items are used in the day-to-day care of your horse.
If you just have one horse that you don’t plan to race, jump, or breed, you can care for him just fine with a water trough and a little grass. But if you intend to get serious about raising and training horses, you’ll probably want a real horse ranch. Fortunately, the wide open yards of Appaloosa Plains lend themselves to setting up a horse-friendly lot.
Hitching Posts
Hitching posts come in several styles, but they all provide a place to feed and water your horse. They also let you hitch your horse, so it can’t wander off.
Box Stalls
The Old Western Box Stall, the Washington Box Stall, and the Self Cleaning Box Stall Lifetime Reward object.
The best way to care for your horse is to place a box stall on your lot. Box stalls provide clean water, plentiful hay, and a safe place to sleep. If you direct your horse to “do its business” in the box stall, you’ll keep your lot cleaner. Probably most important, box stalls give your horses a private place to breed. If you intend to breed horses, you must have a box stall object on your lot. The Try for Baby interaction won’t even be available otherwise.
Training Devices
Your Sims can purchase items to use while training their horses. The Dashing Training Posts object allows your mounted Sim to train the horse for racing. Horses can also be directed to train for racing by themselves. The Buy Mode catalog also offers several items that assist with training for jumping. The easiest jump is the Cavaletti Jump Trainer. Place this on your lot (or use the one at the horse park) to teach your horse the rudiments of jumping before moving on to more challenging jumps.
See the Horse Competitions section, following, for more details about racing and show jumping.
Praising and Scolding
Although horses start out with a few traits when they are created, bought, adopted, or tamed, its up to their Sims to reinforce the good traits, and discourage the negative traits. Don’t just train your horse in specific skills. Take time to praise or scold your horse for her behavior. You have a lot of latitude to direct your pet’s trait reinforcement, so it’s really up to your Sim to make the most out of your pet.
The New Simology chapter has more information about trait reinforcement.
Horse Ball
The brightly striped Horse Ball object is a fun toy for your horse. Horses love to play with the Horse Ball, and doing so quickly refills their Exercise need.
Salt Lick
Horses need salt in their diet, so they love the salt lick. Licking the salt lick gives horses the positive Salty Snack moodlet. The Celestial Salt Lick reward object bestows the even more positive Tastes Like Paradise moodlet.
The regular salt lick stands alongside the sparklier Celestial Salt Lick reward object.
Building a Training Course
Once your horses have a modicum of Jumping and Racing skill, you may wish to set up a serious training course in your yard, rather than going the the horse park all the time. To set up a jump course, peruse the jumps in the Buy Mode catalog. You’ve probably practiced with them all at the horse park, but for a backyard course, you need to just pick a few favorites, unless you have a really big lot. The jumps vary in difficulty; choose a variety so that you can train horses at different levels.
Jump obstacles have a direction that they face. They need to be pretty far apart unless you can chain the pieces together in a single direction. This image shows the distance needed separately.
But as you can see, as long as the horse will be galloping in the right direction, you can place the jumps closer than you’d think.
Once you have set up a good course, you can mount your horse and choose the Run Jumping Course interaction. Now you can train Jumping skill until fatigue sets in, instead of making individual jumps.