Taming a horse in BDO is a fun element of the game and absolutely necessary if you want to save your silver and breed higher tier horses. In this guide, I’ll give step-by-step instructions on how to tame horses, along with detailed maps for 20 different horse locations. (Update! Kama locations added!) (Warning! Taming is addictive… I ended up with 40 low-tier horses in my many stables at one point…) I’ve also summarized things and shown you exactly how to tame a horse in this video below.
Just need the maps? Jump to that section below!
Get Ready to Tame a Horse
To tame a wild horse, you need to be Beginner Level 5 in the “Training” skill line. You can quickly level up by just riding your donkey or horse around. You can get a donkey for a small price at any stable, or you get one through beginner quests in Velia.
Once you’re the right level, you need the following items:
- Sugar lumps – produce yourself (recommended) or buy from a marketplace for a much higher cost
- Capturing rope – purchase from any stable
To make sugar lumps, you need to buy raw sugar and mineral water. You can get them from the cook (David Finto) inside Velia’s Inn or a shop guy (Vangelas) standing by the door inside the Inn at Heidel. Other cooking NPCs around the world also sell these items. Combine 10 raw sugar with 1 mineral water to make 1 sugar lump (more if your processing level is high and/or with buffs).
Taming a horse takes practice, and can also just be difficult in some locations, so I recommend having 8 sugar lumps and 6 capturing rope in your inventory for your first time. As you get better, you’ll only need a single rope for most horses, but you’ll always need 4 lumps of sugar per horse. Most guides — and that stable manager in Glish — say to use 3 lumps of sugar, but we’ve found a higher success rate with 4 lumps.
Steps for Taming a Horse
Here’s the step-by-step sequence for taming:
- Set your rope and sugar lumps to your hot bar
- Carefully approach the horse, but don’t get too close or it will spook
- Aiming at the horse, press the number you set the rope to and a little red cross-hair will appear. Your character will begin swinging a lasso and will now move more slowly.
- Click the left mouse button when you are ready to throw the rope, then press the space bar when the meter hits the “good” area (just like the fishing mini game)
- Once your lasso is around the horse, you need to move yourself to the horse by pressing W when the horse’s front hooves are on the ground.
- If the horse rears up on it’s hind legs, you will need to press “Space” and then keep the meter in the “win” area by smashing the Space bar repeatedly until the timer runs out. Do not stop until the timer is at 0 and the mini-game is off the screen!
- Continue moving forward after the horse stops rearing
- Once you get close enough, you’ll see the circle menu appear above the horse’s head. Now you can interact with the horse. You could try to mount now, or you can feed sugar lumps.
- Feed the horse sugar lumps (we recommend 4) in succession, watching the cooldown. Give it a couple of seconds between each lump before you give the next.
- Carefully walk to the side of the horse and press R to mount. The horse will either accept you, or kick you in the face. 🙂 If you get kicked, you have to start all over.
No-Sugar Method: You may have heard you can tame horses without sugar. This is true, but different methods work for different people, and we have noticed that some methods mysteriously don’t work after a patch… who knows. What we can say for sure is that it is indeed possible to tame a horse by just standing close to the horse and waiting at least 45 seconds before trying to mount. Some “tells” work for some people, such as the horse raising a leg or lowering it’s head slowly. We’ve had mixed results. 🙂
Once your horse is tamed, it is yours — BUT you must go register it at a stable with an open spot. You can ride it back to a stable, or it will follow you on your other horse. Go slowly, as it will not run fast. You will give it a name and then discover it’s gender once it’s in the stable. That’s it! Now, let’s talk about where to find horses in the wild!
Wild Horse Locations
Eight different types of horses in Tier 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 (see exactly which ones here) can be found in the locations shown below. When a horse is captured by a player, a new horse will respawn 2 hours later. Some areas are more popular than others. For example, Marni Cave Path is just off the road between Keplan and Calpheon, so it’s very easy for people to grab a horse and take it to one of those stables. It’s best to try for horses in more “hidden” locations like Bandit’s Den Byway, Ancient Stone Chamber and south of Olvia on the mountain side. The three locations south of Glish are also good.
Circuits
As we’ve become addicted to finding and taming horses, Sofianna and I developed a couple of circuits that seems to work pretty well: 1) Heidel/Olvia/Velia (Balenos and North Serendia) 2) Southern Serendia 3) Calpheon surrounding area and 4) Mediah North. The first circuit is the easiest because there are more locations and they are closer together. The Calpheon circuit takes the longest, but it’s great for leveling the horse you are riding. Taming horses in Mediah is not very convenient, but I have added a circuit which is good if all the horses in other areas are taken.
Individual Locations
Here are the individual location maps, along with a screenshot of horses in the location for reference. This can help really pin-point where the horses are when you are running through dense shrubbery.
