BREEDING YOUR HORSES

Awesome! But there's a few things you have to consider before you even think about pairing that stud with your mare. Here's a few guidelines to follow:

• Horses shouldn't be retired to breeding until they're at least 4 years of age
• Geldings cannot be bred
• To maintain a realistic atmosphere, racehorses are not allowed to be artificially inseminated or have embyro transfers. All foals must be the result of live coverings, much like in the RL horse racing industry
• Twins must be purchased from the shop, they are an extremely rare occurrence
• Remember to keep a record of any and all breedings whether on your stable page or within the Breeding Plans board
• You may also 'back-breed' your horses, which is breeding a stallion and mare to get a breeding pair. This does not apply to horses who have not been retired for at least a year. So a stud retired in Y17 cannot back-breed to get a Y15 foal in Y17. However, if it's Y19 you could back-breed to get a 2 year old juvenile.

Here's a scenario: I want to breed the stallion, Flashy Wings to my mare, Silverianna.

Now why did I choose that particular stallion for my mare? When choosing a stallion to breed to your mare, or vice versa, you're going to want to make sure of the following:

What do I mean by that? Flashy Wings is a Dual surfaced horse, meaning that he favored both the turf and dirt surfaces. He'd match well with just about any mare when it comes to surface preferences. Silverianna was a dirt horse during her career therefore she's a good match for a horse like Flashy Wings, or a dirt horse.

NOTE: Dual horses should only be bred with other dual horses, or turf/dirt horses. Same goes for dirt horses with other dirt horses and turf horses with other turf horses. You can breed a turf horse with a dirt horse, but you must first purchase a CUSTOM FOAL KIT from the shop.

Not every horse can run at any distance and actually be good at it. You've got your sprinters (5-7f), milers (7-9f) and routers (9-12f).

Many horses get furlong extensions over their career via their owners so some stallions can be surprisingly flexible when it comes to distances.

In my scenario, Flashy Wings ran over a distance of 9-12 furlongs whilst Silverianna ran over a distance of 8-11 furlongs. Both of them are around the same range, give or take.

NOTE: You can breed say, sprinters with milers, etc. You'll normally get a foal that will tend to be more flexible with their distance preferences, but they tend to also be something of a wild card, unpredictable at best.

Still with me? Good!

This depends on the owner's preference, honestly. Some people like to breed incredibly high quality stallions with original broodmares who have no race record whatsoever. This ensures fresh lines and more often than not their foals end up being quite successful. Or maybe you breed two originals together, two horses with no race record. This honestly is completely up to the player.

No explicit content needed! There's a couple of extra steps that you need to take into consideration when making your foal. And that is the following:

This is the easy part! Simply flip a coin! I know, I know usually when it comes down to genetics it isn't as simple as a 50/50 probability. But we're going to keep this simple. Let's say heads is for colts, and tails is for fillies. For my Flashy Wings x Silverianna foal, I got tails so we're going to get a baby girl!

We are a realistic horse racing website, and we try to adhere to that as much as possible. So when it comes down to figuring out the color of our foal we use a Coat Color Calculator

Let's figure out what this filly is going to look like, I'll walk you through the process.

1. For the SIRE category, I selected bay from the drop down menu because Flashy Wings is a bay. He doesn't have any unique patterns so we're going to leave it as a solid.
2. For the DAM category, I selected bay from the drop down menu because Silverianna has a base color of grey. She is also doesn't have any unique patterns so we're going to leave her as a solid as well. Lastly, since she is a grey, I'm going to check off that little box for grey
   
3. Click continue
4. You're going to see two boxes for things like red factor, agouti, etc. You can ignore that for now unless you really want to get serious about genetics. Otherwise, click calculate
5. Again don't worry about those genetic calculations at the top in the two boxes. You're going to be focusing on that blue box that says Offspring Color Probability. For my Flashy Wings x Silverianna foal, I've received the following probabilities: Grey (Bay) 43.95%, Bay 43.95%, Chestnut 3.13%, Gray (Chestnut) 3.13%, Gray (Black) 2.93% or Black 2.93% That's a bunch of different possibilities!
6. You could just go with one of the colors that have the higher probabilities, but that's no fun!
7. OPTIONAL, BUT FUN! If you want to get creative like me just use an adjustable spinner. You can rename the colors to the possible coats and adjust the pieces of the pie by moving the blue arrows around to get a percentage similar to the ones the calculator gave you. Then just hit spin and wallah

ACCEPTABLE THOROUGHBRED COAT COLORS:
Black, Chestnut, Bay, Palomino, Cremello, Buckskin, Perlino, Smokey Black, Dominant White, and the patterns (albeit extremely rare), tobiano and sabino. For more information check out The Colorful Thoroughbred, True Roan Thoroughbreds, Cream Dilution Thoroughbreds, The Grey Modifier and the pinto pattern in TB's here.

**note that the color GREY always has a base coat color of black, chestnut or bay

This one doesn't require you to do anything special. It's normally a height somewhere between the sire and dam's. Flashy Wings is 15.3hh while Silverianna is 16.2hh, the sire is a bit on the small side but that's okay! My filly is going to actually be 15hh and is actually going to be just a tad smaller than her sire.

** If you have purchased twins for a pair of horses, do note that the resulting foals should be considerably taller than normal Thoroughbreds. Consider 14.3h to 15.3h 

You write your foal's personalities, but honestly a foal's personality is normally a reflection of one or both of their parents. It's not unusual for them to actually show characteristics of their grandsires and granddams, or even beyond that. This filly's sire is rather dignified and her dam is feisty, but doesn't like men very much. Not to mention that the filly's damsire, Night Stalker wasn't all that pleasant to work with. I plan to combine characteristics of all of these horses when I write my foal's personality.

This is the super fun part! You can get really creative with names. Some people like to combine attributes from the sire and dam when it comes to naming foals, or maybe the actual color of the foal. Or maybe they want to name the foal something else entirely.

A Y17 filly by Flashy Wings out of Silverianna named Flash The Crowd