About this mod
An in-progress rework of every horse in the game, meant to bring them more in line with the historical reality of the American West. (Current progress: 9/19)
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
tl;dr I put way too much effort into rescaling, model-swapping, recoloring, and in a couple of instances completely replacing every rideable horse in the game. A brief overview of planned and implemented changes follows:
➜ anachronistic or nonexistent horse breeds such as the Hungarian Halfbred and Dutch warmblood have been removed and new breeds added or swapped to replace them.
I'm not sure what to do about the
➜ every horse has been (will be) resized. changes range from very minor (the Arabian's scale was increased by a whopping 0.001) to extremely noticeable (the mule went from scale 0.85000 to scale 1.00000). certain horses have also had their models tweaked to better reflect their historical appearances.
➜ there are dozens of absolutely gorgeous coats in the game, all of which are real horse colors (except for the Count, more on that later). however, many of them are extremely rare and unlikely to be seen as a random NPC's horse, so most of them have been replaced with more common colors. If there's a coat that you're deeply attached to, just delete its file from lml\horses reworked\stream.
➜ horses labeled "liver chestnut," "flaxen chestnut," etc. are now actually the appropriate chestnut variants, and chestnut horses not specifically noted as red chestnut have had the redness in their coats reduced.
➜ The game's incorrect white/grey/albino terminology has been fixed, and the Count is no longer genetically impossible. The full explanation for this can be found in the extra fyi section, but the tl;dr is that in Arabian horses specifically, the combination of blue eyes, pink skin, and white coat does not exist as it is attached to a gene that causes foals to die within a few days of birth.
A more thorough explanation of what I did and why can be found at the bottom of this page.
➜ for text/UI changes to appear, Red Dead Redemption 2 String Translator is required. no harm will come from not using it, the model and texture replacements will still work, but there'll be text/description mismatches.
➜ the String Translator in turn requires ScriptHook. again, nothing will crash if you don't have it, the text features just won't work.
unzip the mod archive into your main Red Dead Redemption 2 folder, merging or replacing when asked. boom. done.
➜ I would really like to edit the classes of some of the horses (i.e. the AQH should have the "race/work" class that the MFT does), but pedattributes.ymt editing is still wildly beyond me. if someone knows how to do this, please let me know!
➜ this mod is incompatible with any mod that changes the appearance of horses. it is, however, currently compatible with mods such as "brave horses" or "better horses", which only edit their behavior. (If I figure out the above point, this may change.)
➜ I haven't found any other issues, but my testing process is basically just "the color looks right and there's no head/neck seam, neat, move on to the next one" so if there's weirdness beyond that I haven't found it.
everything else is just vanilla R* assets with their values moved around.
if for some reason you're unhappy with these size changes, don't tell me. I already did more math than I ever wanted to for this. please don't make me do more.
color changes: a lot of the gorgeous coat colors in the game just aren't very likely unless you're specifically breeding for them. for unique horses this is fine--Arthur could easily buy or steal a purebred champagne MFT, no question--but for the general NPC population, you'd expect to see a lot of bay, grey, and chestnut. I think pretty much every horse I've known that wasn't specifically a colorful breed (ie, a paint, Appy, or vanner, etc.) has been... bay, grey, or chestnut. There was one palomino at our barn when I was young, but I haven't seen another one since.
common colors have been left as is, and every color that was changed was done to match a specific reference photograph of the actual breed.
breed replacements:
the HH isn't a real breed--according to the wiki, it's meant to be a Nonius, which didn't reach the US until the 40s--and the Dutch warmblood didn't exist at all until 1967. (I wanted to give R* the benefit of the doubt and accept that maybe it was just a warmblood-type horse from the Netherlands, but they explicitly reference it as "Descended from Gelderland and Groningen mares," which, yeah. that's a 20th century studbook.) therefore, a few horse breeds have been shuffled around, as follows:
- Hungarian Halfbred > Saddle Mule
mules got given short shrift in this game and it's not fair. I love mules. they're hardy, intelligent, and not nearly as mean as people make them out to be. (they're also pretty big - while their size depends on their parent horse, every mule I've ever met has been enormous.) >:( The HH is big and classed as a war horse, meaning it's not easily spooked, so it seemed like a good choice to replace with a mule.
space - Tennessee Walker > Quarter Horse (PLANNED)
Quarter horses are THEE cowboy horse. if you google "cowboy horse" 49% of the results are of a cowboy on a chestnut or bay quarter horse, 39% are on a palomino quarter horse, and the remaining 12% are quarter horses of other colors. As one of the main 'default npc' horses along with Morgans (yes, good) and saddlebreds (eh...fair enough), this slot really should belong to the AQH. (don't worry, the walking horse isn't gone; see the next bullet point.) s
I also recolored the default mahogany paint to a palomino because a) quarter horses typically don't come in paint colors, b) palomino is more common in the AQH than in many other breeds, and c) it's just. it's the fffufkcen Aesthetic. it's what I picture when I picture cowboy. cmon. space
(There is another mod that adds AQH, but the model they used--I think it's the criollo or MFT?--didn't quite suit my personal taste so this is my take. it's all a matter of preference, no insult intended!)
space - Dutch Warmblood > Tennessee Walker
As noted, however, the Tennessee walking horse was common enough in this setting that I wanted it to still be in the game. Since the DW is another breed that very much should not exist in the turn-of-the-century West, and since its model looks more like the long-necked, fine-headed Tennessee walking horse than their in-game model does anyway, I simply reassigned it. This has the added bonus of making Buell a walking horse--gaited horses were often favored by officers on both sides of the Civil War, making it the perfect breed for an old Union veteran.
space - other model changes:
- the Appaloosa and Nokota have the same model now, due to their shared ancestry as Native ponies. space
- the AQH takes over the Appy model, per the wiki's note about it being based on the quarter-horse-shaped modern Appaloosas rather than their historical appearance. space
- the Ardennais has been given the RDO Breton's model for even more chonk. sadly there is no model in the game that truly represents the Ardennais's irl levels of chonk.
grey/white/albino terminology and The Count: There's no such thing as an "albino" horse - what the game calls "white" (a pure or lightly-flecked white coat with grey or black hooves and dark skin) is actually just known as "grey", while what it calls "albino" is in actuality "white" or "dominant white" (a pure white coat with grey or cream hooves, pink skin, and often but not always blue eyes).
In addition, certain horses--Arabians, thoroughbreds, and paint horses in particular--are prone to what is known as Lethal White Syndrome. This hereditary disorder attaches to the gene that results in blue eyes and a white coat, causing organs to develop improperly or not at all. Thus, any foal born with this coloration will sadly die within days of being born. (and on top of this, true white Arabs with pink skin and brown eyes are still so rare that the only reference picture I could find of a) a purebred Arabian that was b) actually white and not grey, is not even a true dominant white, but a sabino with the white expression maxed out.) Therefore, the Count's eye color and description have been changed, and every horse described as "white" that is not actually white has had their description changed as well.
(If enough people ask, I can make a version that instead makes every white horse actually white, but it's both time consuming enough and genetically unusual enough that I'm not going to bother without a lot of interest :P)