Horse Coats & Color Theory (Advanced)
All horses have 3 different color values which affect their appearance: Red, White, and Black.
There is a theory that using “purebred” horses when breeding will give you higher chances of a higher-tiered foal. It is still unconfirmed, but with lots of testing, many players including myself do believe this theory to be correct. There was also a small reference to it on the old Korean wiki which was written by the developers themselves.
Purebred Horses:
For a full list of all Horse Tiers with their Color Values and chances of learning skills, I recommend using the Horse Skill Learning Percentags Google Sheet. You can also find more information and resources in the Horse Community Discord.
BDO Player “Bouwplan” wrote a very detailed explanation of Color Theory on the old forums in July 2016. Unfortunately, you can no longer access the source, but the explanation is written below:
Seems like people are still confused about the color theory, so i will explain it to the best of my abilities.
For this example i used my chart over athttps://imgur.com/a/DaeiQ.
I will point out horses from my chart in the following manner: T stands for Tier, followed by the tier number and the letter associated to the horse. So for example the green horse (“the Hulk”) in Tier 4 would be, T4-E.
Each horse has 3 different colors with a value assigned to them. The lower the tier, the lower the values.
In this topic the word “purebred” will be mentioned quite a few times and it simply means that it only has a value greater then 1 in only 1 of the color values.
All following horses are considered purebred horses: T1-A, T4-B, T4-I, T5-J, T5-K, T5- L, T6-A, T7-A, T7-B, T7-C, T8-C, T8-E
As you can see in the list, each horse has a value assigned to it and for the first example i am going to take 2 horses from the 5th Tier, T5-C and T5-D.
T5-C has aRedvalue of4,Whitevalue of1and aBlackvalue of1.
T5-D has aRedvalue of3,Whitevalue of0and aBlackvalue of2.
These values are something we need to add up, in order to give us insight of the possible foal it can produce (this also after having leveled up your horses to the appropriate levels).
This would give us the following: a combinedRedvalue of7, a combinedWhitevalue of1and a combinedBlackvalue of3.
To make it a bit easier to see, i will shorten it down to7/1/3
During the roll for the foal, it will choose a color channel, this can be either Red, White or Black, before it picks a number between 1 and the maximum number of the combined values.
For this example that would be either1-7if it picked Red,1if it picked White and1-3if it picked Black.
At all times when breeding horses, the desired horse’s value must be matched or exceeded in at least 1 of it color channels (so in eitherRed,WhiteorBlack).
The horses you could expect as a result is as following:
- Any horse that has a Red value between 1 and 7 if the chosen color was Red.
- Any horse that has a White value of 1 if the chosen color is White.
- Any horse that has a Blackvalue between1and3if the chosen color isBlack.
Remember that it picks only from 1 color and as you can see, that leaves you open for a lot of potential horses. The dominant color of the parents, does not have to be the dominant color of the foal, as long as there is a color that matches in 1 of the 3 colors.
This is the reason that purebred horses are highly sought after. Let us take the white purebred horse. At tier 4, they have a color value or0/4/0, Tier 5 it would be0/5/0, Tier 70/7/0and tier 80/8/0. As you can see, it is the amount of the tier the horse is.
The benefit of these purebred horses are the 0’s in their color values. What this does is skip that color and only picks the color that has a value higher then 1. This increases the chances of getting the next purebred horse. Say you go for Tier 7, then having 2 white tier 5 purebred horses will give you a better chance on getting the Tier 7 white purebred horse. Again i’d like to stress that you still can expect a horse with 1 in white and be dominant in another color (T5-H for example).
Hope this helps, and good luck in your horse breeding efforts!
