First, some basics.

The basic horses are 14 prims, though there will apparently be special “Charmed” horses that may take up more prims. Speculations I have seen include unicorns and pegasi. The starter horses you can get at the store come in 16 different coat colours (four bays, four palominos, four appaloosas and four painted) and a range of eye colours (the forum seems to have identified 11 so far).

Like the bunnies, the horses are breedable animals. Which basically means you start with a few and risk ending up overrun after some months, so do keep in mind that they take up prims and they use scripts. Of course, if you don’t have land to keep them on there are already barns and markets available where you can keep and sell your horses.

Unlike the bunnies, the females and males don’t breed at quite the same rate. One stallion is enough to service three mares and stallions are also born more rarely, which hopefully is laying the ground for stud services as a nice part of the game. This setup is reflected in the packs of starter horses that are sold; the smallest contains three mares and one stallion, the middle size six mares and two stallions and the largest nine mares and three stallions.

With the packs you also get food for two weeks and salt licks. The salt licks are one of several different treats and additional products that the horses can be fed to make them breed a little faster. However, you can manage on just the breeder food; doing so will cost you 200 L per month for one horse (or a little less if you buy the larger food packs). There is also pet food at half the cost.

What do I think so far?

Well, as I said, I just have one day of playing with them so far, but its enough to give some initial observations. To start with, their looks. I have seen others say that they feel they are a bit “ugly”, but I don’t agree with that. Its true that they feel more cartoony than the bunnies, but I think its a look that works and makes them rather adorable, especially when they’re sleeping. Overall the sculpting and texturing looks pretty good to me, though I think there is room to add more depth to the texturing. That said, I believe the creators have pointed out that realism isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal for these horses; they’re not supposed to entirely mimic RL horses.

I have spotted some sculpty rezzing issues that occasionally leave sculpty “balloons” when the horses move from one position to another, though I am not sure this is avoidable. I also think that the amount of movement and the amount of sounds the horses produce may need some fine-tuning; with several of them together it feels a little hectic, though one could of course turn off sounds and/or movement on all but a few horses. I do think the sounds are a great addition which make them more of a presence on a sim than quiet breedable animals are.

Other than breeding the horses, you are also able to ride them once they are 7 days old, which is when they are considered mature. The horses will breed for 120 days after which they can be kept as pets, and the fact that they can be ridden does add to the appeal of just keeping a few as pets.

There were some major issues upon the initial release a few days ago, but the team behind the horses appears to have worked hard to correct them and compensate those who were affected, so that shows promise for the future. Other than that the menu system seems quite well setup and relatively intutive. The manual is so far rather basic, however, and will definitely need to be expanded upon. To some extent it seems to assume that users come to the horses already familiar with other breedable animals and that may be a little stumbling block in terms of attracting new users from outside of that community.