Horses Reworked V0.9.4

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)

there’s already a bunch of mods that overhaul horses. one makes horses bigger, and one makes horses more OP, and there’s a bunch of gorgeous texture replacers (without which I never would’ve figured any of this out), but none of them were quite what I was looking for. realistic cowboy horses is great, but it doesn’t cover all the horses in-game, and there’s still the issue of sizing and ahistorical breeds to deal with. i’m a) an inveterate Horse Girl and b) a huge nerd, and what else is the internet for if not being unnecessarily pedantic about things that Literally No One Else Cares About?

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:

(note: this mod is very time-consuming and thus incomplete, but I wanted to at least get something out now (especially if there’s going to be feedback to incorporate). therefore please consider it to still be in alpha, and expect some inconsistencies and missing features to start out with. thank you for your patience!)

➜ 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 Akhal-Teke Turkoman. by all accounts they existed in the 19th century USA as status/racing horses, but I don’t think a small gang actively on the run from literally everyone would be able to discreetly acquire not just one but two of them. i mean, look what happened in horse flesh for dinner.

➜ 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.

Requirements
➜ requires Lenny’s Mod Loader no matter what.
➜ 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.

Installation

unzip the mod archive into your main Red Dead Redemption 2 folder, merging or replacing when asked. boom. done.

known issues
➜ horses are edited alphabetically by filename, so currently only the standardbred through the hungarian halfbred have been edited. I’m working on it!

➜ 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.

Credits:

Persephone

this mod absolutely would not exist without BlackNinja91, who, when I asked what part of the ymt files I should edit to change a model, was cool enough to send me an entire rundown with example files and everything. go check out their series of any-horse-any-coat mods, they’re really rad.

everything else is just vanilla R* assets with their values moved around.