Wagon and Driving Horse Idea/Concept

This is an Idea I had and wanted to share. I don’t know how easy it is to do, but I do think/feel like it should be doable. Maybe it could be a part of the future Horse Update if it is more complicated to make.

(Sorry this is so long xD )

So when wagons were first released when you bought a wagon whatever horses were hitched to the wagon when you pulled it out the first time, would always be the same horses hitched every time you pulled it out.

This had its pros and cons. A pro was that it felt very realistic that it would always be the same horses as the ones you bought the wagon with. However, the con was that you had no choice in the matter of what horses ended up pulling your wagon and you were stuck with them unless you decided to try again and buy a new wagon or bought a wagon from someone else where you knew what horses were hitched to the wagon.

Now I’m not sure when or why this changed, I’m guessing it was by choice/request, but now every time you pull out a wagon it is random what horses are hitched to it.

The pros and cons to this are that, while you are not stuck with the same horses every time, you still don’t have a lot of choice in which horses are used and it also feels quite unrealistic.

Why does it feel unrealistic? Well, what exactly is the story reason behind it? Does everyone with a wagon have a small fleet of draft horses hidden in their stable or do they trade the horses with the stable every time? Or are the horses just on loan or something?

Now to the actual Idea of this suggestion. What if we could set a draft horse as a preferred Driving Horse, either on the wagon or on the horse itself?

So that those of us who want to have a specific horse or horses on our wagon can go buy a draft horse we like and then select it as a preferred driving horse. And then every time you pull out a wagon the stable would hitch whatever horse or horses that is set as a preferred driving horse first and then fill in the rest with random horses if needed.

An example: PC has bought 2 Shire horses to use as driving horses. When PC pulls out their small 1 Horse cart one of the two shires is hitched to the wagon. If PC pulls out a 2 Horse-drawn wagon both the shires are hitched. If PC pulls out their 4 horse-drawn Stagecoach the two shires and two random draft horses from the stable are hitched to it.

This way people can choose to spend the extra money on a specific driving horse or a pair or a team of driving horses if they want to. It is mostly for aesthetics and if people don’t want to spend that extra money they don’t have to…

I would personally love to be able to choose my one driving horse and don’t mind spending the money buying the horse I want. That way I can also RP with my driving horses when they aren’t in front of a wagon, which is kinda hard to do right now since you have no idea or control over what horse is put in front of your wagon…

Like “Oh I want to take my Shire Mare, Bella, out for a drive with the buggy” Pulls out the buggy with a Suffolk Stallion hitched. “Oh, I guess Bella didn’t want to go out for a drive today…”

I have more ideas to expand on this but I feel like this could be a great start with just the current 3 draft horse breeds being able to use in this way. But who knows, maybe later down the line it could be a possibility to have more horse breeds able to pull wagons. Maybe Horse Trainers could offer a service to train “Riding” Draft Horse to be able to be used for pulling wagons.

This is actually the end goal. After the Ranching Scrip and Crim Update is done, there will be a time that our devs are going to “clean” scripts and look back over the older ones. Golden always intended for you to actually purchase the horses that you put in for the wagon. Now, there will be specific requirements, I.e. you’r not going to put in morgans to pull your stagecoach so it will take some extra scripting and designing, but the INTENT by the devs is to do this :)

Sounds amazing!
And yeah, it would be nice to also have more horses be able to pull wagons, with the different horse being able to pull different wagons depending on the sizes and such. That was also something I was thinking of, but I felt like the post was getting too long already xD