Food Plan: build each horse’s diet with real rations, phase by phase: daily training, the week before a race, race day and recovery.
Tastes: every horse has its own, and a ration it loves works better than one it picks at.
Feed by hand: once a day you can bring the bucket yourself, see what your horse eats first, and grow your bond. Sometimes something rare happens.
Gold bands and medals: a well-kept diet unlocks small advantages on race day.
Early warnings: watch for signs of trouble, such as the first hints of colic.
Dedicated plans: for injured horses, pregnant mares, nursing mares and foals.
🧬 Reworked: Breeding
Coat genetics: every foal’s coat comes from its parents’ genes, based on real genetic studies of each breed, with the right odds for every color.
Colors and rare coats: every breed has its own colors, and some coats are extremely rare, just like in real life.
Racing stats: foals now inherit them from their parents, and each foal has a potential of its own.
Pregnancy:
follow your mare through her whole pregnancy: her belly grows month by month;
the day the foal is born gets its own cutscene.
Growing up:
foals gain weight every day until they are two, and every horse has its own adult weight inherited from its parents;
foals train from their first birthday and race from two;
nursing mares stay out of races while they look after their foal.
Breeding window: the filters now work.
🌍 New: Open World
A world rebuilt from scratch: forests, hills and a river running down to the sea, a lagoon with an islet, and a waterfall. Every area has its own plants.
Explore page: the new page in the management hub is your gateway to the open world.
🏡 The Ranch
Veterinary Clinic: a new building.
Dressing: the ranch is now dressed with trees, hedges, fences, gardens and yard props.
Grows with your stable: the props around the stables and the paddock follow the building level, and the buildings you haven’t built yet wait for you as transparent previews.
Performance: the ranch view follows your graphics quality setting and runs faster on every preset.
Low quality: less flickering on the metal roofs.
🏁 Races
Live commentary in every build: the commentator follows every overtake, all the way to the finish line.
Form: horses start a race at their peak form, drop after racing depending on the distance, and recover over the following weeks. AI horses follow the same rule.
Strategic races: after taking direct control with the movement keys, press R to hand the horse back to its race plan.
Rival stables: Group races stay full over the seasons. Retired horses are replaced by new ones of the same group, and rival horses move up when they improve.
🏋️ Training
Foals: a foal’s training plan shows its real life stages: no training in the first year, then training without races until two.
Mares: pregnant mares do light work and lose no growth for races they can’t run. Nursing mares don’t do race training.
🛠️ Fixes
Auctions:
they now offer horses that match their group: Listed and Group auctions have Listed and Group horses for sale;
you can no longer buy a horse without the money to pay for it, and the Bid button is disabled when you can’t afford it;
when a pregnant mare is sold, her foal is born in the buyer’s stable.
Races:
horses can no longer enter races above their level, and foals can no longer race;
Group races no longer end up with your horse as the only runner after a few seasons;
pausing the game no longer cancels the slow motion of photo finishes;
the loading screen now closes only when the racecourse is ready;
added safety checks when a race starts, to prevent some crashes during loading.
Training:
the training plan no longer resets on its own: races already run and custom plans are kept, also across the new year;
the Balanced Training staff skill now has its effect.
Breeding:
pregnant mares no longer lose their pregnancy after loading a save;
black horses now come out truly black instead of dark brown;
chestnut horses with the flaxen gene now have a lighter mane.
Objectives: “Race a horse born in your stable” now completes.
Sponsors: removed the placeholder text from the Sponsors screen.
Stability:
walking away from a negotiation no longer leaves the game stuck on the loading screen;
fixed a crash that could happen when entering the management screen.
Settings and performance:
graphics quality settings are now kept after closing the game;
better performance on screens that show the 3D horse preview.
Version: the game version now appears in the main menu (Playtest v.0.6.0).
⚠️ Known issues
The “Win your first Group 1 crown” objective doesn’t complete yet.
Withdrawing a horse from a race doesn’t refund the entry fee.
Auction reminders aren’t saved.
The sponsor’s monthly payment can sometimes show different amounts on different screens.
The sponsor logo rework is in progress and will be completed in Playtest 7.