Horses in Minecraft can have up to 30 hearts but they still may get hurt and you will need to heal them. Keeping your horse safe and healthy will help you travel far and wide and fight anything that comes your way.
The horse will slowly restore health on its own while you are riding it. But that regeneration is very slow and to speed up the process you can feed it or put it near a couple of hay bales.
Heal Your Horse Using Items
The horse can heal using food just like your character. But the food used for healing a horse and taming it is different.
You can use:
- Wheat: 0.5 heart
- Apple: 1.5 hearts
- Sugar: 0.5 heart
- Hay Bales: 10 hearts
- Golden Apples: 5 hearts
- Golden Carrots: 2 hearts
- Enchanted Golden Apple: 5 hearts
The fastest way to heal your horse would be using splash regeneration potions. But you probably want to save those up for yourself as they can be expensive to craft.
To feed a horse:
- Have one of the food items above in hand
- Get close to the horse
- Press the use button (right-click on PC, LT on Xbox, and L2 on PS)
When the horse is fully healed, it will not eat anymore and you will mount the horse instead when trying to feed it.
Build Stables With Hay Bales
Stables for your horse are helpful as you don’t have to look for your horse or keep it on a lead. But adding a few hay bales to your stables will allow your horse to passively heal.
Make sure hat your hay bales up to 3 blocks away from the horse. This will allow the horse to heal when you are not riding it.
Hay bales can save you a lot of resources because you don’t actually spend any food. The blocks you placed will remain there no matter how often the horse heals.
To craft a hay bale you need 9 wheat. Place all of them in the crafting table and you will get yourself a block of hay bale.
Look for Horse Armor and New Horse Breeds
You may not have known, but different horses have different amounts of maximum health. If you are planning on riding into battle you may want to look for a horse with as much health as possible. Once you have one, you can try and breed it with another horse to try and get a foal with even higher health.
That can sound like a tedious process, so the easy alternative is to get horse armor. Although we recommend getting a piece of armor regardless of your horse’s base hp.
The only piece of horse armor that can be crafted is leather armor, which is pretty weak compared to others but will work well in the early game. You will find the rarer kinds of armor (iron, gold, diamond) in chests within dungeons and structures so you have to be a bit lucky.
