A Forge 1.20.1 port of HughBone's Elden Horses (originally Fabric, MC 1.19.2), heavily expanded with Spectral enchantments, an Elden Ring style summon animation, and Apotheosis / Shiny Horses compat.
Animation showcase (click to watch)
Two new enchantments for any vanilla or modded horse armor:
Spectral Steed: bond a horse and summon or dismiss it on demand.
- 1st-person body and armor go translucent while riding
- 5x mining speed on horseback
- Reduced mount fall damage
- Fatal hits auto-unsummon the horse and start a configurable cooldown instead of killing it
- Once bound, the horse persists across world reload, death, and dimension change
Spectral Leap: mid-air double jump, with a cosmic burst of particles and chime on activation.
Obtain via enchanting table, anvil + book, or chest loot.
Elden Ring style. Whistle, hop onto the materializing horse, ride off. Reverse on unsummon. i-frames during the transition; momentum carries over if you dismount mid-gallop.
When Apotheosis is installed, a Tome of Horse Armor item registers:
- Appears in the Apotheosis Enchanting creative tab after the Boots Tome
- Crafted from 6 books and 1 blaze rod
- Accepts any horse-armor enchantment (Spectral Steed, Spectral Leap, plus Shiny Horses' Protection / Mending / etc.)
Without Apotheosis the tome simply doesn't register.
- Shiny Horses Forge: vanilla armor enchantments (Protection, Mending, Unbreaking, etc.) stack with Spectral Steed and Spectral Leap on the same armor
- Any mod adding horse armor: Spectral enchantments work on any item extending
HorseArmorItem
A Forge global loot modifier rolls extra drops into any chest table (vanilla or modded) whose path contains chests/:
- Spectral Steed / Leap enchanted books
- Pre-enchanted horse armor (iron / gold / diamond)
Drop rate and book-to-armor ratio are config-driven. Netherite horse armor isn't in the loot pool; smith it with a netherite upgrade template + diamond horse armor + netherite ingot, same flow as vanilla netherite armor.
Edit config/elden_horses-common.toml:
| Key | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
transparency_alpha |
0.3 | Horse armor alpha in 1st-person while riding |
body_transparency_alpha |
0.15 | Horse body alpha in 1st-person while riding |
chest_drop_chance |
0.05 | Per-chest chance of a Spectral drop |
book_to_armor_ratio |
0.7 | Share of drops that are books vs pre-enchanted armor |
spectral_steed_death_cooldown_seconds |
300 | Recovery time before re-summon after a fatal-hit save |
- Minecraft 1.20.1, Forge 47.4.4+
- PlayerAnimator by KosmX (whistle and mount animations)
- Apotheosis: Tome of Horse Armor
- Shiny Horses Forge: vanilla armor enchantments on horse armor
- Better Mount Steering: decouples mount camera from horse direction so you can look around freely while riding. Strongly recommended for the full Elden Ring mounted feel
Download the jar from Releases, drop it in your mods/ folder alongside PlayerAnimator.
- hughbone_ for the original Elden Horses mod (CurseForge)
- InspectorJ for the original whistle SFX (Freesound), modified for this mod
- KosmX for PlayerAnimator (runtime dependency, used under its own license)
- Shadows-of-Fire for Apotheosis (lang keys referenced for tome tooltips; jar must be sourced separately to build with compat)
MIT (see LICENSE). The elden_horses mod ID is preserved for save compatibility with the original.
./gradlew build
Output: build/libs/seramicx-elden-horses-1.0.0+forge-1.20.1.jar
See libs/README.md for how to populate the compile-only deps directory.