Pferd & Pony – Mein Gestüt

Summary
You have to build and manage a ranch. You can choose a career in the beginning whether you want to be a Stable Manager, Riding Star, or Riding Instructor.

Game Design
The horses and environment are 3D, aiming at realism. The horse's idle movements contain flicking its tail, moving its head and ears, snorting, and shifting its weight. You play in a more or less open world. There's the farm map with a top-down view and limited riding, and there are riding grounds and countryside locations where you can ride freely with the camera positioned behind your horse. You control the player's or horse's movement with the arrow keys, Space, and Shift. Selections and actions such as dismounting, grooming, etc. are done by mouse. The controls are a bit confusing because on foot, you move directionally (left arrow - go west, top arrow - go north), while on horseback, you steer relatively (left arrow - to your left, top arrow - move forward/faster). The game is based on a day timer that starts at 8am and automatically ends at 8pm (or at 10pm, if you aren't home at 8pm) but it is possible to go to bed and end the day manually as soon as you wake up. One game hour lasts 2 min IRL, so a 12 hour day in game lasts 24 min in real time. However, time will pause while you are in menus like e.g. buying items. The game has no autosave, you need to save manually. You need to confirm overwriting your previous save every time or make a new one.

Gameplay
Your ranch starts out with a small farm house, a small stable and one or two horses.

Choosing a Career
In the beginning of the game, you need to pick a career you want to play: Depending on the role you pick, you will get different tasks to fulfill. Some buildings can be updated more if you pick one Career over the other - see Building Upgrades.
 * “As a Stable Manager, you have a fairly large stable and start with two horses. You can enter for shows and accommodate many guests. However, your main source of income will be the sale of the horses you breed and train.”
 * “As a Riding Instructor you only have one horse initially. You instruct your pupils and take part in shows.“
 * “As a professional rider [Riding Star] you start with one horse only. You organize shows in which you can also participate.”

Character Customization
The next step is picking your first horse. You can pick between 10 warmblood and 9 draft horse variations, as well as between 3 lengths in mane and tail. As a Stable Manager, you pick two horses. The first one you pick will be a mare, the second one a stallion.

The coat color names are estimates from the TMQ community according to real horse genetics, accuracy may vary, as some of these variations don't exist in real horses. There are no coat colors named in the game.

Locations
Your ranch is the center of the game, from where you can enter the different areas (after you've built them). Available buildings are
 * Stables (starting with 3 small stalls as Stable Manager and 2 bigger stalls in the other careers). You can upgrade it twice to increase the number of stalls to 9 (Stable Manager) or 6 (Riding Instructor or Riding Star). In the stable, you care for your horses and can look at their stats.
 * Foaling Stable - space for one breeding pair, no upgrades. You can do (limited) horse care here.
 * Farm House - including your bed (for starting a new day), a chest of drawers to change your tack, and an office computer to look at your farm's stats (Guests, Horses, Income, etc). You can upgrade the farm house twice, which is only an aesthetic / size change and brings no new features. Although the last upgrade has three doors and is easier to run in and out of without getting stuck.
 * Guest House - at the first level, you can host three guests. As a Stable Manager, you can upgrade twice and host up to seven guests.
 * Paddock - if you build the paddock, you can keep your horses there, automatically taking care of the horses' activity, hunger, and thirst stats. You can interact with the horses there (give a treat, pet, or lead them) but the rest of the care options require them to be led to the stable. The paddock has no upgrades.
 * Parking Lot - this is required so more visitors can reach your farm (although they never bring a car). No upgrades.
 * Riding School - an empty rectangular riding paddock which allows you to canter/gallop and jump, which is otherwise not possible on the farm. As Stable Manager or Riding Star, you build it once with no upgrades, while as Riding Instructor, you can upgrade it from a roundpen up to an indoor riding arena.
 * Tournament Ground - like the riding school, but with an obstacle course (with a limited editing function). As a Riding Star, you can upgrade the Tournament Ground for more lucrative shows.
 * The rest of your farm is purely aesthetic, including a well, some trees and bushes, and a small pond you can not ride or fall into.

To the west of your farm, you enter the first countryside riding area - open fields with a couple of fallen logs and fences as obstacles. You can not get lost, because every path leading away from the fields will take you home to your farm. To the north east of your farm, a second countryside area unlocks as you progress in the game: the forest. The third and last area to unlock is the beach in the north west.



Tasks
The game comes with a set of tasks in chronological order. These work as a tutorial and guideline on how to run the horse farm, but you can also ignore them, in which case you might not unlock the different countryside areas yet. But you will probably get there in your own timing and can set priorities differently.

Horse Care
In the stable, you can select your horse (turning it a yellow shade as an indication) and pick an action - renaming the horse (this feature got added in the steam-re-release, it was not possible in the original version!), grooming or petting the horse or moving it out of its stall. You can also access the info panel with your horses attributes, parents, and age (=“days on farm“, there is no apparent aging past the adult stage, and no death). On the stable wall, you can pick up a broom, which shows an animation of your character sweeping a tiny spot, which miraculously raises the cleanliness of all stalls by 20%.

Before you can feed your horses, you need to add water and food to your inventory (max 6 of each type). Rainwater in the barrel outside is technically limited to 100 portions, but refills daily.

You can choose between three types of feed. The difference between the three feed qualities is the speed at which the horse eats.
 * Horse Feed 1:
 * Horse Feed 2:
 * Horse Feed 3:

Horses can also get sick, you need to call a vet who will heal them by next morning. While a horse is sick, you can not speed up past a trot.

Horse Stats
There are 9 horse stats, all of them get affected by horse care and/or riding, nothing is static or capped individually, therefore you can not breed, but only train for better horses. All stats have a minimum value (generally 0% or 5%), a maximum value (generally 100%) and a current value (between 0% and 100%). In game, you can approximate them by the amount of sections in the stat bars. For an exact value, you can take a look at the save file. Strength works the same way as the care stats, with a maximum of 100% and a current value of your current state of training. This value never decreases. The endurance stat is a bit more tricky, as it can temporarily decrease when the horse races and jumps, but will restore to the current maximum value. Hypothesis still in testing: Either, each horse DOES come with an individual max in endurance that does not increase in training, but then i'm not sure how the current state of training gets saved. There is an additional stat attribute called base, but changing its value does not make a perceivable difference. Or, the maximum endurance value is what gets increased in training, and is trainable up to 100%, which means the game can only assume that the value needs to be capped at 100%, or saves that fact somewhere else.

Every stat gets influenced (towards 0% or towards 100%) by different factors of your horse care and riding:

Good Horse Care
Your horses' basic need stats will decay over time. You have to keep caring for them if you want to keep the stats as high as possible. Hypothesis: Your horse will stay clean longer (the stat will decrease more slowly) if you keep the stalls mucked out regularly. How hungry is hungry enough? Leftover food will disappear (or be eaten?) over night, though?
 * Cleanliness increases by grooming.
 * Thirst and Hunger are increased by feeding. In the paddock, the horses will take care of these stats by themselves. If you feed your horse in the stable, the horse will eat and drink until these stats are at the max, at which point the food and water disappear from its trough. If you feed a horse when it's not very hungry or thirsty, it will ignore the food until it gets hungry or thirsty enough.
 * Activity increases by riding, leading, or spending time in the paddock. It does go down occasionally there, though, so you might want to ride anyway.

Some stats express more of the horse's general wellbeing and are affected by the current value of the basic need stats.
 * Trust and Happiness increase by grooming the horses and spending time with them.
 * Health is affected by general care of all the stats. Not feeding the horse will sink health to 5%, although the horse does not get listed as sick.

need more info on stat decay. how much is lost in a day?

Which basic needs affect trust, happiness, and health in what way?

Riding does not affect: Trust, Happiness, Cleanliness, Health. Unclear yet whether Thirst / Hunger decay faster, or unaffected.

Bad Horse Care
If you do not take care of your horse's basic needs, its stats will slowly fall to 5%. If the basic need stats stay this low for a while (almost a week), its wellbeing stats will start decreasing, as well. A horse in this game does not experience negative effects or show any reaction to being neglected. Horses can get sick, which seems to happen rather on a random basis than due to low stats. A sick horse needs to be cured by the correct medication or calling the vet. While the horse is sick, it can not walk faster than a trot. While the tutorial states that horses get sick more often when staying in the paddock, playing experience doesn't show much of a higher risk.

Training
Racing and jumping temporarily decreases the endurance stat (the base value) and recharges in slow gaits.
 * Endurance and Strength are influenced only by riding the horse, but not by the values of other stats. The base values increase very slowly. VERY slowly. It makes no difference how fast or where you ride (at the farm, in tournaments, in the countryside, or even in pupils' lessons). Every once in a while, you'll get a pop-up notification that strength or endurance has increased.
 * A high stat in Endurance allows the horse to gallop faster, while a high Strength stat will allow for higher jumps.

how fast do endurance and strength get trained up?

Leading
When you move a horse out of its stall, you can select “lead” to make the horse follow you. The horse will adjust its speed to yours. You can select “lead” even while far away from the horse, as long as the horse is visible to be selected, and it will come running towards you. Leading is important if you need to relocate the horse (paddock, stable, foaling stable).

Riding
You must saddle the horse in the stable and then lead it outside to mount. While on horseback, the top arrow key increases speed, left and right change direction, and down arrow slows your horse down. While you are on the farm, you are limited to walk and trot and can not jump. In the countryside or on the training or tournament arena, you can make use of canter and two speeds of gallop as well as jumping. When you race and jump the horse, Endurance slowly decreases, and recharges in slower gaits (the slower you go, the faster it recharges). If the endurance stat is currently empty, you can not increase the tempo past a trot. There is no limit or minigame to jumping, apart from the endurance your horse uses up when jumping (-2 endurance every jump. If there is an obstacle, you need to jump in time, or your horse will stop (there is no refusal animation or penalty time).

Breeding
To breed, you need to lead a mare and a stallion into the breeding stable. Good horse care increases the chance of the mare getting pregnant fast. You do not need to do anything for them to breed, you just need to check in with them after some in game-hours and do a pregnancy test on the mare. Once she is pregnant, lead the stallion away. After two days, your foal will be born. You need to feed mare and foal daily and muck the stall when necessary. After two more days, your foal grows up into an adult horse. As soon as the breeding stable is free, you can breed the same or different horses again.

Genetics
The foal will always look bay, but will grow up to have the adult coat of one of the parents with no variation. Mane and tail length seems to be randomized and can not be changed in-game. A foal will also start with a basic set of stats in Strength and Endurance independent of its parents' stats.

Management
Running the ranch costs money for horse feed, building upgrades, buying more horses, medicine and veterinarian, tools and tack, as well as wages if you hire a stable hand. There are no running costs so you can not go into debt. There are several sources of income brought in by customers, their arrival depending on your career and the upgrades of your farm. Customers will arrive (earliest at 10 am) and walk into your farm house, where you can welcome them. If you neglect this, they will leave after waiting for half an hour in-game time.

* Are Stable Hands worth their wages? What do they even do? Stable Hands show up after the first stable upgrade. They get paid 50 dollars a day. All they do is sweep the farm, keeping the stables (regular and foaling stables) clean, but not feeding the horses.

Guests
Your first income in any career will be guests. The Guest House at its first level can house up to three guests. As a Stable Manager, you can upgrade twice for up to seven guests. Guests walk around your ranch for three days, then they will leave and pay you 200 dollars each.

Pupils
As a Riding Instructor, your main income is giving lessons to pupils, as soon as you have build the round pen (first level of the riding school). You select a pupil to train them, and you need to control the horse during their lesson. You can host three pupils at a time and train them once a day. They will stay at the ranch until their training is finished. To get more advanced pupils, you need to upgrade the Riding School.

Guests will stop arriving when there's already three pupils in the guest house, although pupils will still arrive even if the guest house is full of guests.
 * Beginners pay 100 dollars per lesson - they take a lesson of “Ride three rounds.”
 * Advanced Pupils pay 200 dollars per lesson - they take lessons of “Ride along the arrows.”
 * Profi Pupils pay 300 dollars per lesson - they take lessons of jumping.

Breeders
Breeders will show up when you've built the foaling stable, they will ask to breed their mare with a stallion of yours. If you accept, you need to lead your stallion into the foaling stable and keep both horses happy until the mare is pregnant and gets picked up by the breeder. While the foaling stable is occupied, you can not breed one of your own mares.

Show Organizers

 * when you've built the tournament ground, they will offer to organize a show you can participate in.

Journalists

 * Journalists (when you're a famous riding star)

Run before you walk
When you lead a horse, you can not start running. However, if you already keep Shift pressed before you click “Lead”, you can run, and your horse will trot to keep up with you. Don't let go of shift or you'll have to “Unlead” to do it again.

Teleport
This is a bit like cutting corners to save half a second, but still: if you walk from the breeding stable to the regular stable, the shortest path is to the back of the stable. Walk close behind the stalls and zoom in so the roof gets hidden. Select a horse and the option to pet it, and you'll be in the stable. You can also mount your horse from far away as long as you can see and select it.

Leading
Usually, you can lead only one horse at a time. When you are mounted, you can not select a horse to lead. However, if you are already leading a horse and then mount another one, you will technically still be leading the horse. While you are on the farm, the horse will appear to stay in place even though you ride away from it, and will only actually follow you once you dismount the other horse. Curiously, the horse you lead will raise its activity stat really fast even though it's not technically moving. The same happens if you're on the ground while in leading mode. Activity skill goes up faster than while riding. This is a useful hack to give your horse exercise (but one without skill gain). If you stay on horseback and ride into town or one of the countryside locations, the horse you lead will be teleported with you and then go its own way, but determined to get somewhere - it follows a specific path in each location. In the open fields, it will trot a straight path up to the big tree in the back of the field, where it will start going in a continuous circle until you either dismount, or ride back home so it gets teleported back with you and will trot somewhere else on its own. I have no idea what the game devs did there, and why. If you are keen on editing game files, you can also set all your horses control_mode="1" (more in #Program Editing), and take them all for an outing at the same time.

Saddle Duplication
Sometimes (cause unknown), when you take a saddle you own off the rack, the saddle is ALSO still on the rack, so you are able to put it on several horses at once. This is permanent.

Getting stuck
It is ridiculously easy to get your horse stuck somewhere where it can't walk out again, esp. when you bring it into houses. If your player character can still walk away, it helps to move to a different location that reloads the screen and teleports your horse to accompany you. If your horse followed you into a tight space and corners you between the wall and its body (you are solid and the horse is solid, and two solid objects will try to push each other out of the way), you might have to wait for nightfall and automatic bedtime. You wake up in your bed and your horse is back in its stall.

Through the Walls
Some walls in the game allow you to walk through them with your horse. If you are unlucky, they won't let you walk back out. That way, you can also get out of bounds and cause a glitch. If you trot straight at a fence on the outside borders of your farm, the horse will trot in place for a bit and then glitch through. You will reach a “tree wallpaper”. As you walk straight through, you can see the world fall apart and then fall into the void. Only automatic bedtime at 8pm can save you. At other times, jumping forbidden fences will take you to interesting but harmless locations, like into the river.

Jumping Out
When you leave the Riding School at a faster pace than allowed on the rest of the farm, the horse will keep it up until you press an arrow key or it runs into an obstacle. Just a little gimmick if you enjoy seeing your horse gallop from the side / top down instead of just from behind.

Program Editing
Since the game files are coded in xml / ASCII encoding, they are human readable within a simple text editor and you can easily mess around with a lot of values and stats. To do this, you need to find the save game folder of the game. On a windows system, this should be stored at C:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\dtp young entertainment\My Riding Stables\save\ Open the save game you want to edit. Make sure to close your running save game for that, at least go to the main menu. If you want to experiment without risking your game file to break, make a second save or copy the file. If you try a change for the first time and are not completely sure it will work, don't change several things at once, so you'll be able to retrace your steps when troubleshooting. Once you've made your changes, save and close the game file before you start up the save game again. Here are some examples of what you can do, maybe you can find some more.

Causing a building to upgrade
Look for the building you want to upgrade. The names of the buildings are in German. Find the line for your building that starts <Object type="Building" ...... and look for the attribute upgrading="false" Change this to “true” and the building will upgrade over night.

I have not yet figured out how to forego the upgrading process and just immediately replace the building with its upgrade. Input is welcome!

Changing Horse Stats
As described above in #Horse Stats, each stat has four different values - minimum, maximum, base, and current (it's not called current, it's just the name of the stat). I can't figure out what “base“ does. I think it is just the value the horse started out with. Useful in this context are: First of all, use the search function to look for your horse's name. If you use one of the standard names, you might end up in a list of all available names, skip to the correct result, which should be something like <Object type="Horse" pid="463952688" loc="db:Horse:horse_02_se1" name="Blossom" Within this paragraph, look for the stat you intend to change.
 * changing your horse's current stat in strength and endurance (instead of training it yourself) and possibly increasing the maximum to 100.
 * changing your horse's minimum stat to limit stat decay (instead of having to care for it yourself)

endurance_minimum="0" endurance_maximum="100" endurance_base="50" endurance="76" This makes your horse as enduring as it can be. If you don't change the current stat, it will slowly recharge to the new max whenever the horse is at rest or in a slow gait.

hunger_minimum="100" hunger_maximum="100" hunger_base="0" hunger="100" This makes your horse never get hungry again.

Changing Horse Configuration
loc="db:Horse:horse_02_se1" See above at #Character Customization for the id of the horse coat you want. horse_graphics_set="0 1 0 " First value: leave it alone or the game will crash Second value: 0= medium mane, 1= long mane, 2= short mane Last value: 0= long tail, 1= medium tail, 2= short tail To change the horse's sex, you need to change the value sex=“1” (mare) or sex=“0“ (stallion). To avoid confusion, also change this under <Object type="HorseRecord" .......... animal_sex="0" to avoid it being displayed wrongly in the horse's info sheet.

Gaining Followers
To make your horse follow you, you can set control_mode="1" If you do this on several horses at once, they will all follow you!

Changing your Inventory and Finances
You can change your money and whether you own medication and grooming tools for your horse:  The numbers are a count, not a specified value, so you can edit them to your liking. The Tools and items have specific names that are sometimes not included in the list yet, but you can add them. Or, you can just raise your money count and buy them.

List of buyable items:
 * turnierdress_neu01
 * turnierdress_neu02

You can change the capacity and count of horse feed:  Any of the values in the inventory can not have more than 10 digits, or they'll turn into a negative value that can make the game crash.

Trivia
The save file contains data referring to cats, parakeets, guinea pigs, dogs, and rabbits - these belong to the developers' other game released in the same year (2005), Meine Tierarztpraxis, which uses the same horse models and many of the same textures. The user manual's background is a screenshot from Meine Tierpension, their third 2005 game sharing its textures. Apparently, all three games have been made in one go...

Special Edition
Two "Special Edition" boxes were released in Germany in 2006, with a slightly different box. A one claims on the box sticker "More obstacles & parcours editor + new care options + extended riding lessons + a fun extra", and the other "New competition parcours & riding tracks, extended riding lessons, natural obstacles and a fun extra". The both may be the same release.

These feature seem to be on the Steam version.

Old Version on CD-ROM vs recent Steam Release
In the CD-ROM version that was released in 2005, it was impossible to rename your horses within the game (editing save files was the only way). The button to do that was added later.

GBA version
GBA version seems to be simplified and only in top-view.
 * Gameplay by Jeux Game Boy

Additional Media
User Manual on Steam





System Requirements & Compatibility
Minimum: OS: Windows Vista/7/8/10 Processor: Intel Pentium (or similar AMD) 1.5 GHz Memory: 1024 MB RAM Graphics: Direct 3D compatible graphics card with 128 MB RAM DirectX: Version 9.0 Storage: 600 MB available space