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 / shift, while selections and actions (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 (if you are home) or 10pm, 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, which is a bit of a hassle because 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.
 * “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. 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.

To the southeast, you get to a small town street with access to 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.
 * 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.
 * Pasture - if you build the pasture, 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, you build it once with no upgrades, while as Riding Instructor or Riding Star, 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). No upgrades.
 * 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.
 * the Horse Salesman - you can sell or buy horses here. There are 3 random horses on offer, being on three different levels of training. Once you leave the village and re-enter it, those horses disappear and 3 new horses are generated.
 * the equipment shop - you can buy food, brushes, medicine or tack here.
 * another equipment shop - more specialized on tournament tack for player and horse.
 * a veterinarian - who offers exactly the same medication as the equipment shop, at the same prices.

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.

Starting Tasks for all Careers:
 * Feed your horse
 * Saddle your horse and go for a ride
 * Discover the Fields
 * Build the guest house
 * Host your first guests until they depart

Tasks Riding Instructor:
 * Build the Riding School

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. A hungry horse will start eating right away. If you feed the horse while it's not hungry, it will ignore the food until...
 * Horse Feed 1: an hour.
 * Horse Feed 2: 30min.
 * Horse Feed 3: 20-30 min

Horse Stats
There are 9 horse stats, all of them get affected by horse care and training, nothing is static or capped individually. All of them have a minimum (generally 0), current (at this very moment), training (at this stage in training), and maximum (generally 100).
 * Trust and Happiness are build by grooming the horse (and general care, but grooming raises them to the max fastest).
 * Cleanliness rises from grooming and mucking out.
 * Endurance and Strength are only affected by riding the horse. They move up very slowly. VERY slowly. Racing and jumping temporarily decreases the endurance stat and recharges in slow gaits.
 * Thirst and Hunger are increased by food and drink - by the time the horse finishes its food, the stat will be at the max. If you feed it when it's not hungry, the food will just disappear without an effect. Leaving your horse out in the pasture will also fill up these stats.
 * Activity is raised by training or by staying in the pasture (it does go down occasionally there, though, so you might want to train anyway.
 * Health is affected by general care of all the stats.

Leading and Riding
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. You must saddle the horse in the stable and then lead it outside to mount.

Riding
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 share its coat with one of the parents. There are no mixed horses. 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
Your first income in any career will be guests. They will arrive (earliest at 10 am) and walk into your farm house, where you can welcome them. If you neglect this, a guest will leave after half an hour (in-game time). Guests walk around your farm for three days, then they will leave and pay you 200 dollars. A guesthouse at its first level can house up to three guests. Depending on the upgrades of your farm, there will be other types of customers:
 * Show Organizers when you've built the tournament ground, they will offer to organize a show you can participate in.
 * Breeders when you've built the foaling stable, they will ask to breed their mare with a stallion of yours.
 * Stable Hands (when?), they will........help?
 * Pupils when you're a Riding Instructor, and you have build the round pen (first level of the riding school).

A guesthouse at its first level can house up to three guests.

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.

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. 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 trotting 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 “lead” value to “1” (more in #Program Editing), and taking them all for an outing at the same time.

Program Editing
Since the game files are human readable within a simple text editor, you can easily mess around with a lot of horse values and stats. I will write an overview shortly.

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