BDO Horse Values & Money from Training & Breeding

Looking for a strategy to earn silver by horse breeding and training? This guide will help you determine the value of your horse and horse skills.

Parts of this are from an old Life Skill guide created by Eminent with several additions and corrections by me througout the years.

Note that there are several convincing articles on how you can NOT make good money with Training. The general consensus seems to be that Training can be profitable, but pales in comparison to other Life Skills like gathering, etc.

But if you love horses and training them, who needs silver, right?! 🙂

Horse Breeding for Silver by Eminent

A lot of people consider horse breeding to simply be a method of grinding out a tier 8 horse. I think it’s a bit more dynamic than that.

Of course breeding is going to be the primary way to get a t8 (the other method being to buy one from the market). However, if you are seriously into horses, you should be aware of the capabilities breeding has.

Most people consider horse training to be an awful way to make money. They’re mostly correct, but I think you’ll find that with a little creativity, you can make training semi-competitive AFK silver (this is with requirements in mind. You can make good silver from horses on a brand new account, but this won’t be competitive with an endgame player’s silver).

Let’s say I do 4 hours of taming and in the process I get 2 female tier 5s, and 6 tier 4s (mixed gender). Most people would sell the low tier horses (t1-3 or maybe t1-2 depending on the person) to the npc for half the market price (this is done in order to free up space in your stable). As for the tier (3?) 4 and 5 horses, those would likely be sold on the horse market for a decent price or leveled in order to breed for a tier 7.

If you are going for a t8 horse then it’s an obvious choice to level them and breed. However, if you’re simply doing taming for xp (idk if anyone but me actually does that), then it might be a waste to sell your higher tier horses to the market.

Elynxi’s Horse Market Price Formula 

Training Level Influence on Horse Value

The funds claimed via the Horse Market and Breeding Market will vary depending on your character’s Training level.

Training Skill Modifier Example:

If a horse is worth 100 million, you get 70 million after 30% tax. If your Training Skill is Master 1 then the bonus is 20%. This is applied to the 70 million for an increase of 14 million. Total silver received would be 84 million.

Remember in our example, our t5s are female and our t4s have a few males. Wouldn’t it be better to breed the t5s before dumping them onto the market?

You don’t need to level them, just breed and see what you get.

While the price of your t5s would drop a bit by exhausting their breeds, you can’t ignore the price you’ll fetch from the foal. What you’re banking on here are the skills that your foals learn at birth.

If you get a skill of low value, like Forechop, your foal should still make up the cost of the breed. However, if you get a high value skill like Sprint, the price of your foal will go up 3,315,000!

Remember, breeding takes pretty much no effort, it’s completely AFK. If you’re planning on selling your horse (with breeds) anyways, consider your options:

1. Sell the horse immediately for instant payout
2. Sell the horse a day later (after it breeds) for potentially a couple mil silver totally free

If you have just a little bit of patience, the extra payout you get from breeding is worth the minimal effort you just put in to breed your horses.

Let’s take it a bit further. Let’s say you tamed a female tier 5 level 10 (this is actually the best possible horse you can catch). Later that day you go to the horse market and find a male level 30 t5 with breeds.

You, being the intelligent person you are, notice that this level 30 t5 can actually be traded to the imperial horse dude for a profit. Again, you have 2 choices:

1. Sell it via Imperial Horse Delivery for immediate profit
2. Breed it first

You literally have nothing to lose by breeding it first, and you’ll profit 100% of the time in this case anyways.

Given this hypothetical situation, these are your chances for various tiers of horse if you decide to breed.

That’s a 28% chance of a tier 7. If that tier 7 gets a good skill at birth, you just made even more money. If it’s a female you could even breed it again with the level 30 t5 you have.

For no risk and no work, that’s some pretty good chances at a good horse (and some ok silver).

Now, this is definitely not going to make you rich. What I’m trying to illustrate here is a method of maximizing your profit. You were going to list your t5 horse on the market anyways, you might as well get an extra 1-2m from it for no extra work.

I’m not someone to give advice that I don’t personally follow, so here’s some data from my own spreadsheet (updated automatically as I add more data).

If you want to see the raw data, you can see my spreadsheet here.

Remember, none of those horses were leveled by me. All of them were either caught or bought. If they were bought, they were only bought because they would profit or break even by imp’ing them. All of that breed money was just additional cash.

All of that breeding took me like 5-10 minutes at most.

While breeding low level/low tier horses might seem like minimal profit (indeed, 2-3m silver/day isn’t much), if you think about the profit in relation to the time you spent, it turns out to be phenomenal.

If you’re someone who checks the horse market a lot, this can help to provide a bit extra passive silver.

If you’re someone who does taming for Training xp, this can make it a bit more of a worthwhile activity. Of course, people who play for xp aren’t necessarily concerned with maximizing silver, it’s always a good feeling to have a pile of cash after a long grind.

I understand that this section was more about an implementation of breeding than breeding itself.

While this section might not have answered all of the questions you have about breeding (it probably didn’t), I think it helps to illustrate the repeating theme of this Life Skill guide — think for yourself and play creatively.

I’ve done a fair amount of research on Training, and I’ve never seen a guide telling people to breed low value horses for extra profit. In fact, almost all of the things I do with horse training are things that I thought of myself.

I’m not claiming to be the person who came up with any of these ideas (just looking at the horse market will prove that bad-horse-breeding is a fairly popular practice).

If nothing else, I hope that this implementation of breeding can inspire you to think more creatively about how you can implement various features in this game.

It is my personal belief that it’s impossible to get ahead in this game without creative play (and, of course, a lot of effort).

So feel free to copy my method, and feel free to come up with your own. Through brainstorming and testing you might just find that there exists methods that are far better than what I’ve come up with.

If you come up with super-sick, super-secret methods that are better than things I’ve come up with (for any Life Skill) you better share it with me :^

Horse Market vs Imperial Delivery

If I want to sell a horse I have a couple options.

1. I can sell it to other players on the horse market
2. I can sell it to any Stable Keeper for 50% of the horse market value.
3. If the horse is level 15+ I can sell it to any Stable Keeper (imperial delivery) for 50% of the horse market value, and get Shiny Golden Seal – [Imperial Training] equal to the Tier of the horse. (Horse must be stabled, then click on the horse and a button will appear for an “Imperial Horse Delivery”.)

Let’s do an example to make that more clear.

Let’s say I have a Tier 3 horse worth 5m silver.

1. If I sold it on the market I would get 5m (before tax)
2. If I sold it to a Stable Keeper I would get 2.5m
3. If I did Imperial Horse Delivery I would get 2.5m and 3 Imperial training seals

The horse seals have a value dependant on the Marketplace selling price of Black Magic Crystal – Viper.

When you get 12 seals you can trade them in for one Black Essence: Viper. The exchange NPC is Breesman, the Stable Keeper located at Stonetail Horse Ranch in Mediah.

You heat the Viper essence with an Ancient Magic Crystal – Viper to create the more valuable upgraded Viper crystal.

So, let’s do some math:

Ancient magic crystal cost = 290k

Black magic crystal cost = 15m

Profit = 14,710,000 (before tax)

Profit/seal = 14,710,000/12 = 1,225,833

Marketplace prices change all the time. Here’s a quick look at what’s going on for Viper crystals at the time of this edit:

Although it looks like the Marketplace is over-saturated, the time left was 6+ days on all the crystals on page one. So there was enough demand. So for now let’s just value a seal at 1m. So looking again at our previous example, we got 2.5m and 3 imperial seals, which is a total value of 5.5m. That’s better money than selling it on the horse market.

Get the idea? Here, let’s quiz you:

1. You have a t6 horse valued at 8 million, do you:
• List it to horse market
• Sell it via Imperial Horse Delivery
2. You have a t7 horse valued at 30 million, do you:
• List it to horse market
• Sell it via Imperial Horse Delivery

Answers:

1. Imperial Horse Delivery would give you 4 million silver and 6 Training seals for a value of 10 million. That’s more than the 8 mil you’d get from listing it to the horse market.
2. Imperial Horse Delivery would give you 15m silver and 7 Training seals, for a total of 22m. That’s a huge loss of 8m. So this one you would list on the horse market.

As you can see, sometimes it’s a great idea to sell your horses via Imperial Horse Delivery, while other times you’d be selling them at a huge loss. With a bit of practice you should be able to recognize a profit or loss in just a couple of seconds when looking at a problem like the ones I listed.

Why is this important/relevant?

Well, let’s bring this knowledge back to actual horse leveling.

Let’s say I have four T1 horses on a wagon. I run them for 4 hours and they hit level 15. At 15, I can sell them via Imperial Horse Delivery for around 1m per horse (since the price of a t1 horse is fairly negligible, I’m mostly looking at seal value). This is 1million/hour for AFK running horses.

1million/hour is ok considering there are no requirements at all. You could do this you first day playing the game no problemo.

We can do better though.

The problem here is that you hit level 15 on your horses after only 4 hours (time will vary based on your wagon, xp buffs, etc). If I’m running horses overnight (let’s say you’re getting a healthy 9 hours of sleep), that’s 5 hours of wasted time per night (since the value is coming from the seals, having horses past level 15 doesn’t increase the value much).

So the next night we try the same thing, but we have 4 Tier 2 horses. This time it takes me like 8 and a half hours to get them to 15 and I get 8m from it. I’m still getting around 1million/hour, but this goes on for more hours, which equates to more total money. So at this point I’m getting 8-10m a night from doing a 0 requirement activity. That’s fairly decent if I’m a newer player. But, can we do better?

Well, let’s say the third night I try to do the same thing but with 4 Tier 3 horses. This ends up taking 12ish hours and we get 12m in seals from it. This is still 1million/hour, but the problem we run into is that we’re only sleeping for 9 hours. This means our horses aren’t level 15 by the time we wake up. This is a problem. That said, it’s not a problem with a very difficult solution.

Consider this: Who’s forcing us to level our horses from level 1? No one. I can very easily go to the horse market, find a Tier 3 horse that’s already level 10, and then level it to 15 overnight in maybe 8-9 hours. This means, assuming we can snipe 4 t3’s at a reasonable price, we can make 12m per night instead of 8.

What if we bought t4 horses at level 12 or 13? We could make 16m+ a night!

If Viper Crystals are at a high price when you’re doing this, you could be profiting around 19m/night (I was when I was doing this).

While 19m/night might not seem like a lot to an end game player, remember that there are no requirements to do this.

This means that a brand new player with no gear (and very little silver) could be pulling in 16-19m overnight completely AFK. That makes it potentially the best AFK money in the game for a new player.

Before you run off and start doing this though, consider a few points.

1. There’s no progression for this method. While it’s good money for low level players, it doesn’t get better as you level up.
2. This is completely dependent on the price of Viper Crystals. Recently (well, recent as of the time of me writing this), they’ve been adding gem boxes to our log in rewards which give Viper Crystals. This has crashed the market considerably. When I was doing this method Viper Crystals were 21m, but now they’re 14.5m. Do the math yourself before trying.
3. Now that I’ve written this a bunch of people are gonna start doing it which means you’ll have a lot more competition when trying to buy suitable horses.
4. You can only buy 1 horse per hour from the horse market. This means it will take a minimum of 4 hours to buy the required horses. Of course, that’s not 4 hours of active time (you don’t need to be standing at the horse market for 4 hours), but if you can only be at your computer for 30 minutes a day, you won’t be able to buy 4 horses.

If none of that is a problem for you, then feel free to try it out. I keep a log of all of my imp’d horses, and I’ve made around 1b from doing this.

Let’s change gears a little bit.

When I was new to the game everyone told me that horses were absolute trash Tier in terms of making money. That said, using traditional methods, they are.

For some strange reason though, I took that as a challenge. I figured that every Life Skill should have some purpose, and that they could all be good if used correctly.

Thus began my quest to “make Training great again”. Over the course of a couple months of running horses overnight, logging hundreds of entries in a spreadsheet, and constant adjustment, I finally perfected my craft.

I’m not sure if it was willpower or stupidity that kept me testing horses for that long, but I did it. And after all that work I turned a “trash Tier” Life Skill into the best AFK money in the game for low level players.

This isn’t me trying to brag, and I’m sure there are actually better ways to make money overnight without high requirements (I just haven’t found any yet). While the method itself is extremely simple and straightforward, it still took me literally months to put all of the pieces together (I had the general idea for a long time, it just took a lot of perfecting).

The point here is that you shouldn’t take the advice of other players as church. Even my advice. There is so much depth to this game, and so much room for creativity, that it is impossible for people to have figured everything out.

Do your own testing, think for yourself, try to make bad skills good. Play creatively and you’ll get an edge on everyone else. And once you create the greatest method in the game that no one knows about…. Pm me.

Sources & Additional Info

• Horse Value/Price Calculator. – posted in discord by Wolfy. Thanks!
• parts written by Eminent (u/CadeGuitar), who generously published a Horse Training Guide in “Eminent’s Life Skill Guide“.