HGG Community Forums

You are in a semi tough spot. I took a quick look through your barns. Easy ways to make more room in your barns, would be to put all of the mares, 3 and older into you pastures. But that’s mostly a short term fix.

Since you are breeding bootstraps they don’t start earning at their full potential until they are older 12-14 in my experience, so culling them isn’t really advisable. However you could do it, I would just try to make sure you don’t cull a whole age generation or in a few months you will be kicking yourself. I’ve done it. 90% of your show horses are younger than 10, which is when I start culling out the under performers, you probably should cull your 10+ year old horses, but those guys will typically have the most points. So no clear cut answers there.

My way of making $$ semi quickly is it create several 4yr old mares and a stud breed them in a pasture. BA the mares, stud and foals then toss the lot of them in the auction. Don’t do any testing on the mares or stud until after they are bred and only do BA testing on them. I have bought 1k barns using this method.

I hope this helps you out a bit.

@Ktarpey you’re welcome. If you decide to cull some young show horses let me know. I am low on 3yr olds. :)

High PT horses can take a while to earn money, so maybe think about clearing a bit of barn space and searching the sales boards for some new creates with decent points, these will help increase your daily payout until some of those high PT horses come of age

The majority of my show ponies have been either gifted ponies that are older with high points, or pointed creates that I picked up on sales or auction with 200+ points, so it's good to know I started off doing something right. I now have a handful of spelds from my breeding project in there as well but out of around 500 show ponies its probably only about 50 that started off without points.

With my Bluegrass account I decided to do things differently and spend a while selling pointed creates before I started collecting show ponies. I have two 1000 stall barns there and I'm on the fence about if I should shoot for a padding of IVs or GMTs before I start collecting ponies. I wish I had the benefit of that experience here as well, because I probably would have worked harder at getting barns before I started collecting ponies.

But the idea of making, breeding, and auctioning creates here to build my cash back up should help. It'll just go slower with my space constraints.

What is the #1 thing you all wish you knew before you started playing?

Bootstrapping is breeding a high papered stallion to lower-papered mares to create show ponies or to quickly up the paper quality of your breeding by stock.

For example: breeding a star stallion to red papered mares. Keep the blue mares and breed them back to that same stud or one of similar quality.


Honestly once the bootstraps start getting points they go up super quick if They are 13pt+. Most of my 10 year olds are 1000+ pointed. I require 500 points at 10 years of age to stay in my show lineup.

Ok, you are in the building up stage. This will be tricky, and differently from how I do things. I have had horses for long enough and enough barns that I have found a rhythm where as long as I don't breed more than a certain number of foals they can fill up the spots of horses that aged out due to old age at the beginning of the month... I really like this balance and would say this is a good groove to shoot for, but takes about 2 real life years to get there, plus it kinda means you need to get a bunch of barns laid down before that happens so you can be happy within that framework once you get there.
I will say an important thing to keep in mind with that and in your position is be aware of how many horses you can house and not breed in excess of that. I can usually house between 150-200 foals a month so I try not to exceed 180 mares in the pastures so I don't go beyond what I have stalls for, I also put my mares 2 years and up in the pastures which decreases foals per month as I am housing non breeders in there taking up breeder slots, plus opens up more stalls. For you I would try to make sure that when you get new barns try to not breed too much so it takes a few months to fill up those barns so you can save up for the next barn in the mean time. The more show ponies you have (that you show) the greater the show bonus you will have, the easier it will be to get the next barn till you reach the breeding/ aging out equilibrium. You want way more show ponies than breeders. I honestly try to find reasons to snip almost all the foals I produce to put them into show barns and to keep my equilibrium.
Not for boot strapping in particular, breeding advice is not advisable. It is almost a garenteed all foals get spelded button. Great for good future show ponies...But if you want to keep some in tact for either yourself or to sell to others I would suggest either sell them as nontested (specify this) or I find a mare I think is one of my highest quality mares (If you have any mares on the leader boards this will help a lot) And then I comparison test to that mare and only keep foals that test aga to her, or if I am trying to bread up a gene and the horses are still lower quality I require foals with that gene test superior to their mothers. I keep all the spelds as show ponies... Honestly since comparison testing costs as much as what I like to sell my breeders for that is just for keeping brewer members down for me and not for making money.
Now, I looked at your horses and you have some really nice stock there. If you would like, next month if you want, find the filly that you feels best shows what you feel is a good example of what you want your heard to be out of fillies you want to sell, not your keepers, those are for you to keep, don't breeding advice her, put her up for sale for 2 mil and let me know. I love getting premier horses from new bootstrapper projects... ;)

Time is your friend, especially if you take breaks from the game, gotta have auto show.

When I was just starting I'd max out every empty stall making creates, putting into pasture and breeding, then auctioning them all and their foals. No testing, don't even look at them just select all and into auction. If I could do 60 mares that was a profit of 150,000 just off their foals, plus earning back what I put into making the creates. Then I'd wait til the next auction (every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday), rinse and repeat. If you can do that once a week your at 600,000 hbs for the month which is 48 IVs which should buy you a barn so you can increase your numbers ;) I'm sort of maxed our again on barn space, and I guess that's a good thing because I keep bumping up my cut off for my bootstrap. Currently anything under a PT of 13.5 gets sold or to auction. Sometimes you can use the search feature also, search horses under 10, sort by highest points. If they are 8 or 9 yrs old and for sale for less than their total payout, you can buy them and wait til they are 10 and sell them at auction for that total payout and earn hbs on them in the mean time while they show and age. Or keep them if you have space.

Happy to help with bootstrapping, I've got more studs than I know what to do with, even ones that deserve to be studs get snipped because I have so many. So just let me know :)

@HiddenCreek that's really good advice. I struggle still with seeing the pixel ponies as just pixels.... horse auctions make me sad so doing the "puppy mill" method (as I think of it) is difficult for me. It's so silly.

@Prickle I never thought of combining the Foundation Rescue with the breed and auction thing. That's actually a great idea to buy them as 9 year olds, breed them, let them age up, and sell them. Then I'd get a boost on whatever lifetime payout they have. I imagine it's hard to get 9 year olds this late in the month though... so close to age up.

I finally did make enough on sales to grab myself another 210 stall barn so at least my space constraints are alleviated for a little bit. I'll have a season or two maybe before I need to panic about this again... then hopefully I'll be smart enough to refer back to this thread, or even have my own method figured out at that point!

Ammit did seem surprised that it had stopped showing, so I am not sure that it is a deliberate action/consequence of that strategy.

Ok, just checked and there are still plenty of foundation rescue horses for people to choose from and this just seems to be making it so the older horses that breeders would probably be shying away from already are weeded out, the oldest ones there now are 8, so it isn't likely going to harm breeders who are wanting horses from there... The fact that the oldest horses there are 8 makes me question how entirely useful this is for flipping horse strategies.... But I am put more at ease abut things... Still, getting a good show bonus will probably help you beyond waiting for these horses to age to 10... but yeah. Sorry for overreacting.

With how popular bootstrap breeding is now a days it is a game of trying to set your herd apart from everyone else. I used to go for being known as one of the highest quality bootstrap herds. Now even though quality is something that is still good to strive for, you can't be competitive unless you use cloned double boosted horses, so... try for as high a quality as you can but don't beat yourself up over it. Now trying to get bootstrap herds of different eras to compete in those era breeder boards and/ or add new genes into the era 0 bootstrap herds are the best way to get the most interest in your herd. Try to be the first bootstrapper working with any particular gene and then people will be asking for your stock to get the gene into their herd. Like I brought in ND1 and DFP1, and chocolate and am in the process of breeding in DFP2 and Pangery + which are genes that are not prevalent in bootstrap herds already... I focus on dark horses and primitive looking duns though, so those are the sorts of genes I work with. If you are interested in dilution genes I would say look on the for sale searches for the highest quality sun or snow gene (Just first examples that come to mind that I don't think others are working on already, find whatever genes work for you that you want to work with) stud colt and breed him to your mares and then keep the fillies that are better than that stud colt and breed them to a high quality bootstrap stud till your fillies with the desired genes are the same quality as your regular bootstrap mares and you can sell those for quite a bit to anyone who would like those genes in their herd. Like good quality bootstrap mares can be sold for a bit, but the more unusual/ unique they are/ the more fancy genes are on them the more they are worth... If you are unsure try du forum auctions with some foals to begin with to see what people want them for.

nice!

Well this month may not be the time you want to do it. I messed up and left my mares out of pasture overnight and lost my pasture bonus and I only ended up with one filly that passed BA, and her pt is a bit lower than normal because of the lost bonus.

This is her.


8955531

She was my BOP this season. She's pretty, and I like her coloration, but I'm trying to keep hom satin and add more white spotting like kitM and w8 to the lines. Overall I consider myself lucky to have had 3 intacts out of the whole pasture, all things considered.

If you're interested in her or any of my others I'm happy to sell them to you! Otherwise I'm hoping to be less of a dummy next season and get some nice babies out of mares with the full pasture bonus. This upcoming season will be the first that I am able to breed some of my first boot fillies back in, also, so I'm excited to see what changes when I do that.

Overall though this thread made a huge difference in how I manage my herd and how I build my show herd.... since I got all this amazing advice, my show bonus has nearly doubled, and that's despite losing a few at rollover.