HGG Community Forums

So, we've got a word kind of for this sort of breeding you're looking into getting into.

Bootstrapping!

The basis of bootstrapping is taking a whole bunch of low quality horses, like Foundation mares, and breeding them to a much higher quality horse, like a *Star or **Star stud. The higher the breeding quality (paper) of a horse, the higher PT of their foals

With this method, however, you NEVER use breeding advice. BA compares against both parents and because one of them is so amazing and the other is at the baseline, the foal will never be as good as the amazing parent and will be altered. They will, however, be a LOT better than their baseline parent. You then take these foals, and either breed them back to the same amazing stud, or to another one of similar/better quality than him. I lot of people will BA the colts and when about 1/2 of them start passing BA, you know you're getting close in quality to those amazing horses.

With being a newer account, if you don't have a basic upgrade (you can buy this with HBs!) you can either keep the mares that you think are pretty intact, or you can use Average Foal Performance Testing, or AFPT. For this, you need to PT test the foals, and have at least 3 before you use the average of their PT to judge the quality of the mare. This is a lot more time intensive as a free account though, so just going for the "pretty shiny pony must breed" approach is fine :)

Here are some other forum links to read up on bootstrapping. If you're looking for a certain stud/s to use, just shout out and you'll get one+ cheap! There is a bootstrapping chatroom with studs up for cheap, and sometimes colts and mares will be put up for sale. Many are "shiny", in that they have a lot of rarer genes mixed in, like satin, KP, GP, snowflake, Axiom, etc

https://hj2.huntandjump.com/forum/discussion/88856/everything-bootstrap#Item_15

https://hj2.huntandjump.com/forum/discussion/87646/bootstrapping-tips#Item_11

So papering is an upgraded feature, called "Breeding Inspection". There are levels to it! Foundations will always be Yellow/C (mare/stallion), unless they're an exceptional create in which case they'd be Red/B, the next level up. Then it's Blue/A, *Gold/*Star, **Gold/**Star, and finally ***Gold/***Star. There's also Showable Only/Failed, which is the paper a foundation will be if it fails BA.

PT stands for Performance test. It is an indicator of how long your horse may train for. For example a horse with a PT of 9.9 is going to level off at the end of their 9th year, or near the start of their 10th year. The longer a horse trains for, the more likely they are to reach those higher leveled shows where a whole lotta points, and thus money, can be won.

**Edited to add that this section is only kind of true, but it's true enough for the purposes of understanding how it works. If a horse is altered (gelding/spayed mare) then its training will be boosted. Also a horse does still train after this point, it just gains so little from training that in most cases you may not even notice a difference in the score that horse gets in shows

All accounts can PT test, genetic test (colour), and use Breeding Advice, which will compare the foal against both parents and if it is worse than one of them (with a tiny bit of lee-way) it will be altered.

Breeding Inspection, or papering, is available for basic and premium upgrades. As I mentioned before, you can buy the basic upgrade with hbs, underneath the "Upgrades for HBs" tab. I 100% recommend as that being a milestone to work towards, not only can you use papering, but you also get a higher weekly pay, and a bigger primary barn/pasture! It also lasts for a whole real life year so by the time you have come to the end of the upgrade, you should have enough hbs saved up to buy another one almost instantly.