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Watch the auction. Every time it runs there are horses from the Lined Rescue that are guaranteed to be good show horses. You do have to keep an eye on their ages, though. Do a search for Status>For Auction, and Owner ID>9.

If you have enough stall space, keep everything and show them all. Even those lower PT horses have the potential to earn you some serious show points.

Also, double check that all your barns (except your Primary barn) are set to auto show. You would not believe how often people forget to set new barns to show when they buy them!

Some people manage their show herds pretty closely, but I just dump everything that is spayed or gelded into a show barn. I do have some Ex Show and/or Ex Perf intact mares in my show barns, but I use them for surrogates, since I do a lot of embryo transfer.

I pretty much do the what Confluence does, I also look to buy pointed foals, check the forum and auctions for pointed young horses. A lot of new accounts need quick cash so those pointed horses go up for sale.

Well I don't really notice a huge difference.
But if you want to keep them just as show it doesn't hurt to cut them.
Sometimes I do because there is no chance I will breed that horse. But I'm sure others may see it more than I do.
But I've also seen a 1150 point gelding get super good show scores, then I've had 10pt inconsistent intact mare make the leader boards lol. So really you never know unless you pay attention closely to each horses scores. I don't, but I still make decent money. When you search horses look for young say under 9, then put in best showing, or highest payout can't remember what it's says I'll have to look

BTW the fastest I have ever seen someone build up money was DuelingHawks, what she did was breed auction , rinse and repeat. I think she bred pasture then just put them all in auction.

@SmokinBlack I thought that was who I had seen buy up but I couldn't remember. I may have to just do that too for the mares that didn't cut it for my breeding and the studs that end up duds.
@pestilenttempest, yes I've noticed that as well, I've achieved 9-10 pt but haven't yet gotten that far, I've seen some on here that are amazing pt and daily and just beautiful colors too. I have the time I'm working on the space. My goal is to have a few barns for showing that are at least 100 stall

@SandycreekFarm not gonna lie....I've stalked your barn page a few times looking at numbers and such, part of where I figured I needed pt and more barns

I've gone about this two different ways so I'll give you an overview of both.

I started playing here on Forest, so my system here is the first one I'll tell you about. I was impatient to start breeding so I didn't know what I was doing as well. I started off with a stud I liked and bred him in the pasture to a bunch of rank special mares to just see what colors would come out. I did keep most of the foals but eventually I ended up spaying and neutering all of them. Those foals are around 6 years old now I think and I've found that lots of them are starting to be really good show ponies. But they take up a lot of space, which I really struggled to come up with the money to buy barns. If you can save enough for a 1000 stall barn, it will really make a difference for you when you start to build a show herd. So after my first season of foals I decided I needed to build a herd of higher PT horses for showing, my thought being that if I got a few nice ones with high PT, they'd possibly be worth money for sale, and the ones that didn't pass breeding advice would earn me show points. So far that's working out decently well, and I enjoy the breeding portion of it too. I definitely don't have tons of money to play with but after almost 7 game years I have enough to be able to spend a bit at auction when I want to. Now my focus is mostly on buying horses to show. I try to split auction days evenly between bidding on the highest pointed horses there, regardless of age (more on that in a moment), then the highest pointed horses there under 10. If I buy horses that are 17+ years old, their daily payout has to be over 200 hbs for me to be happy with it. I'm taking a risk that they'll pass away at the end of the month, but in the meantime I'm getting their daily bonus. If I buy 10 that make 200 a day, that's an extra 2000 gbs a day for the rest of the month... the risk is worth it to me as long as their auction price isn't too expensive. The ones that I buy that are under 10, I try to make sure that their daily hb payout is at least over 50. Those have several more years to show and earn points, so I know they're still a good investment, and all horses under 10 have a starting bid of 2750 so you can bid on more without worrying as much about draining your funds up front.

All of this work on Forest has gotten my daily bonus to just over 40k a day in about 7 months. I only just started working the auctions to my advantage last month, though, or I'm betting it would be higher by now.


So that's method one.

On Bluegrass I took a totally different approach. There, I was really strict with myself on not starting a breeding her until I had money and space to play with. I focused on selling pointed creates instead. What I did there was go through the Herd Helper board and pick up all the rank special, exceptionally perfect, and exceptional show herd helpers I could find. I would use them to create pointed foals for sale (I always create yearling mares but that's a matter of personal preference). I normally only ran genetic testing on them, since all of those herd helpers are guaranteed to pass the other tests. If you move into using exceptional producers or perfect herd helpers, I would recommend running performance inspection at that point as well. It's not a must, but I always did it that way. At this point, any horses below 200 points went to auction immediately, without testing. Any horses that came out with 200-299 points I set for sale at 50% of their lifetime payout. Any horses that came out with 300-599 points I would set for sale at 5k below their full lifetime payout. Any horses over 600 points I would put into a separate barn to keep and show. Eventually I did sell off the ones I had that were 600-699 points (still 5k below their lifetime payout) and only kept ones 700+ but that was mainly because I wasn't quite where I wanted to be yet and my points were inching closer to the limit.

So now you should have hbs rolling in from sales on your pointed horses. When you have enough, use hbs to buy a 1000 stall barn. I kept going until I had the money to buy two 1000 stall barns just for good measure, and then built up a cushion of about 2mil hbs for spending money. That was about the point where my show horses filled up and I hit the 20k cap for pointed horses and stopped having pointed creates. Once that happened I did make a few pastures full of mares and bred them to a stud, then tossed all of the foals along with the mares and stud back into auction, all with zero testing. That approach earns you about 100-150k hbs for each pasturefull you put in auction, but it was too slow for me so I didn't stick to it for long honestly. It works, I just lost interest with the method and didn't see the greatest return on my money.

So now I'm building my Bluegrass show herd slowly from auction in the same way I mentioned I use here on Forest. I started that about 3 weeks ago and I have a daily payout of atoubd 8k hbs now on Bluegrass. That entire method took me about 4.5 months to get to where I am now. It went much faster than Forest but I also knew what my method would be and didn't have to deal with the learning curve.

I do also buy pointed creates on both servers now that I'm building a show herd, but it's more of an investment of cash up front than the auction is.

Also make sure you keep an eye on contests and giveaways! People are so generous on this game and I have a barn of about 40 show horses that were gifted to me early on that have kept my earnings steady here while I learned what the heck I was doing. :)

If you decide to sell pointed ponies, I'm happy to buy some. If you decide to start building a herd now, let me know by PM and I'd be happy to gift you a handful of horses to start you off.

So the way I was able to grow my show herd and daily bonus quickly was through bootstrapping. I notice that you are a member of the main bootstrap chat, and maybe you've decided that's not a direction you want to go. However it can be a viable option with some patience since you have to wait for your show herd to grow up.

I got a lovely colt in the 2017 Secret Santa and bred to foundation mares doing the bootstrap thing. I kept everything and showed everything, something I still do to this day. In fact to maximize all my horses in the show ring, I would only give the mares I would breed 14 days in pasture so that I could show them the rest of the month. I no longer have the need to rotate my breeders from pasture to barns and back again and haven't for quite some time now.

My barn is now self-sufficient and has been for about 2 real life years. At least once per month, sometimes twice, I purchase 300 IVs. Every time I get close to the max hbs I move it to IVs (usually 300 or 400). Early on I used these to buy more barns until I got to a point where I decided that I was comfortable with and could easily manage the number of foals I had each month. I also used them to buy 12 month basic upgrades until I caved and got premium.

Now 4 years after beginning the bootstrapping journey, I have 4712 horses, 38 barns and a daily bonus of 421.5K. I never thought that I would get to this point. If it's something you'd like to talk more about and you like Silver Black Pearls, just reach out! I always have extra colts that I feel bad snipping.

Another reference point I don't often sell my stock and rarely buy lined horses from outside stock, I quite literally keep everything and show everything.

@Haltanny where I'm at now I can get 6iv. I have a 120 that I'm currently filling up and two 15 barns that I use to auction and pull pasture babies. I was thinking of trading the two 15 barns in for iv

@Haltanny it said 40iv. I've finally come close to 3k a day showing, and to be honest if I would have been smarter with my spending I would have got the barn before the horses, had took a two year real life brake from the game and had almost max but didn't think about it at the time because I didn't have my upgrade. But I have my premium back now

@Haltanny thank you :x