You might be familiar with this scenario: You’ve entered the void in Minecraft Bedrock, spent hours searching for a stronghold, and finally located the entrance, but it’s not as straightforward as you hoped. First, you had to cross a massive, bubbling lake of lava; gathering your courage, you managed to do it. Next came narrow cobblestone bridges just one block wide, along with countless eerie, dried-up skeletons.
And now—just one final push, and you reach your goal. You walk through a dark red corridor filled with ominous echoes and the heart-wrenching cries of phantoms. Bravely overcoming the last challenge, you discover it—a chest. Approaching it, you almost open it when suddenly a skeleton attacks from the shadows, but you’re always on guard, so you dispatch it in mere seconds. Finally, you unlock the chest and carefully examine its contents: diamonds, which you already have plenty of; flint and steel, which could come in handy for relighting the portal; a dusty saddle—not needed since you’ve already moved all the pigs away. And then your eyes fill with tears of joy because what you’ve been searching for has finally arrived—horse armor!
Horse armor is a special item designed exclusively for horses. You cannot equip it on other animals like donkeys, mules, or undead horses, no matter how hard you try. Once, I decided to have some fun and put horse armor on myself. Never repeat my mistakes; it was incredibly uncomfortable! After finding the armor, you can place it in your inventory by selecting the appropriate slot or equip it on a horse by right-clicking on it.
Horse armor was introduced in Minecraft version 1.6.1 and comes in four distinct types. The diamond variant offers the highest level of protection with five and a half chest points. Following that, gold provides three and a half, iron gives two and a half, and finally, the leather armor added in version 1.14 offers just one and a half.
You may have noticed some differences between human and horse armor. Firstly, for horses, gold armor is stronger than iron, while for humans, it’s the opposite. Apparently, horses look better in gold than people do. Secondly, horses lack chainmail armor because they are bothered by the clinking of the rings.
Another distinction is that in Minecraft, players can only craft leather armor themselves. To create it, you need to arrange seven pieces of leather in a crafting grid shaped like an “H” (in English, ‘horse’ translates to ‘Horse’, hence the letter H). Other types of horse armor can be found in chests located in fortresses, villages, dungeons, abandoned temples in jungles and deserts, as well as in bastions.
In the real world, horse armor has a quirky name known as barding, which likely originated from ancient Near Eastern kingdoms such as Parthia and Pahlavi, who developed formidable armored cavalry and spread into Europe after Alexander the Great completed his conquests. By the 16th century, horse armor was widely used across many European nations.
Different segments of horse armor have unique and exotic names. The head protection is referred to as “chanfron,” the neck guard is called “crinier,” the chest piece is known as “pavise,” while the sides of the horse are shielded by “flanchards.” One of the most crucial applied parts is termed “croup.” Occasionally, European knights would cover their horse armor with a fabric known as “caparison.”
There are numerous types of medieval horse armor, but in reality, they were quite limited compared to modern times. So, the next time you explore abandoned locations in Minecraft Pocket Edition, if you come across horse armor, consider yourself very fortunate!
