Minecraft: Here’s Why Your Horse Keeps Despawning

Unless you already own Elytra and can travel by air, having a horse in Minecraft is very valuable since it’s the best means of transportation on land. Once you’ve gotten yourself a horse with the best possible stats and textures you prefer, it’s time to make a stable for the horse, but what if the horse disappears and despawns? Why does it happen, and how do you solve it?

Why do horses in Minecraft keep despawning?

Apart from actually despawning because they have too much free room to roam, horses can despawn for other reasons as well. Sometimes, it’ll happen that they don’t even despawn, but instead, they disappear due to an in-game bug that has been in the game for far longer than it should be. Let’s check out all the reasons why your horse might disappear in Minecraft.

Visual bug

Although this is an old bug, it might still persist in the older newer versions of the game or perhaps even in 1.19. The bug makes horses disappear, but it’s not like they’re actually gone; they’re still there; you just can’t see them. The problem might go away on its own if you quit and reopen the game. Another possible solution would be to turn off any shaders and RTX you might have on because sometimes, their textures won’t load.

For example, my BSL shaders; although they are unique shaders when I enter the Nether, some textures won’t load, and I can’t tell the difference between nether rack blocks or other blocks. It’s a really weird glitch, so go into the video settings and turn off your shaders for the moment to see if that will work first.

The horse wasn’t tamed.

Untamed horses will despawn after 15 minutes of no one being there, so if you don’t tame the horse properly, it will despawn when you go away to explore. Horses are one of the few passive mobs in Minecraft that you can tame just by trying to ride them, and there’s no food requirement. Food, however, will help with the taming process and speed it up.

Once on the horse, you have to saddle it and ride it for a bit to make sure it’s really tamed. It also wouldn’t hurt to feed it some wheat, apples, or carrots. To be extra safe. You tamed it. This will rarely happen, but it is still a potential answer worth mentioning.

They can free-roam

You must build a stable with fences and other blocks to keep your horses from roaming around. This relates to the 20-block problem, where a horse will despawn if it can travel more than 20 blocks in any direction. It has more to do with the fact that your horse might have wandered away, and you can’t find them anymore.

Don’t even try putting them on a lead because a lead might not always work. Leads break after the horse has gone 10 blocks away, so the same might be true if you put the lead on a fence post. Another problem relating to leads that are as old as the game itself is that leads will sometimes glitch out and disappear without any reason whatsoever. This problem might not be in the game anymore, but it just shows you how you shouldn’t rely on leads to keep your horse where you want it to be.

The horse died

If you left your horse unattended and there was a chance for it to roam around, the horse might have gotten stuck in a 2-block-tall construction and suffocated. You wouldn’t be able to tell if you didn’t look for the dropped items immediately after it happened because the dropped saddle and horse armor will despawn after 5 minutes.

Make sure there’s nothing surrounding the horse that could potentially lead them to go into the wall and suffocate to death. This is likely the least possible reason your horse might have disappeared, but it’s still worth investigating and ensuring that your build can’t cause it to die.

How does despawning work in general?

Generally speaking, mobs will despawn if a player is more than 128 blocks away from the mob in question. If a player is 32 blocks away from the mob, it also has a chance of despawning, but the chances are very low. Taming does prevent despawn but not entirely. The best way to prevent the animals from despawning would be to name them.

To name a mob in Minecraft, you must acquire nametags that you’ll then rename in the anvil and press use with it in your hand, aiming at the mob you want to name. The problem with this is that name tags are rare and can’t be crafted. There are multiple ways to acquire nametags, three to be exact, so let’s list them.

None of the methods are the best, and you’ll still have some trouble finding name tags, but if you want to be absolutely sure that your horses aren’t despawning, I suggest acquiring name tags.

Trading

If you have a master-level librarian villager, they can sell you one name tag for 20 emeralds in normal circumstances. This can turn out to be expensive if you don’t have a reliable way of getting emeralds (another villager will sell them for an absurdly low price).

Fishing

When fishing, you have a 5% chance to catch treasure which is what name tags are, but that does not mean you have a 5% chance to capture it. After you see a treasure item, there’s a 16.66% chance that the treasure in question will be a name tag, so this is an incredibly inefficient way of acquiring name tags.

Chests

In Java Edition Minecraft, there are three possible locations where you can find name tags: mineshafts, ancient cities, woodland mansions, and dungeons. The highest chance of finding them is in mineshaft chests (around 4,2%), whereas the lowest chance you have of finding them is in ancient cities (about 16%). You can also find them in buried treasure chests in Bedrock Edition Minecraft.

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