Base Stats (Wild Lv150)
| Stat | Base Value | Per Level (Wild) | Per Level (Tamed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health | 240 | +48 | +5.4% |
| Stamina | 560 | +56 | +10% |
| Weight | 350 | +7 | +4% |
| Melee Damage | 100% | +5% | +1.7% |
Taming Guide
| Food | Amount (Lv150, 1x) | Time | Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple Kibble | 6 | ~5min | 100% |
| Rockarrot | 12 | ~9min | 99.8% |
| Sweet Vegetable Cake | 120 | ~1h 36min | 84.2% |
Special Abilities
Ok so the Equus has three abilities that make it way more useful than just a horse. I slept on this creature for my first 200 hours in ARK and I regret every minute of it.
The first ability is the buck kick, activated with right click or left trigger. The Equus kicks backward with both hind legs dealing decent damage AND torpor to whatever is behind it. The torpor scales with melee damage, so a high melee Equus can actually knock out medium sized creatures like Trikes and Stegos with repeated kicks. I've tamed entire packs of raptors this way — kicking them unconscious and then feeding them meat once they're down. It's the funniest way to tame anything in ARK and I will die on this hill.
The second ability is the saddle, which acts as a mobile mortar and pestle when equipped. You can craft narcotics, sparkpowder, cementing paste, and gunpowder directly from the Equus's inventory while riding it. For early game players who don't have a chemistry bench or even a smithy set up yet, this is a massive quality of life improvement. Gather narcoberries and spoiled meat on the Equus, craft narcotics in its saddle, and immediately use those narcotics to tame something else — all in one trip without returning to base. It's genuinely one of the most underrated utility features in the entire game.
Taming Strategy
Taming an Equus is a passive tame and it's unique because there are two phases to it. The first time I tried to tame one I failed three times in a row and almost rage quit the game, so let me save you from the same frustration.
First, you need the right food in your last hotbar slot. Simple Kibble is best, rockarrots are the second best option. If you don't have rockarrots you need to grow them from seeds in a medium crop plot — takes about 10 hours of real time, so plan ahead or find a server that has them in the market. Without rockarrots or kibble you're basically not taming a high level Equus. Sweet vegetable cake works in theory but takes forever, the effectiveness is terrible, and you'll lose like 10 bonus levels. Defeats the purpose.
Wear a ghillie suit if you have one. The Equus is extremely skittish and will bolt the moment it detects you within about 20 meters. Without ghillie the approach is nearly impossible — the Equus runs faster than you can sprint, and once it flees it won't stop for a solid minute. You'll be chasing a horse across the entire highlands biome like a complete fool. I've done this more times than I'm willing to count.
Once you've sneaked close enough the feed prompt will appear. Feed it the rockarrot or kibble, then immediately mount the Equus by pressing the interact button again. This is where the second phase starts. The Equus will start bucking and running in random directions. You need to stay on it and feed it again whenever the buck animation happens by pressing the prompted button (usually E on PC, or the interact button on console). Repeat this cycle of running, bucking, and feeding until the tame bar fills.
The entire process takes about 5 minutes with Simple Kibble for a Lv150, or about 9 minutes with rockarrots. The key is to not panic when it bucks — if you miss the feed prompt the tame progress resets and you have to start over. That's how I lost my first two Equus tames. I'm still mad about the second one — Lv145 event colored horse, beautiful black and white pattern, ran into a pack of Allosaurus during the tame. There was nothing I could do. I just had to watch it die.
Best Uses
The primary use for an Equus is early to mid game mobility and crafting combined. It's faster than most early game mounts and has a respectable 560 base stamina — enough to sprint for a solid 2 to 3 minutes without stopping. Level stamina or speed depending on your playstyle. I prefer speed because a 150% movement speed Equus outruns almost every non-alpha predator on the map. You can do supply runs between your base and resource nodes in half the time it would take on foot.
But the real draw is the mobile mortar and pestle saddle, which completely changes how you approach resource gathering and crafting. Harvest narcoberries on the Equus, craft narcotics on the move, and use those narcotics to keep a knockout tame unconscious without ever stopping to return to base. For long tames like high level Rexes or Spinos where you need 600+ narcotics, this workflow saves literal hours of back and forth trips. It's the kind of feature that makes you wonder why you ever played without it.
The Equus's lasso ability is unlocked by crafting the saddle — even though the saddle isn't required to ride the Equus. The lasso lets you rope small creatures and drag them behind you while riding. This is incredibly useful for taming. Lasso a creature like a Dilo or a Raptor and drag it into a pre-built taming pen instead of trying to lure it in by aggro. The aggro method is unreliable and often ends with the creature getting stuck on terrain or aggroing something else and dying.
For PVE the lasso is also great for moving baby dinos around during breeding. Babies will follow you but they're slow and get stuck on everything. Lassoing them and dragging them to the feeding trough is way faster and less frustrating. It works on human players too, which is hilarious for PVP — lasso an enemy off their mount and drag them into your turret tower. Very little they can do about it once the rope is on them.
Here's a wild niche use I discovered by complete accident. The Equus's buck kick torpor scales with melee damage. Breed and imprint an Equus with a high melee stat around 500% or higher, and the buck kick deals enough torpor to knock out a Lv150 Rex in about 15 kicks. Because the Equus is fast you can run circles around the Rex while kicking it in the face — the Rex can't hit you because its turn radius is garbage and you're moving at horse speed. This is genuinely one of the funniest ways to tame apex predators in ARK. Nobody does it because nobody levels melee on an Equus, but they're all wrong and missing out. I will defend this opinion with my life.
Equus vs Raptor
The Equus and the Raptor are both early game mobility mounts that people pick between, and the comparison isn't as straightforward as it seems. The Raptor is faster in a straight line, has a pounce attack that pins small creatures, and is a better scout mount for pure speed. But the Raptor has terrible weight, terrible stamina, and can't craft anything — it's a one trick speed pony, literally. The Equus has almost double the base stamina, way more weight, and the mobile mortar and pestle which is an entire base building function the Raptor can't match. For players focused on progression, the Equus helps you get established faster because you can craft narcotics on the go and tame bigger creatures sooner.
The Raptor wins on cool factor — let's be real, riding a dinosaur is cooler than riding a horse. But the Equus wins on pure utility. If you're trying to build up a base and advance through the tech tree efficiently, the Equus is the better choice. You can always tame a Raptor later for scouting.
Breeding Tips
Equus breeding uses gestation not eggs — the female carries the baby internally and gives live birth after about 8 hours on official settings. Longer than most egg incubation times, but the upside is you don't need to manage incubation temperatures, so it's actually easier for beginners. The baby phase lasts about 4 hours 37 minutes, total maturation takes about 1 day and 22 hours (same as Iguanodon and most medium creatures), and the breeding interval is the standard 18 to 48 hours.
The best stats to mutate on an Equus are melee and speed. Higher melee makes the buck kick torpor scale harder, and higher speed makes the Equus outrun everything (its primary defensive mechanism). Health and stamina are secondary — the Equus shouldn't be tanking hits, it should be kiting and kicking and never getting hit. A mutated Equus with 150% base speed plus imprinting bonus is genuinely one of the fastest land creatures in the game. You'll never use a different land mount for anything that doesn't require combat.
Pro Tips
First tip: always bring backup food when taming an Equus. I mean double what the calculator says you need. The Equus's passive tame mechanic is finicky — miss a feed prompt during the bucking phase and the tame resets, you start over from zero. You brought exactly 12 rockarrots for a Lv150, one gets wasted on a failed attempt, now you're short and the Equus is running away. You're standing there holding 11 rockarrots feeling like the biggest idiot on the ARK. This happened to me exactly once before I started bringing 20 rockarrots to every Equus tame. Never happened again. Learned that one the hard way.
Second tip: clear the area around the Equus before you start the passive tame. If there's a raptor, terror bird, or saber tooth anywhere within about 100 meters, it will find you during the bucking phase when you have zero control over where the Equus runs. You'll be bucked off directly into the mouth of a predator. You'll die. The Equus will probably die. The whole tame is wasted. I cannot count how many times this exact scenario has played out. Do a thorough sweep of the area before you start the tame. Just kill everything that moves — it's safer that way.
Third tip: the Equus saddle unlocks at level 20 but you don't need the saddle to ride the Equus. The only thing the saddle gives you is armor for the horse, the ability to craft the lasso, and the mobile mortar and pestle function. If you're just using the Equus as a transport mount you can skip the saddle entirely and save the engram points and resources. But the mortar and pestle function is so useful you should craft the saddle as soon as you can. Once you've used it you can't go back to playing without it. The saddle is cheap to craft — 160 fiber, 240 hide, 85 wood, 80 stone — nothing by mid game standards. The return on investment is immediate because you'll save hours of crafting time.
Fourth tip and this is the most important one: don't try to tame an Equus without a ghillie suit, unless you have kibble and you're really confident in your sneaking skills. The Equus's detection range is huge. Without ghillie the margin for error is like 3 meters — mess up the approach and the Equus bolts, and you have to track it down again. Equus are fast and they don't stop running for a long time. You'll spend more time chasing it than actually taming it. Ghillie suit pieces are cheap to craft (some organic polymer, hide, and fiber per piece) and having full ghillie makes the approach almost foolproof — the Equus's detection range drops from about 20 meters to about 5 meters. You can walk right up and start the tame process without any drama. Yeah it's that good.