Horses are strange beasts in Skyrim. Unlike in the real world, where the primary advantage of travelling by horseback is a significant speed and stamina boost, in Skyrim the main use of horses appears to be travelling up nearly vertical surfaces. It’s almost as if the horse development team confused horses with laddergoat.
There are a lot of horse mods for skyrim, but if you want a simple mod that just makes the horse run faster, then Faster Vanilla Horses is the mod for you. Faster Vanilla Horses does two things:
Boosts base horse speed to something realistic (and balanced, this doesn’t give you ridiculously overpowered speed of light horses.) 30% is the magic number, if you were wondering just how much faster this mod makes horses.
Extends gallop time. Gallop time is perhaps the most ridiculous thing in the vanilla Skyrim horse experience. Anyone who has ever spent five minutes with a horse knows that their gallop lasts, much, much, much longer than twenty seconds. A well conditioned horse can go at a full gallop for several minutes or even longer. Skyrim horses gallop as if they’re chronic asthmatics who have been doing thing but sitting on the couch eating fast food and chugging soda for the past half-decade.
The saddest thing about Skyrim’s vanilla horses is that they’re pretty much useless. You occasionally get a kick out of seeing one hoof a dragon in the face, but most of the time you can sprint faster than you can ride and as the game goes on, fast travel becomes the travel mode of choice, which really breaks immersion. With faster vanilla horses, you not only enjoy your Skyrim mounts more, you value them more.
The Skyrim Faster Vanilla Horses Mod can be downloaded through the Steam Workshop.
