It's no secret that I have, in the last 20-ish months, accumulated Many Horses in Star Stable Online.

A screenshot from the poster's Star Stable Online home stable. In the background is their Hanoverian, Ardentstar doing the flehmen response, though the focus is on the blue box in the middle of the screen. To the left of the box is the poster's Pasture, with a selection of horse portraits in a 3x6 grid that are mostly level 15, though there are some level 1 horses. To the right is the Stable section, where the poster's active horses are. Most are level 15, though there is a selection of level 11 and 2 horses which are horses the user is actively training.


Now, I have Opinions about the home stable and hope that there is an update on the way, because, frankly, I need more ways to find the horses I'm looking for. But, that's not what this post is for.

No, what this post is for is going over my methodology with training horses from level 1 to 15. Or, at least, how I am doing it currently.

My home stable is fully expanded, which means I have 18 "active" spots for horses I can just grab and ride. These are my favorites for one reason or another.

The left side of the barn, and the four most "upper" spots of the right side are my permanent horses. These guys are fully leveled, but I want to keep them in the barn and handy. That leaves me 8 spots for training horses. Currently, I have 6 on the way to 15, and 2 that will begin training when those 6 are fully leveled, but, until then, daily care will get them a few levels.

Some background if you're just wandering in here and have no idea what the heck Star Stable is: There are two types of experience in the game: player XP (XP), and horse XP (HXP). Once you're done with all the story stuff, opportunities for player XP are slim outside of events. But, there's a LOT of HXP each day.

Horses need 33,000 HXP to be fully leveled, and it just so happens that level 11 is 16,500.

Cropped screenshots from Star Stable Online, showing the horse stat/gear cards. The card on the left is the user's Hanoverian, Ardentstar, who is level 15, and to the right is their Westphalian, Ambers, who is level 11.

(Ambers has an extra day of stable care, so she's 300 HXP higher than she was yesterday.)

My goal, then, is to take the training group from 1-11, then 11-15.

Stopping at level 11 was originally just from Vibes, then I checked what the actual halfway point was and was like "Oh, neat."

Now!

I have made a list of what I prioritize each day in Star Stable, and I call this the Duskbard Training Circuit. I prioritize the 250 and 200 HXP daily races, with a few others that I will do just so I don't have to go back for them if I decide to do the rest of the activities. My linked list there grants 17,275 HXP as is, not including a few "optional" races, or the daily care/home stable chores, but, there's more than enough HXP on the map to fully level a horse in a single day.

So, I split it up between multiple horses.

Right now, with the Anniversary event going (for one more day), I can get basically 3 horses either to 11 or maxed. Today, I ended up getting 4 maxed because I ran some of the repeatable races more than once, and the first one was about halfway through 14 at the start.

It takes me about 2 hours to get a horse to the stopping part. So, yes, I can get a horse fully leveled in about 4 hours.

Anyway!

With each group, I go through all of them from 1-11, then start over at the horse in the stall closest to the main entrance (which is the bottom Entrance on that screenshot above). When that horse is 15, I de-tack them, swap to the next horse in the next stall, and put the newly minted level 15 into the pasture, then I check my spreadsheet (yes I have a spreadsheet for all my horses) for who's next on the list.

(Do you want your own spreadsheet? Here you go. I'm working on non-Google versions.)

I have my "To Level" list sorted by horse name. So I grab the next horse on the list, and then go through and hide all the other horses of that model. Those horses will get unhidden once I'm through the list, and the process starts over. Those new horses are for the next group, so I don't level them beyond what they get from daily care (300 HXP).

I did just reduce the size of my training group from 14 to 8, because, frankly, it's easier on my brain to see the smaller group and have that quicker turnover, but even if I have a larger training group, it's still the same principal.

Okay, this is longer than I thought it'd be, but this is at least less disjointed than if I described this on stream.