Where do zombie horses spawn in Minecraft?

At night in plains and savanna biomes – including sunflower plains, snowy plains, windswept savanna and savanna plateau. They are rare, and many carry a zombie or skeleton rider.

What do you feed a zombie horse to tame it?

Red mushrooms are its food and heal it, but taming itself works by mounting: each ride raises its temper by 5, and when the temper rolls over its starting value, hearts appear and the horse is yours.

Can you breed zombie horses in Minecraft?

No. Zombie horses cannot be bred at all, so the only way to get one is to find a wild spawn at night and tame it.

How do you stop a zombie horse burning in daylight?

Equip it with horse armour. An armoured zombie horse is protected from sunlight and can be ridden safely during the day; without armour it burns like other undead mobs.

How to Tame a Zombie Horse in Minecraft

For over a decade the zombie horse was Minecraft's ghost: fully coded, rideable in creative experiments, but impossible to meet in survival. The Mounts of Mayhem update finally let it out of the stable. Zombie horses now roam the night plains – frequently carrying an undead jockey that would very much like to kill you – and for the first time you can tame one and ride it as your own deeply unsettling mount.

Where to Find a Zombie Horse

Zombie horses only spawn after dark, and only in the plains and savanna families:

Plains, Sunflower Plains and Snowy Plains
Savanna, Windswept Savanna and Savanna Plateau

They are genuinely rare – well under one in a hundred nighttime spawns in those biomes – so expect a few nights of patrolling with a good view of open ground. Many spawn with a rider: a zombie or skeleton jockey, sometimes armed, even with one of the new spears. The rider steers the horse and is hostile, so the rider has to go before taming can begin.

How Taming Works

Remove the jockey. Kill the rider without killing the horse – the horse itself is passive and will not fight you.
Feed it red mushrooms. A wild zombie horse is usually hurt; red mushrooms are its favourite food and restore its health.
Mount it, get thrown, repeat. Right-click to climb on. The horse rears and bucks you off after a few seconds, exactly like a normal horse.
Watch for the hearts. Every zombie horse starts with a hidden temper between 0 and 99, and each mount adds 5. When your mounts push the temper past the top of its range, the horse is tamed and red hearts burst around it.

Because the starting temper is random, one horse may tame on the second mount while another takes twenty rides. Feeding does not raise temper here – persistence does.

Riding and Keeping It Alive

A tamed zombie horse still wanders where it pleases until you give it a saddle: hold one and use it on the horse, or open the horse's inventory while mounted (E key) and drop the saddle into its slot. The same screen has a slot for horse armour, and here it is not decoration. Like other undead mobs, a zombie horse burns in direct sunlight – but a horse wearing armour is protected, so armour is what turns it from a night-only novelty into an all-day mount.

Saddled up, it rides like a regular horse with one Mounts of Mayhem flourish: hold and release the jump button to make it dash, the same charge-up move the camel and the nautilus use. Line up a spear while dashing and you have the update's signature jousting combo.

What Zombie Horses Cannot Do

There is no breeding them – two zombie horses will never produce a foal, so every mount is one you found and tamed yourself. They also do not attack anything, rider or no rider, which makes them safer neighbours than their jockeys suggest. Find one, armour it, keep it out of the sun until you do, and you own the best-looking Halloween mount in the game, all year round.