◦°˚SJ|284 Endearing

Guide: What NSS is & How it Works

NSS stands for Non-Specialty Stats and is one of the main showing/breeding mechanics on Equiverse. While it is not necessary to utilize the NSS system to play EV and some players have been successful without it, learning how NSS works can give a significant advantage when showing and breeding, and reduce a lot of the frustration new players have when their horses perform badly for no apparent reason. So whether you've just started out or need a refresher on how NSS works, hopefully this guide can serve as a good summary of how the NSS system works.

The short answer to what is NSS, would be that NSS are stats that are not used for your horse's current specialty. You may ask why these stats would be a big deal if they're not being used anyway. The answer is that while your horse isn't using them, that doesn't mean they're not affecting your horse. Unlike other horse sims where unused stats simply do nothing, stats not used by your horse's specialty will often have a negative effect.
To explain what this effect is and how you can manage NSS requires a longer explanation. Of the two areas affected by NSS, I will start with explaining shows first and then breeding.


An Overview of Specialties and Grades
To start, let's take a look at the help page on Showing. While it's good to read everything that is written here when you can, we're here to look at 3 things in particular.

What stats are used for which specialty: First, at the top you can see a table. This shows all six specialties (also known as disciplines) that you can have on EV and the five stats that each horse has. Each specialty is made up of a unique pair of two stats, for example you can see that Endurance is listed as INT (Intelligence) and END (Endurance). These are called Specialty Stats and are a large part of what determines your horse's placement in shows.

What stats are given by which treats: Next, just below that is a small list of treats and stats. For each of the five stats, there is a designated treat that will only increase that stat. So from here, you can see that an Endurance horse would need to eat Green Apples and Turnips to gain more INT and END respectively.

How the stat ranges work: Lastly, near the bottom of the page is a larger table. This is a list of grades that your horse will fall into based on their current Total Stats. On the left you can see all the names of the grades, from Novice 1 to International 5. Then there's the stat range, a horse at or in between those pairs of numbers will be within that grade. As soon as a horse goes over that range, a button will appear on their page allowing you to upgrade to the next grade. Next is the amount of stats per grade. You can see that it becomes higher with every grade, starting with just 49 stats and ending with 580. You do not need to memorize this table by any means, but it's good to note that it's there.


How to Determine the Best Specialty
Now let's move on to an example of what foundation horse stats can look like on EV. These horses have no specialty and haven't had treats yet. These are just freshly created foundation horses.

Horse A
STR: 20
SPD: 21
AGI: 19
INT: 21
END: 19
ALL: 100

Horse B
STR: 17
SPD: 25
AGI: 17
INT: 25
END: 16
ALL: 100

What specialty should these horses be set to? Well truthfully, in most cases foundation horses can be set to any specialty and do well. Their stats are too low to have a huge effect, though occasionally you'll come across a foundation that should really not be set to a particular specialty or it'll risk a poor showing career.

But in this case, you may notice right away that the Speed and Intelligence stats for both are a bit higher than any of their other stats. Comparing this to the small table of specialties noted above, it easily tells you that these horses are best suited for the Western specialty.

So, we set the horses to Western and their Specialty Stats are Speed and Intelligence from now on. When setting a horse's specialty, they will earn extra stats for that specialty depending on how much foal/young horse training was done. But those aren't really important right now so we'll skip over them.

Now what would happen if our two horses competed against each other?


How Showing Works

First of all, shows will primarily look for the horse with the highest Specialty Stats. So to determine who is more likely to win, we have to find who has the highest specialty stats, not who has the highest total stats.

Let's assume both of our horses still have 100 total stats. We're also going to color the specialty stats for both horses in green to help distinguish them from non-specialty stats.

Horse A
STR: 20
SPD: 21
AGI: 19
INT: 21
END: 19
ALL: 100

Horse B
STR: 17
SPD: 25
AGI: 17
INT: 25
END: 16
ALL: 100

Counting our horses specialty stats, we see that Horse A has 42 and Horse B has 50. So based on this information, we know now that Horse B has higher specialty stats. We enter both horses into the same show, and Horse B will likely win over Horse A!

Of course, when actually showing your horses you will need to be mindful of several more things. Other factors weighted in shows include daily care, treating, training level, and tack. So make sure you train your horses every day to gain training levels, care and treat them before shows, and equip them with 5/5 grade tack.

But on the topic of treating, not any treat will do. Treating is one of the biggest impacts on showing and breeding, and doing it incorrectly can cause major problems down the line...


Incorrect Treating

To demonstrate how improper treating affects showing performance, we're going to take our two foundations and assign them different treats.

Horse A will get treats suited for their specialty, using the help page you can see what treats give which stats and base your treating around that. Which of the two specialty stats you increase does not matter, you do not have to focus one or raise both equally. Carrots will increase the Speed stat, so we'll give those to Horse A.

Horse B will get treats that are not suited for the Western specialty. Endurance is a non-specialty stat for Western so we'll give them Turnips every day.

Some weeks pass and we're going to assume that the only stats gained during this time was through those treats. Now our horses have gained 49 stats in that time for a total of 149 total stats each, the very end of the Novice 1 grade! When a horse is near the end of a grade, it's the best time to show them since they will have their highest possible stats within the grade.

Horse A
STR: 20
SPD: 70
AGI: 19
INT: 21
END: 19
ALL: 149

Horse B
STR: 17
SPD: 25
AGI: 17
INT: 25
END: 65
ALL: 149

Again, both of these horses have the exact same total stats. Let's try competing them against each other again. We enter them both in a show and.... now Horse A wins?

One look at their specialty stats will show you that despite both horses gaining the same amount of total stats, Horse B did not gain any specialty stats. Horse A now has a whopping 91 specialty stats, while Horse B is still at 50 specialty stats.

This is how non-specialty stats work, NSS gets in the way of potential specialty stats that your horse could have gained while in their current grade, potentially causing your horse's number of specialty stats to be lower than the horse they compete against.

So basically: the lower the NSS, the more room you have for Specialty Stats.


How to Breed for NSS
While the system for breeding down NSS may be a little complex, it's built in a way that has you always either lose or retain the same NSS and never gain more. Simply put, it takes the average between each parent's NSS stat to create the foal's NSS stat, then has a chance of lowering even further.






But suppose all the other horses we compete against are also fresh foundation horses, all with 5/5 tack and cared for just like our horse. What could cause our horse to lose is the fact that our horse actually has fairly average specialty stats, which is a direct consequence of their also fairly average NSS. Let's look at a possible competitor's stats to see how NSS affect specialty stats.




This horse has the exact same number of total stats, but their specialty stats are higher and NSS are lower than our horse.



The other factors that affect showing are:
Daily Care
Health/Happiness
Training Level
Tack




When setting a 3 year old foundation's specialty, they will receive 6 extra points for each of their newly set specialty stats. We'll also color the specialty stats for both horses in green from now on.

Horse A
STR: 20
SPD: 27
AGI: 19
INT: 27
END: 19
ALL: 112

Horse B
STR: 17
SPD: 30
AGI: 18
INT: 31
END: 16
ALL: 100

What about their remaining stats? Those would be the Non-Specialty Stats! Any stats that are not used by your horse's current specialty will be their NSS. Western NSS is Strength, Agility, and Endurance because Speed and Intelligence are currently being used. Using the specialty table you can easily find NSS for every specialty, any of the stats that aren't check marked for the specialty will be the NSS.

Now we have Horse A with Western horse with 27 Speed and 27 Intelligence for a total of 55 specialty stats. With our horse treated, now we can enter a show! Of course, you will want to equip tack to this horse first. But I'll explain how tack factors into shows a little bit later.

Our horse now has 113 total stats, so using the table of grade ranges from before we can see the horse's current grade is Novice 1. We enter our horse into 10 Novice 1 Western shows and..... might get poor results actually.