Cubing Horses?

I hear about people cubing horses, what does this mean? Is it beneficial? 

It refers to giving horses sugar cubes or hay cubes as treats. For horses over 3 that are focused on showing, it's not very useful at all, as both cubes distribute stats randomly and won't specifically target specialty-specific stats. Some players, however, will use cubes for riding school horses, or give them to horses while they are under 3, in order to provide an overall larger stat boost. When that horse turns 3, they assign a discipline that they don't want, then convert that discipline to the one they want the horses to have, in order to redistribute those randomly assigned stats.

(since I was just a tad late, what River said xD)

This just means a horse has been fed hay cubes or sugar cubes as treats. In some ways, it can be beneficial. If you cube a horse, and then plan to convert it to whatever your desired discipline is before breeding, it can help gain stats quicker. So say you have a foundation you want in western, or horse bred for western. If you initially place them in, lets say, dressage, and then riding school/show/cube them, and then convert to western before you breed, all those stats get appropriately redistributed so the non specialty stats are that of the base/birth stats. This way your foals don't have super high non specialty stats and become useless for shows.

However, if you cube horses and don't convert them, you get a high number of non-specialty stats. So as far as showing goes, they all count towards the level the horse is in, but only the specialty stats truly matter to show. So now you have a horse with, for example, 500 total stats, and only 200 are in the specialty (just for example) competing against a 500 stat horse with 450 in the specialty. The one with all the specialty specific stats is going to win against yours every time. And then when you breed them, the foals are stuck with these high non-specialty stats that can't be fixed, even by converting the discipline, because that's what they were born with.

So long story short, if you plan to convert into a proper discipline (whatever its bred for/or whatever you want the foundation to be) later, it can be good. If you have no intentions of converting, but still want people to possibly buy your foals/breed to your horse/ whatever, I wouldn't do it c:

Last edited on 2018-10-25 at 10:23:52 by ηεⲃυℓα

I've found that cubing is good for foundation horses that you have no plan to show.  For example, my recent set of paint horses are ultimately specialized for western.  Rather than put them to western at age 3, I'll set them to anything else (I believe it was show jumping this time) and cube them up until their breeding age at 19.  Right before breeding age I pull them from cubes onto either green apples or carrots (western food), convert them all from show jumping to western, and have them ready for their first breeding.  

These horses do not show in their lifetime, and therefore gather no points.  Points don't really mean much other than how well they've showed, so that doesn't matter to me for foundations.    They are strictly riding school (but riding school + cubes, given the 10k price to convert, is still a profit in the end, and extremely easy to do for large groups).

From my teke experiment, it also seems like cubed + schooled foundations have a higher overall average stat gain.

Rules for cubing:
• Don't breed them while cubed or before converted.  The foal will have high non-specialty stats (stats not counted towards showing) and will not compete well, ever.  It ruins future generations.
• Don't show while cubing.  For the reason above as well. They won't win.
• Place them in an incorrect specialization while cubing, so they can be moved into another spec (10k conversion) instead of double converting (10k + 2evc).
• Cubed horses may not sell the way you want them too.  It's hard to see base stats unless posted, and the new owner would have to pay the 10k to convert themselves.
• Cubing does give you a few more stats than regular food does, so keep that in mind.