Avoiding inbreeding block?

I know that horses with the same grandparents can’t breed, but what about great grandparents? If I were to have each pairing of my foundation herd produce 2 offspring, and bred those siblings to another pair of siblings that don’t share a recent ancestor, how big would my foundation have to be at minimum? Before I calculated a minimum of 16 so at gen 4, there would be 2 groups of 8 horses that could breed with each other. By what generation can I not factor in gen 1 into the inbreeding issue? Gen2? Etc.
Thanks!

You want even groups and generally in a multiple of 4. 16 (so 8x8) would get you 4 subsequent generations not including your starting foundations. Usually you want to annotate which gen/pair is from who so you can keep track. In the help it details:

Thank you so much!

If you want to check current pairings or ever need to double check, there's an Inbreeding Checker tool in Help > Breeding.

On selling line crossed horses- most people only check the first page of the pedigree for crosses but if the horse is really good for showing and/or the line isn't already overbred (where lots of horses in the game are related in some way) inbreeding is overlooked. I personally don't mind a few line crosses if the pedigree isn't common, but close inbreeding with lots of foals puts me off as it's difficult to find unrelated horses down the line. 

Thank you for your help! Both of you lol I was planning on keeping 12 foundation horses of each gender (maybe 16). I plan to produce 3 foals from each pairing, picking the best 2 for future breeding and retiring the third so it doesn’t get mixed up. I was mainly going to use this as a personal show line! So horse sales aren’t my main concern at the moment.

Last edited on 2021-10-03 at 07:16:47 by Kasi