Weird West: How do horses work

Horses are unavoidable in a book that emphasizes the wild west so strongly (and supernaturally) as the Weird West does. Horses will be an important mechanic for players to move around regardless of how they choose to go on the path ahead of them. Users that pre-purchase Weird West will receive Calamity, a starter horse that can be obtained from the mailbox at the start of the game. For those that don't, you'll need to spend around $200 at the beginning of the game to buy a horse from one of the many stables strewn over the landscape. Moving on without a horse will make bounty hunting in Weird West much more difficult, as these scheduled events will expire if players do not arrive in time.

Moving around without a horse is possible, except for bounty hunting: the game invites players to explore in their own time. Having a horse, though, decreases travel time in half, and there is plenty of traveling to be done across the entire geography of Weird West. Some characters may need to buy a horse at the start of their voyage, and the cost will gradually rise as the chapters progress.

Players can simply steal a horse in any scenario they load into, albeit this will cost the character Honor. These horses can be utilized to travel from one location to another, however, the horse will leave once the voyage is over. It's possible that you'll end up loading into a scene with no horses available to steal, but for some, taking a chance in exchange for saving more than $200 can be worth it.

Horse theft, on the other hand, means that players are losing inventory space. As they explore the land of Weird West, cowpokes may find their bags overflowing to the seams with goodies, and even utilizing the inventory spaces of other characters may not be enough. Horses have a saddlebag inventory that adds 32 spaces to their storage capacity. All horses have a shared storage mechanism, which means that a horse stored with ore in the first chapter can be retrieved with a different owned horse in a later chapter.

Finally, horses are unable to be modified to make them go quicker. While additional chapters of Weird West will increase horse expenses, these newer stallions travel at the same speed throughout the landscape. All of the horses we've found so far have the same speed, which is measured by traveling between two pre-determined spots on the map (whether purchased, stolen, or from the pre-order bonus).