HGG Community Forums

I'm not sure it's ever been completely quantified exactly what the pasture bonus does. But the long and short of it is it results in higher quality foals. The way I've heard it explained before is that every mare has the ability to produce foals within a range of quality (remembering that most of these values are hidden from us). The pasture bonus might either boosts that quality range up a little bit all the way across that range or it causes mares to produce foals only from the higher end of that range, but that is pure speculation.

Basically, the longer you can leave your mares in the pasture, the more bonus they accumulate. If you take your mare out of the pasture for any reason (showing, egg collection, public breeding, breeding with a straw), the bonus resets to 0. It also resets when you breed them in the pasture. They can only accumulate a months worth of bonus (I think 30 days) so there is no reward for skipping a season and leaving them in the pasture.

There are no bonuses to leaving a stallion in a pasture, so I just put mine in long enough to breed and pull them back out to use for showing.

There are other benefits to using pastures. These are a few:
Breeding costs half as much--500hbs per mare.
You can breed as many as 50 (or as few as 1) mares to a stallion all at once, assuming everyone is breedable.
You get an email that tells you which foal was the best in the batch of foals that are in your pastures (if you fail to remove the foals from the pasture and breed another batch, it may just tell you the same foal is the best).

There are a few drawbacks too.
If you put more than one stallion in a pasture, there is no way to predict which mares each will cover.
You can't use straws or eggs to breed with the pasture bonus--the mares have to be out of the pasture to use them.
Mares can't show from the pasture.
If you forget to pull your foals out of the pasture, they disappear on the 28th of each month. If you forget to pull stallions out, pastures automatically breed at the beginning of breeding season (this can be an advantage if you plan for it).

I'm not a particularly long term player, so if any of this is incorrect, please correct me y'all!