MOUNTS

Mounts are QuantumRift’s transportation and logistics system: three animal types, each in three tiers, each specializing in a different job — general travel, heavy hauling, or fast raiding. Mounts never permanently die; enough hits just throw you off and despawn them, so there’s no risk of losing one for good beyond having to summon it again.

The three mount types

Every type comes in three tiers (T1 / T2 / T3), and each tier is a completely separate mount — upgrades you buy on a T1 don’t carry over if you later buy the T2 or T3 of the same type. You’re buying (and upgrading) each one independently.

Getting your first mount

• Your very first mount ever is free — specifically the Horse T1. New players get it automatically the first time they join, so it is already in your stable; a player from before that change can still claim it once at the Mount Breeder in the Imperial City.
• Everything else costs credits: T1 Bull, T1 Hog, and every T2/T3 of any type are always paid purchases, even the first time you buy them.
• You can’t buy the same (type, tier) mount twice — trying is refused before anything is charged.
• One mount order at a time: while a buy or upgrade is still going through, a second one is refused with “Your last mount order is still going through. Try again in a moment.” Nothing is charged for the refused one.

Where to buy and upgrade

All buying and upgrading happens at the Mount Breeder in the Imperial City. You need to be physically within 8 blocks of the Stable Master himself to buy a mount or purchase any upgrade — this applies to both actions, not just the initial purchase. If you’re too far away, you’ll see:

“Visit the Mount Breeder at the Imperial City to buy or upgrade mounts.”

Tier locks

Higher tiers aren’t just about credits — they’re gated behind the Empire’s overall progress:

• T1 — no requirement, available from the start.
• T2 — requires the Empire to have reached Imperial mission tier 3.
• T3 — requires the Empire to have reached Imperial mission tier 5.

This is a server-wide gate: it’s the Empire’s collective mission progress, not your personal progress, that unlocks these tiers for everyone. The Mount Breeder shows a locked tier greyed out with “Unlocks at Empire tier 3 (current: 1)”, /mount info prints the same line, and the PDA’s Mount tab marks it as locked. If you try to buy a locked tier, you’ll see something like:

“HORSE T2 unlocks at Empire tier 3 (current: 1). Advance the Empire’s missions first.”

Purchase prices

Base stats by type and tier

Stats below are the mount’s starting point before any upgrades are purchased.

Horse — Balanced Transport

Bull — Heavy Hauler

Hog — Fast Raider

The Hog is built for speed and mobility but is fragile in a fight; the Bull is the opposite — tanky and cargo-heavy but slow; the Horse sits in between as the generalist choice. A speed multiplier means the same speed on every type: each 1× is 6.48 blocks/second, so a Horse and a Hog of the same tier run exactly as fast. A fully speed-upgraded Horse or Hog T3 reaches about 44.1 blocks/second. The Bull is the slow one: a base Bull T1 runs about 10 blocks/second, almost twice sprinting speed, and a fully upgraded Bull T3 about 25.1 blocks/second.

Upgrading your mount

Every mount has three independent upgrade tracks: SPEED, DURABILITY, and STEP. (There is no Storage upgrade any more: each tier has a fixed cargo hold, see below.) Each track has its own ladder of levels for that specific (type, tier) mount — you have to buy rungs in order, and you can’t skip levels. Trying to buy past a track’s top level gets refused with an “upgrade at cap” message.

Upgrade prices depend on the mount’s tier, and are the same on every type. SPEED and DURABILITY use this ladder:

STEP has its own prices, listed in its section below.

SPEED (4 levels on every type/tier)

Adds flat speed multiplier per level:

A fully speed-upgraded mount is about as fast as the next tier with two speed levels, so upgrading your current mount is never wasted money.

DURABILITY (4 levels on every type/tier)

Adds to the mount’s “hits to dismount” pool:

STEP (the smallest ladder)

Raises how tall a block the mount can step up without jumping:

In short: the Hog leans into STEP (it’s the raider that needs to clear rough terrain, with the only 2nd step rung), the Bull is the hauler through its bigger cargo hold, and the Horse is the generalist.

Cargo and carrying capacity

Every mount has its own cargo hold — a separate storage grid from your personal inventory. Open it with /mount storage while riding, or by shift-right-clicking the mount. Grid size is fixed by the mount’s type and tier (9 slots per row):

There is no weight or item limit: you can summon and ride any mount whatever you carry in your own inventory.

What happens to your cargo

Your cargo belongs to the mount, not to the entity in the world: dismissing it, logging out, walking away from it or having it despawn keeps everything in the hold, and it’s all there the next time you summon that mount.

The one exception is a killed mount. If your mount takes enough hits to be destroyed, its whole cargo hold drops on the ground where it fell, so a loaded mount is a real risk on hostile ground.

Riding mechanics

• Speed ramp-up: mounts don’t hit top speed instantly. A mount starts at roughly 30% of its top speed and builds up to full speed over about 7 seconds of riding while you move. Standing still for up to 2 seconds keeps your speed; stop any longer, or get off your mount, and you start again from low speed.
• Inertia: mounts don’t stop on a dime either — there’s deceleration drag when you let off.
• Step height: governs the tallest block a mount can walk up without jumping. Values range from 2 blocks (Horse/Bull at T1–T2) up toward the engine’s hard ceiling of 10 blocks, though no mount’s ladder gets remotely close to that cap even fully upgraded.
• Combat tag: getting hit locks you out of summoning or swapping mounts for 30 seconds by default, so you can’t mount-swap mid-fight to make an escape. A hit on your mount tags you too, whether it comes from another player (who gets tagged as well) or from a fall, fire or lava while you ride. Your own hit on your own mount never tags you, though it still counts toward the hits that throw you off.
• Swapping mounts: summon another mount while one is out and the one that’s out goes back to the stable, its cargo kept in its hold, and the new one appears under you at once. Summon the mount that’s already out and it’s brought back to you. A swap is refused while the mount that’s out still has cargo in its hold: empty it or dismiss it first.
• Switch cooldown: after dismissing a mount with /mount dismiss, or logging out with one summoned, you must wait 5 seconds before summoning another. Relogging doesn’t get around it. A direct swap (summoning while a mount is out) doesn’t wait.
• Stepping off: a mount you step off stands still where you left it, Horse included, until you climb back on.
• Hits to dismount: mounts don’t take damage like normal creatures — after absorbing the listed number of “counted” hits, they throw their rider and despawn. Hits are throttled to a maximum of about 2 counted hits per second, even from continuous damage sources like fire, lava, drowning, suffocation, or crowding. Cactus and berry bushes never count at all: you can ride through them without losing a hit.
• Unattended mounts: if you go offline while a mount is summoned, it stays where you left it for a 30-second grace period, so a quick reconnect finds it waiting, and then despawns with its cargo kept in the hold. While it waits it can still be attacked, and a killed mount drops its cargo. A mount also despawns (cargo kept) if you wander more than 80 blocks away from it.

Commands

Mounts can also be summoned and swapped from your PDA, not just via /mount commands.

Common failure messages

Summoning or buying can fail for a number of reasons, each with its own message:

• Not at the Mount Breeder
• Tier-locked (Empire hasn’t reached the required tier)
• Insufficient funds
• Combat tag active
• Switch cooldown active
• Mount not owned
• The mount that’s out still has cargo in its hold (so it can’t be swapped)
• Upgrade at cap
• Can’t summon here (e.g. spectator mode, inside a vehicle, or an unloaded world)

Choosing a mount

• Horse — your free starter and the generalist choice. Good all-around speed and step height with modest cargo space.
• Bull — the hauler. Slow, but tanky (highest hits-to-dismount by far) and built to carry the most cargo: its hold is 3, 5 and 6 rows at T1, T2 and T3, against 1, 2 and 3 on the other two.
• Hog — the raider. Fast and nimble, with the best step height in the game once upgraded, but fragile — it goes down in the fewest hits of the three types.