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, granted once per player 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 will just refuse the purchase and refund you automatically.

Where to buy and upgrade

All buying and upgrading happens at the Mount Breeder in the Imperial City. You need to be physically within 32 blocks of the breeder 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. If you try to buy a locked tier, you’ll see something like:

“The T2 Horse unlocks at Empire tier 3 (current: 2). 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 fully speed-upgraded Hog T3 can reach roughly 28.5 blocks/second, close to the game’s absolute speed ceiling, while a base Bull T1 barely outpaces walking speed at around 4.6 blocks/second — it’s an entry-level cargo mule, not a racer.

Upgrading your mount

Every mount has four independent upgrade tracks: SPEED, DURABILITY, STORAGE, and STEP. 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 follow the same flat, low-cost ladder across almost every type and tier:

SPEED (4 levels on every type/tier)

Adds flat speed multiplier per level:

DURABILITY (4 levels on every type/tier)

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

STORAGE (capped at 2 or 3 levels depending on type)

Adds fractional cargo rows:

STEP (the smallest ladder)

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

In short: the Bull leans into STORAGE (it’s the hauler, with the only 3rd storage rung), the Hog leans into STEP (it’s the raider that needs to clear rough terrain, with the only 2nd step rung), and the Horse is the generalist with the smallest max ladders on both.

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 scales with the mount’s effective storage rows (base rows plus any STORAGE upgrades), rounded to the nearest whole row, and caps out at 6 rows (9 slots per row).

Weight gate on summoning

To summon a mount at all, your own inventory can’t be too full. The cap is based on the mount’s effective storage rows:

• Cap formula: 9 + round(effective storage rows × 9) occupied slots among your 36 main inventory slots (armor and offhand don’t count).
• Concretely, at base stats: Hog T1 caps you at 18 stacks, Horse T1 at 27 stacks, and Bull T1 at 36 stacks — the Bull effectively has no gate at all, since that’s your entire inventory.

This is rechecked roughly every 10 seconds while you’re riding. Go over the limit and you’ll get a warning first, then be forcibly dismounted if you don’t lighten your load.

Dismissing a loaded mount

If your mount’s cargo hold isn’t empty when you dismiss it, its contents spill on the ground. You’ll be warned first:

“Your Bull T1 is carrying N stack(s). Dismissing spills it on the ground.”

You then have 15 seconds to confirm by running /mount dismiss again.

Riding mechanics

• Speed ramp-up: mounts don’t hit top speed instantly — they accelerate over about 7 seconds, starting at roughly 30% of top speed and ramping up from there.
• 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 — you can’t mount-swap mid-fight to make an escape.
• Switch cooldown: after dismissing a mount — including logging out, which counts as a dismiss — you must wait 5 seconds before summoning another. This is a deliberate anti-instant-swap measure, and relogging doesn’t get around it.
• 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 cactus, fire, lava, drowning, suffocation, or crowding. So a base Bull T1 (9 hits) can actually survive roughly 4.5 seconds of continuous cactus contact rather than dying in well under a second.
• Unattended mounts: if you go offline while a mount is summoned, it despawns after a 30-second grace period via a housekeeping sweep. A mount also despawns 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
• Over the inventory weight cap
• Combat tag active
• Switch cooldown active
• Mount not owned
• Already have a mount summoned
• 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, especially once its unique 3rd STORAGE rung is bought.
• 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.