Okay, I'm finally to the point where I have a mare (and soon more) to go out to breed. That got me wondering if I'll be allowed to name the offspring. The manual mentions the ability to name horses, but I don't see specifics on it.

If I can name them, what's the process?

While on that subject, can I name ANY of my horses at any time or, once named, they're forever that name?

Yes you can. Click on their generated name in the details page. It should be in red, showing it can be edited.

Any other horse you own with a red name can be changed. I know unraced 1 & 2 yr olds, if bought. I can't remember if you can rename any age, if bought unraced. Once it races though, name is set.

We're also hoping that Mark will introduce an option to rename any unraced horse, including ones that are not owned by yourself. This was raised a few months ago and Mark said that it should be possible to bring this option in with a future patch, but it hasn't been mentioned again since then.

The reason for this is that after all the default names in the game have been used up (which takes around 10 years on default settings), the game starts to use only the two-word names that were created by the name generator, which include some ridiculously silly names! If we have the option to rename any horse, it brings many advantages: the option to name horses something relevant to their sire/dam, the option to have one-word names or names with three or more words, and also the option to name overseas horses something relevant to the region they're racing in.

I'm with you. This really seems like something a mod might target. I can envision a mod that could take over this task to keep it from becoming an issue.

This game needs to be about immersion and 10 years in the sim will fly by which means, based on what you said, it will begin to lose that critical element. Naming things is one of those tasks no developer I've ever worked with enjoys doing. It's never optimal no matter what you try, but it's one of those things that should be kept in mind.

Heck, how many horse names have there been over the years? It should be possible for a mod to essentially download from a list of all known horse names and then apply them. You could even eliminate every horse that won big so that none of the names will be familiar to anyone except the most addicted trip handicapper. There have to be millions of them in a database somewhere.

Currently, the default names files contain around 27,000 names, and the generated names files contain over 5 million names (split into two files, with just over 2.5m names suitable for colts and roughly the same for fillies). When I first noticed how silly some of the generated names were, I spoke to Mark about it and looked into the possibility of modding this in some way, but it's massively time-consuming, so I gave up on it and decided the best way is what some others had been suggesting, that we should have the option to rename any yearlings or unraced horses, including those belonging to AI trainers.

I couldn't find any database with the required number of names in it. The British Horseracing Authority (BHA)'s website has a database with around 160,000 horses, which is still a long way short, and probably includes some duplicates. As Mark's name generator program takes words from the default names files and puts them together into millions of random two-word names, I also looked into the possibility of updating the names in the default files, using only fairly standard "adjective noun" names, in the hope that when these were fed into the name generator the names produced would at least be a little more believable. However, this still requires several thousand unique names for colts and the same for fillies, so it's still very time-consuming. It also doesn't remove the issue of only ever having two-word horse names, and wouldn't allow us to name new horses something relevant to their sire/dam.

So, I definitely think the best solution is to allow us the option of renaming any unraced horse! Hopefully Mark can add this in a future patch.

Thanks for considering the mod. If I can help in any way, let me know. I owned a major game testing company for two decades and enjoy helping projects I like. I'll poke around for some sort of other solution. Someone somewhere has a database of horse names. Finding a public one might be the challenge.

This site seems to have countless horses (had a hard time finding a horse it didn't know and finally did with a middling trotter from the 80s):

http://www.rsb.net.au/Publishing/ror/Ho ... dHorse.asp

Another potentially even better one. The horses are already broken down by gender:

https://www.pedigreequery.com

My thinking would be to reach out to such places to see if they'd be willing to share the database in return for a credit and the understanding that the names won't be used to mimic the actual horses and, possibly, that all the best known horses would be removed from the list.

Following the latest patch today, we do now have the option to rename any yearling or unraced 2yo in the game, not just our own, so I'm happy with that. At least we now have the option to scan through the new yearlings each season and rename any that we choose. For me, this is an extremely useful addition to the game.