Minecraft Forums

1. Need:
a ) Pig redundancy - Pigs in minecraft so far have two uses - riding, and food source. The former has since been overtaken by much speedier, tougher, and easier to control horses. The latter overlaps with many other animals, that happen to be cheaper in breeding due to greater access to seeds and wheat from everpresent grass, as opposed to semi-rare carrots that are found in villages or are rare finding on zombies.
b ) Hoglin redundancy - being tough to kill and very dangerous to handle, Hoglins make sub-par food source in comparison to overworld animals, most notably cows, that provide the same resources as hoglins do - food and leather.
2. Idea: If Hoglin and overworld Pig happen to be in proximity and are both in breeding mode, they would interbreed. The resulting animal, would be sterile, like mules, and, once saddled, make a durable, but not very fast land-based mount. It would attack enemies if approached with its tusks, and if so, its approach to the player would be similar to Llamas - if hit, it would retaliate once. Such mounts would make excellent steeds to ride into the fray, despite transport difficulties (it cannot ride striders, requires additional minecart, and so on). Mind that these mobs would inherit a fraction (just fraction) of hoglin knockback resistance.
Alternative concept: The swine mount might be made completely passive instead, but given ability to mount chest and transport objects. It would combine endurance of armored horses with transport capacity of donkeys - at cost of any disadvantages mentioned in balance section below. Personally I prefer combat variation of the mob though.
3. Balance (Ideas I think about to make it useful, but not gamebreaking mount, including ideas I would reject on my own)
a ) Zombification in Overworld. It would severely inhibit versatility of the mount, something I would really not like to see personally.
b ) (combat variation) Heavy maintenance. If it could regenerate only after being fed golden carrots. Due to amount of hitpoints, it would have to eat quite a lot of them. That's a nerf I personally approve.
c ) (combat variation) Going amok. Once on badly injuried, it would become uncontrolable and attack whatever hurt it, no matter what player is trying to do. Sometimes to save himself from certain death, the player will have to abandon the mount, or heal it immediately. I personally neither approve nor disapprove.
d ) (carrier variation) Need to control by the rod with carrot. It would make the mount less feasible in combat, as well as force the player to choose between resupplying control tool and increasing the gap in speed differences between equine mounts. Personally I don't mind it, but again, I prefer combat variation.
e ) Sterility. Flaw that I fully approve, it would force the player to handle dangerous hoglins in the Nether in order to get new ones, and give pig herds an use even after enough swine mounts are bred.
f ) Warped fungi. Nerf mostly for PvP and exploration of warped forests - the swine mounts would slow down in warped fungi proximity, or straight run away from them. Personally, I don't mind the former variation, but the latter sounds too exploitable.
g ) Mobility. Another flaw I fully approve, the swine mount, while able to climb 1-block high gaps would be unable to jump higher than said one block, like player, and move much slower forwards than horses or donkeys. Remember that the mob still forces the player to have his/her head three blocks above the ground and unable to move through one-block wide gaps.
h ) Inability to swim. Yet another flaw I approve, it would make swine mounts less powerful in the overworld.
i ) (buff) Dual-purpose. In case the swine mount should prove to be too weak in comparison to equines due to slowness, it could have both item-carrying and combat capacity. Considering that it could be leashed for faster, but riskier transportation, I really doubt it would be useful.
4. Name. "swine mount" sounds pretty laconic, doesn't it? Anybody has better ideas?