Levelling your horse in Disney Dreamlight Valley’s Wishblossom Ranch DLC is essential when it comes to progressing through the story, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Much like levelling your friendship with the villagers, you can do this by giving up to three gifts per day, spending quality time with them, or brushing and petting them. Even then, you’ll only get an XP boost once a day from these actions, and waiting until the next day when you want to head to the next area can feel like waiting a lifetime.
When you hit level 2 with your horses, you can also assign skills to each pony like mining rocks, digging holes, and harvesting or watering crops which does give you another avenue for XP farming. But, as much as I love how efficient it is to mine resources and farm now you don’t have to deplete your own stamina, it’s by no means a fast process. Luckily, outside of gift giving and quality time, you can also work on your bond by riding them around and jumping over obstacles, but this process is still pretty arduous. Fortunately, I’ve found a hidden spot that, with a bit of decorating, can be a vital tool in levelling your horses, and make things feel much more efficient.
If you head west of Wishblossom Ranch, underneath the bridge that leads from the ranch to just before you head over the bridge to Glamour Gulch, there’s a small meadow clearing with a few trees and four hay bales. If you start the trail at the fence post to the left, you can easily loop round all the jumps and come back on yourself, but adding a few extra shrubs and jumps between the bales will boost your XP much faster while you run around the same loop since you’ll have more hurdles to navigate.
Each time you jump over an obstacle, your horse gains a tiny fraction of XP, and since this area offers a perfect loop, it’s easy to just sit and run around over and over again. To increase the speed my horses gained this tiny fraction of XP, I placed four additional bushes, mostly between the fencepost and first hay bale, and ran around for about ten minutes before Khan levelled up. This was without any petting, treats, or brushing, too.
You can’t go crazy though. There is a limited amount of space here, and you still need a reasonable gap for your horse to gallop between hurdles. But, there’s still enough space for you to create a more time efficient obstacle course. It’s a bit repetitive, don’t get me wrong, but it saves running around the entire map and smashing rocks or digging holes—or whatever ability you’ve chosen each horse to have. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until the next day when each characters’ preferred gifts reset.
If you didn’t fancy making a trek to a specific area, you could just create an obstacle course wherever, too. But, the convenience of the world already forming a little loop is what convinced me to use this area. It also meant all my dodgy decorating was tucked neatly out of the way, so the aesthetic of Wishblossom Ranch wasn’t ruined either—which is incredibly convenient as I always forget to clean up after myself and find random items scattered around the valley. Out of sight out of mind, and at least I know it’ll be there for the next horse I bring back to my stable who inevitably needs to be levelled up.
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