Explorercraft adds several elements and changes to vanilla Minecraft in order to make exploration more fun and interesting, while also taking away some of the pain from the game's design choices. The following entries are edited dialogues from the mod creator, so any first person references are referring to him.
Swimming Horses[]
Explorercraft Horse Swimming
One of the biggest gripes about Vanilla is the fact that horses dismount you when they enter the water. This is incredibly frustrating to have happen and makes exploring the world on horseback tedious when you have to push or leash a horse across the water.
As a result, one of the tweaks I've made is that horses now no longer dismount you upon entering 2 block deep water. Instead, they wade through the water at a slow pace, allowing you to continue riding while keeping your exploration experience uninterrupted.
Trident Recipe[]
Once again, another thing that seems incredibly tedious and frustrating to get is a trident. There is an incredibly rare chance for a Drowned to spawn in the world with a trident, and an even smaller chance of it dropping it. It most likely drops it with damaged durability, meaning you'll need multiply tridents, Drowned farms, or Mending/Exp farms to fully repair it. Any way you frame it, it's a pain and hassle that is almost certainly not worth it for the player.
With that in mind, I've created a recipe that allows you to craft a trident, making them more usable as a whole. This also follows the Explorercraft doctrine, as in order to craft a trident, you need a Heart of the Sea, Prismarine Crystals, and Prismarine Shards. The new recipe rewards exploring the ocean and obtaining its treasures, in return for being able to make a powerful weapon.
Saddle Recipe[]
My gripes with the saddle are similar to those with the Trident: while it does require you to go out and explore to find a Chest in a dungeon or village to get Saddles, you could go out and explore these elements on horseback if Saddles were made available to you earlier.
With this all in mind, I added a recipe for the Saddle, which dropped with the 1.14 version of the mod.