2 Weeks In

It's been 2 weeks, and I think it's safe to say we are all thoroughly enjoying HI3. Two of our first three wild equines are still hanging around, so it's about time we introduce them in a bit more detail.

Let's start with our first wild horse. Here are the screenshots of her profile from soon after we caught her:

As you can see, she's pretty huge. I'm not sure how Pepsi ever got on her without a saddle, because her back is taller than Pepsi. 

She's mildly skittish and ornery, but otherwise she's a pretty easy horse to ride. We love how high she carries her head, her luxurious mane, her eel stripe, and her tiny star. "Nitro" didn't seem to fit her very well, but it took us almost two weeks to decide on a name that did. We finally agreed on Bethany's suggestion, Starfleet. She just seemed to need a space-themed name.

Any guesses as to her breed? We were thinking maybe some sort of light draft horse. Well, we had her breed determined, and it came back as "Grade Baroque Horse." (Think powerful hindquarters, arched necks, and thick manes and tails. Lipizzans and Andalusians fall into this category.) I guess we weren't that far off. 

Okay, side note. Turns out that all wild equines on HI3 are grades. Getting a purebred takes careful breeding over several generations, if I understand correctly, or ordering one with Mobia, HI3's equivalent of ordering a horse with tokens. We currently don't have much desire to breed or order horses, but we think this system is pretty cool. It means wilds come in a wonderfully overwhelming range of shapes, sizes, and colors. We've lassoed 39 of them already, and no two have been much alike. The downside is that there are only a few possible types of grades, and you never know which type you have for sure unless you pay to have it determined. 

Now on to our third lassoed horse, who came with the name "Thingvellir." What the world is "Thingvellir?" My best guess was that it was a character from some obscure movie or video game. Lily thought it was randomly made up by a name generator and had no significance. Wrong and wrong. We Googled it, and it turns out it's a national park in Iceland. XD The name means "assembly fields."

This guy doesn't look anything like an Icelandic Horse. His breed determination came back as "Grade Pleasure Horse" even though he is technically an inch too short to be a horse. Pepsi no doubt had a much easier time getting on him bareback.

We love pretty much everything about this little guy, from his winning personality, to his athletic build, flashy markings, and dapples. It quickly became apparent we did not want to face parting with him any more than we did Starfleet. We have renamed him "Gryffindor" because he is so brave. 

So, two of our three horse slots were filled from day 1. Typical us, right? We've been keeping the third slot open for wild horses, forcing ourselves not to get attached to any of them. We were tempted by these 3 guys, though:

I thought he looked like a bull, so we'd probably have named him Toro or Taurus if we'd kept him around.

He's so cute and playful!

He gets the prize for coolest spots so far!

We have wandered our way to several villages beside Elder Ridge now, including Mount Olympus, which really is built on a mountaintop.

Here's my sisters' favorite so far, Sanctum of Solace Village. Its buildings match the nearby sparkling lavender waters.

We've seen lots of other cool things, like snow:

very slippery ice sheets:

islands:

and tons of wild horses!

We're getting way better at throwing that lasso. =)

We also journeyed to the exact center of the HI3 world, just to see what was there. We arrived in the middle of the night, which made it that much more dramatic.

Giant stone horse head? That's appropriate!

You know us. We're so used to HI2 Eternal, where horses are immortal, that we were having a really hard time watching Star and Gryff age. Infinitum amulets are so out of our price range right now that we lost hope of being able to buy them with in-game currency anytime soon. So, we bought ourselves 500 mobia with 5 real dollars, enough to give infinitum amulets to 5 special horses. Here's hoping it will eventually be easier to get our hands on these amulets. If not, our herd will be staying very small.

Anyway, we felt a little funny about putting the amulets on the horses. It reminded me a bit of turning them into vampires like in the Twilight series, since it sort of freezes them in time so that they can never have offspring (females, anyway.) The sterilizing effect is permanent, even if the amulet is removed. Oh well. They will now be our faithful steeds as long as we play the game, and that was way more important to us. =)

Our biggest goal right now is to find a spot we can all agree upon to build our ranch! This will probably take us a while, since we want to explore a lot more before we commit to a spot. In the meantime, we'll pamper our two horses and hopefully buy ourselves some non-white clothing and boots so we don't stick out so much as "new player."