Jungle Juice, Anyone?

With all the craziness going on in the world right now, we're so glad to have HI3 to escape to for a while! We've found loads of wild horses and ponies to admire and take for spins this past week. We're also still working on creating appropriate dye colors for all of our keepers. Some of the best color names we've stumbled upon so far are Quack Quack, Lavender Tea (you can tell who this will be for), Jungle Juice, Old Asparagus, and Sunglow Gecko. 

Somebody mentioned on the game that they found 3 lucky finds today! Whoa! I'm hoping we don't find any more for a long while to keep them more special. Speaking of lucky finds, we already have a name for our second one ever, "Bio." 

Since she is a Groningen, a Dutch breed, we decided to name her after a variety of tulip. It is officially spring now, after all! Our choice: Tulip Mariette, a lily-petaled pink tulip. 

It should come as no big surprise that I, Lily, have chosen Mariette to be my 3rd horse. 

Horsey McHorse Face doesn't have a new name yet. She also has some competition for staying on as our March horse. 

Competitor #1 is this cute blue-eyed Grade European Hotblood stallion.

He's similar in size and shape to Ossagon: just an inch shorter and a little heavier.

His performance metrics aren't so great, other than his low stamina drop. His personality is pretty good, though, and Pepsi doesn't look any more awkward on him than Ossagon.

Competitor #2 is this Grade Pony stallion who is peppered with bend or spots:

Despite his unimpressive genetic stats, his sprint boost and turning speed are nice. What we - and most of all Felicity - really like though, are those spots. <3

Now for some fun screenshots!

First up, here is Ossagon with his macro me! The horse, who I think was also a Grade, has a stripe but otherwise sure looks like Ossagon!

We explored lots of cold regions this past week, including tundra, which we hadn't seen much of before. Here is Gryff posing under Stonehenge-like rocks.

What a picturesque view. :)

Here's our second ever wild horse with lacing!

We'd have been really tempted by her if she wasn't ornery!

Ooh, a curly-coated appaloosa!

Cloud on ice! 

He is better than many about being ridden on ice. All the ones we've tried get scared by the cracking ice eventually, though. (I don't blame them!)

Another feature of the tundra: rock formations that resemble Easter Island heads.

Finally, here is one of our first ever wild horses with lots of feathering!

Aw, I hope we get one of these in our herd someday! <3

Pi Day Post

Our HI3 herd is growing way faster than any of us intended. We're sorry for not sticking to the rules, Lily, but we're not sorry about choosing to keep any of these special horses and ponies! <3

I've decided to keep going with the tall horse theme: my first 3 horses are 17-hand Starfleet, 18.3-hand Topi, and 20-hand Blitzen.

Felicity is going with a bay theme with bright bay Gryffindor, silver wild bay Fireside, and bay Ginkgo.

Julie's equines don't really have a theme, other than all being quite different from each other: leggy Windfall, sausage-y Teatime, and noble little Ossagon.

Lily's going for the sturdy, athletic type with Cloudburst and Talvi, but she hadn't found her third horse yet. As cute as brindle, not-so-bold Bold Venture is, we couldn't convince her to keep him.

There has been no shortage of other candidates for Lily's third horse. Coincidentally enough (since I'm posting this on Pi Day), the first two are piebalds!

The first one showed up last Saturday, when we veered off course upon spotting her at the edge of the desert. Her name: As Good As It Gets. Would she live up to a name like that?

Normal-ish conformation, impressive size, cool speckled pinto spots, and exactly 1000 genetic stat points! Whoa! I was thinking we'd found Lily a 3rd horse for sure!

Oh no! Ornery. So, so ornery. At first we didn't want this to be a deal breaker. We love pintos, we don't have any horses with a black base or with this extreme of pinto patterning yet, and we already passed up White Walker (a minimal pinto) for the same reason. 

They sure look nice together here!

But it just isn't fun getting bucked off constantly or having a horse pin its ears and threateningly stomp its hoof when Pepsi's close by. With time she would get more tolerant, but with that extreme of an ornery tendency, I doubt these antics would ever go away entirely. Lily decided that she definitely wasn't as good as it gets. 

Candidate #2 was another black tobiano, this time a stallion from wonderland:

We only found this one because of the first private message we ever received on the game. By the time we formulated a response and figured out how to send it, the player had logged off. Oops, our bad! We tried to make up for our lame silence by sending a few stars her way later, not that the player would know it was us. 

Anyway, here's the horse's profile:

Despite having a way lower genetic stat total and not quite as cool of markings as As Good As It Gets, his performance metrics are mostly superior. (I don't really get how this works, but it happens.)

While he doesn't have any personality traits as extreme as As Good As It Gets's ornery one, he's not ever going to be in the running for any Mr. Congeniality prizes either. He is, however, a handsome mover at the trot, and *bonus* paces in a picture-perfect way too! 

The expert determined that he is a Grade Gaited Saddle Horse, our first. I was rather hoping Lily would fall in love with his gaits and overlook his shortcomings, but it didn't happen. "One pacer is enough" according to her. What sealed his fate: he bucked Pepsi off this afternoon when Lily was trying him out. 

On Thursday evening, while en route through black sand to deliver a letter, we noticed a white blob off in the distance. We figured it would turn out to be a snow tiger, but since black sands wilds are also often pale, we detoured to check it out anyway.

Meet Horsey McHorse Face, who is clearly not a tiger!

Well done, random name generator. XD

You can't tell in this shot, but she is not totally white. She's actually an extreme tovero, with only a small patch of gold on her chin area and a barely-there wisp of pale gold on her left flank.

her eyes are a purplish blue! <3

Please don't be ornery!

Drat, ornery again! At least the orneriness isn't extreme enough to cause bucking. No Miss Congeniality nominations for this one either, and we'd have to deal with major laziness for a long time too.

She's got quite the unique look going on -  she reminds us of an especially stocky American Paint Horse, though her back is probably too short. She's also pretty fast and has a powerful jump. Despite all that, Lily still wasn't sold.

The day wasn't over yet. We found a pretty buckskin with an abysmal personality on a mound of dragon grass:

And also a short-legged, curly-coated pinto mare who was hanging out mere meters from a village:

But the (chocolate) icing on the cake was this horse, the last of three we caught in a cluster near somebody's ranch:

She is our second ever lucky find! It caught us completely by surprise too, since she didn't look much different in build than the other two wild horses we caught in the same area. 

Her genetic stats are even higher than Talvi's, our first lucky find! Please, please, don't be ornery...

Yes! Not only... not ornery, but playful for a change! The rest of her personality traits are mid range, which should make her pleasant to ride. 

Make your guesses about her breed now! I was rather stumped. She looks sort of like a warmblood, though I thought she seemed a bit too sturdily built/doesn't have long, refined enough legs to be a typical warmblood. My best guess was Cleveland Bay.

Nope. She's a Groningen, which is a light draft breed from the Netherlands. To my credit, the Groningen is closely related to some heavy warmblood breeds, and Cleveland Bays were used in developing it. 

Now Lily gets to decide between "Horsey McHorse Face" (adding a second pinto to her collection) or "Bio" (adding a second lucky find to her collection.) Which will she choose? And who will claim the one she doesn't? Guess we'll have to wait and see! =)

I will leave you with this fun screenshot of Pepsi in her relatively new kayak! It's made crossing bodies of water of all sizes faster and more enjoyable.

We call it "The Banana."

Don't Leap Into Cacti

Happy leap day! It's been anticlimactic on HI3, mainly because our internet is having trouble today. While we were briefly on this morning, both wild horses we encountered were super sensitive to the lasso. We gave up on the first one, since we were on hilly rainforest terrain. We got booted off as we were trying to lasso the second one, another rainforest wild. *Sighs*

We did get back on for about an hour this afternoon and successfully caught 2 wilds, delivered a few letters, and completed a quest, so at least it wasn't a total wash.

Also, since the last game update, there is a glitch where a horse's name doesn't disappear when mounted. Oops!

 

Last Saturday was really fun, though. The brindle wild horses were out in force. We found 4 of them on our travels! 

Our clear favorite was the 4th:

He has quite the extreme personality, but contrary to his name, he is far from bold. He is yet another pacer! (This probably explains why he's not especially fast despite being from the savanna.) Take a look!

He holds his head awkwardly high, but it's cute how much his tail billows out.

Because of his only-in-the-700's stat total and his extreme laziness and skittishness, I don't think he'll be joining the herd. We felt we'd better keep him around for a little while though, because we (okay, I) accidentally rode him into a cactus. Sorry, buddy! Note to self: do not use the rotate camera feature while riding anywhere near cacti! We had to take him to the vet to get the spines removed. I guess he has good reason to be skittish.

Here's another interesting wild horse we found last Saturday:

It's a heart!

It's a shame we didn't find her on Valentine's Day... though if we had, Bethany and/or Julie would likely have wanted to keep her. As cute as she was, she was extremely ornery and didn't have great stats, so it's probably for the best that the timing was off.

I much prefer "Hogan," who has now been re-named Ginkgo after Ginkgo biloba trees, which originated in China. (Even though we found her in the rainbow eucalyptus forest, in appearance, she reminds us of the Datong, a Chinese breed.) Ginkgo trees have really cool, unique-looking leaves, so we think it's a fitting name for such a unique looking horse.

We have also finally decided on names for the other newest horses and pony. We're not "officially" keeping any of them yet, but as you know, it's a lot harder for us to say goodbye once we've named a horse, so I think they all like their prospects.

"Teatime" will remain Teatime. Now that we have that image in our heads of Pepsi sipping tea while riding an enthusiastically pacing Teatime, there's no changing it. XD

"Blitzen" will also remain Blitzen because her coloring and huge hooves remind us of a reindeer. 

"Dipsy" and "MicroMini" have shed their somewhat embarrassing, non-manly names, to their great relief.

"Dipsy" is now "Topi" because his speediness and short, angled neck remind us of an antelope, plus he is from the savanna biome. The topi, a subspecies of the tsessebe from sub-Saharan Africa, is also brown and black like him, so it seemed like a fitting name. We may need to get him some golden polos though.

"MicroMini" is now Ossagon. It's the name of a creek and a trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Since we found him in the sequoia rainforest, and since Mom has been to this park with giant trees in Northern California, we thought it was perfect. 

Whew, glad to have that done! You wouldn't believe how much time my sisters spend deliberating on names.

I will leave you with these two fun screenshots of our horses posing with other players' purebreds.

Here is Windfall next to a Thoroughbred:

I love the expression on her face in this shot. =) She's not a great match, though there is some resemblance. And, as we already knew, she has a short neck and tiny head, which makes grazing awkward for her. XD

Here is Teatime saying hi to Hot Cocoa, a Tennessee Walker:

Mmm, I could really go for a hot beverage right now.