Happy Anniversary

We recently celebrated our 1-year anniversary of joining Star Stable! (Our first Star Stable screenshot - see below - was taken on 2/5/23, but we think we actually created our account on the 3rd or the 4th.)

We've come a long way in a year! We've unlocked most of Jorvik, progressed through 17 player experience levels, and are much less apt to get lost. Clara has been transformed from cartoony to Sims-esque and usually rocks glasses now. Our once-lonely 12-stall stable is now a bustling home to 7 special equines.

All 7 have been carefully picked out, fully trained, cared for daily (barring internet or game malfunctions), and given equal riding time, might I add. These are some very lucky virtual horses!

We decided to each come up with a Star Stable goal for year 2, and here's what we said:

Me: buy a halter for every horse. (Tigertin looks so cute in hers!)

Felicity: buy a third horse with spots

Julie: expand the stable at least once, so we'll have room for another 7 horses

Lily: meet the missing star riders, Lisa and Anne, officially

Will we reach these goals by next February? I think there's a good chance!

The recent game updates have been largely Hollow Woods-related. These all seem to be here to stay, so we haven't seen the urgency to go investigate Hollow Woods immediately. The snow disappeared with the 2/7 update, which seems kind of early, but I guess they wanted it gone for maximum impact of the non-wintery magical forest activities. We're slightly sad Clara is having to retire her cute wintery sweaters already, and we miss the Northern Lights. Other than that, we're enjoying everything being green again.

Goodbye, snow.

Hello, summer!

We've been getting a merciful lull in the snow in real life too. It even hit 60 degrees one day this week, which is highly unusual for Feb. in Michigan. We were also startled awake late on Thursday night to a big boom of thunder from a full-on thunderstorm. This is all largely thanks to El Niño and global climate change, we assume, but wow, so bizarre! We're diving back into the seasonable 30's for the foreseeable future, though, so our sweaters aren't going anywhere for a while.

If we haven't been out in Hollow Woods chasing fireflies and unicorns, what have we been doing on Star Stable? Well, most of the time, just routine daily races and stable chores to make Jorvik shillings, which we then spend on hay. Unexciting, yes, but we still haven't given in entirely to buying stable care with star coins and like to care for all 7 horses ourselves when we can. We have had time for some questing on weekends, though. See the screenshots below for some highlights!

playing hide-and-seek with the annoying twins: always seeking

Good thing there was a fire extinguisher! Jamie still sent out the charred baked goods.

This poor lady ended up pinned under her own cart when her horse was spooked. Even worse, her horse ran off, and her load of Jorvik root was stolen.

Clara and Brighty to the rescue! They freed Isabel and brought her home.

...then found her horse and brought him home. 

(Why is the the horse wearing a saddle and not a harness?)

multiple angry swarms of bees - what a nightmare! Clara bravely righted the toppled hive boxes while avoiding the swarms.

a much less scary task: transporting a box of swamp insect specimens for a professor to study

the New Hillcrest - South Hoof bridge pre-repair

the same bridge after Clara's repairs. This fix was a lot less labor-intesive than the fix of the bridge to the Harvest Counties

Donald, the guy who was supposed to be fixing the bridge, had a crippling fear of heights. 

Clara helped him face his fear by slowly crossing the bridge with him once repairs were complete.

He did it!

This poor husband and father had isolated himself in an underground bunker because he was slowly losing his mind after being infected by poisonous swamp water. Yikes!

The resident alchemist was able to explain:

The cure: Jorvik root. But how to get Terrance to ingest some, when his poisoned mind wouldn't let him eat it? The solution: have the alchemist put Jorvik root in lip balm. When Terrance came one last time to kiss his wife goodnight, she had slathered on the lip balm and was ready to save him.

It worked!

His wife even made amends with Isabel, since she was the one responsible for spooking Isabel's horse and stealing the Jorvik root. A happy ending for everybody!

Another lengthy quest has been trying to find and rescue Nightdust the wild Welshie and his other stolen herd mates. Long story, but Madison, the girl who's bonded with Nightdust, ended up here: in Aideen's Plaza, in the trunk of Carl's car.

Clara eventually managed to swipe Carl's keys and free Madison.

I love how we get the British English translation here, ha ha. 

Carl took off in his car - somehow he got the keys back? Madison still has his briefcase, though, and is trying without success to convince her dad to open it before returning it. (Surely it will contain incriminating evidence.) That's where we left it for now.

...and finally, two less high-stakes recent quests.

one involved attracting and then scaring away pigeons for an old guy in a park:

in another, we took this young woman to Cape West Fishing Village for shopping and then gave her a ride back to Silverglade riding arena. 

We discovered that anytime we jumped, she loved it, ha ha. Hence, lots of spontaneous jumping for no reason on the return trip.

So Much Snow

We kept on visiting the Winter Village as long as we could. But, sadly, it was time to say goodbye to it mid-January just like all the Christmas decorations.

We will miss it and its various residents, as well as the vortex chasing.

I think our favorite mini-activity was clicking on penguins to play a short song...

...and our least favorite was trying to track down yule goats.

Arcticair reached full horsie XP with ease before the end of the event.

Here's the whole crew enjoying the Christmas decor one last time.

The Winter Village may be gone, but the snow lingers on. (Unlike in real life, however, you can toggle it off if you aren't in the mood.) The next exciting development was the addition of the Ardennes Horse to the game. 

We're still partial to the Shires and Irish Cobs, but these guys are pretty great!

All of the color variations are lovely, and the gaits are great too.

Too bad the mane doesn't fly up more at high speeds, but it is fun that it is so thick that it falls on both sides of the neck.

Unfortunately, like the Appaloosa and Tennessee Walker, they like to doze off a lot. *Sighs* I'm not sure we'll ever purchase one ourselves, but we love seeing so many of them being ridden around on the game.

The Mitten has been making up for lost time with wintery weather. We currently have a whole lot more snow than Jorvik does. *Sighs again.*

We thought we might have to say goodbye to Star Stable permanently this past week. On Monday, the game randomly wouldn't launch, and our go-to fix, restart the computer, did nothing. We hoped the issue would resolve itself with the Wednesday update, but no such luck. Nothing changed. On Friday night, we finally attempted to uninstall and reinstall the game. I don't know what exactly we did, but we managed to finally get it to launch, update, and let us back in. So, it's great it's back, but again, it seems our days in Jorvik may be numbered. We'll enjoy it while it lasts!

Speaking of enjoying things while they last, we had a Hazel visit this weekend! It was a whine fest for quite a while, but she loved running around in the backyard. 

Eventually she did relax enough to get snuggly on the couch. <3

Hello, Deer

Happy 2024! Our snowless stretch has continued here, and we're even getting a bit of sunshine on the first day of this new year. Hopefully, it's a sign of a good things ahead!

In case we needed any more reminders of which season it really is, we've been seeing plenty of virtual snow on Star Stable. The winter festival quest line had us searching for yetis with Scott Buttergood. It all started when a yeti showed up in the background of a photograph Clara snapped of an arctic fox. We did eventually find a small yeti and proceeded to pelt each other with snowballs. 

Later on, Clara entered this ominous dark cave alone to save some arctic fox kits.

It looked like a yeti lair, but no yetis inside. She picked up the little foxes and got out of there.

The dramatic confrontation with the big yeti came outside.

Fortunately, once everybody calmed down, they could talk things out.

...and that's what they did. The arctic fox kits were relocated to a cave in the Winter Village, where Clara built nests for them. 

We love the little fox! <3

We've been calling her Icy.

Star Stable made restoring the winter magic easier partway through by making each gathered snowflake worth several points rather than just one. With that tweak, we had no trouble reaching the 18,000 goal. The gifts did get better the closer we got to the goal, too: increasing amounts of Jorvik shillings, increasing amounts of experience points for Artie, and an entire matching set of tack and clothing. 

We're still gathering snowflakes, and the counter keeps counting up, but there doesn't seem to be any further rewards. 

On Friday, after we had claimed the free 300 star coins Star Stable offered as a year end gift (thank you!) we logged on to a deserted Moorland Stable area - very strange. When we arrived at the Winter Village and it was totally deserted as well, then we were sure something was up.

We spent about 2 hours playing, teleporting several times, and no other players ever showed up. I think they were there but just invisible/inaccessible to us, because all the chats were silent, but we did get a notification of a buddy logging in/out.

Coincidentally, when we approached our first light beacon, we were given the option of having a deer follow us around. We agreed, of course, and the deer stuck doggedly to Artie for the rest of our session. Hence, nobody got lonely!

He stayed with us while performing all our tasks in the winter village, like rounding up and guiding the gingerbread followers:

slipping and sliding our way through the races:

and saving the fox kits from the elves:

We thought he would disappear when we left the Winter Village, so we said our goodbyes here:

But no, he came with us back to Moorland! Here we are in the stable, complete with decorations and new NPC horses.

He accompanied us as we competed:

as we surveyed the eerily empty stable grounds:

and as we watched to see what would happen when the countdown clock reached zero (absolutely nothing. It just started over at 60:00):

You can't see the deer here, but he was still around. I had to include this screenshot because our Christmas gift from Star Stable, a mini yeti named Betty, was randomly levitating like the many lanterns we had just sent up.

Here we are spending the bulk of the winter tokens we had amassed, while Artie communed with the deer. We didn't have nearly enough to redeem everything we would've liked, but we carefully picked our favorites.  

And here's Clara hugging one of the wild Brinicles, which roam the area like the other magical winter horses. We're so glad we will have one of our own after the winter festival ends. <3

It was fun to have the world "all to ourselves" for a bit, but we would find it lonely long-term. So, we were glad when everything was back to normal on our next log in!