March in Marchenghast

March at last! Our February turned out to be much less brutal weather-wise than our January, though, so for once I was in no particular hurry for it to go. Thanks to having Marchenghast to explore, the Milan-Cortina Olympics to watch, and some engrossing books lined up to read, it did not drag on the way most Februarys do. Also, the family calendar pic was especially cute:

March's pic is cute too, but not much can compete with a baby panda.

One blight on our February: back on the 19th, while Mom was getting ready for work in her bedroom, a mouse ran by her and under the bed! It was quite remarkable how quickly she (Mom, not the mouse) launched herself onto her bed.  Then later the same morning, when our grandma was bagging up the trash in the kitchen, a mouse jumped out! Talk about a traumatic morning!

This sucks, because while we we've long had mice issues in the partially-unfinished basement (it's part of the reason why my sisters and I were moved upstairs), we thought the upper levels were "safe." Mousetraps are set up in Mom's room and in the trash cupboard now. We've been living in dread of hearing snaps in the night, but in the 2+ weeks since, nothing has been caught in Mom's room, and just one mouse was caught by the trash. Mom currently spends as little time in her room as possible and is very jumpy when she is, which is sad for us and the stuffed animals. 

Poor Marchenghast has much more serious blight problems than a few mice. For the first time ever, we moved our home stable from Moorland, making Marchenghast our home base. Marchenghast has kept us so busy that we've hardly left. 

We've made many a trek from the castle through the blighted forest to the witches' hamlet.

So far, despite their off-putting appearances, I prefer the witches to most of the castle folk. Though they are barely hanging on themselves, the witches are still are trying their best to help the forest creatures affected by the Blight.

In addition to helping the cute winged Mahr, they help reptilian wolf-like creatures called Nicchus, which the castle folk are deathly afraid of.

These guys are rather fearsome-looking, but they actually minded their own business in the swamp before the Blight.

One noteworthy daily task Clara can now help with: riding out to Nicchus suffering from the blight and allow them to chase her back to Mercy in the witches' hamlet. (In their blighted state, they give chase because they want to destroy her lantern.)

Mercy then gives them a potion to temporarily counter the Blight's effects.

The third forest beast still hanging on: the massive Waldfenggen.

Aww! A+ from us on these Marchenghast creatures, Star Stable.

Unfortunately, they sometimes get lost from their homes, lose the light in their shells, and can't find the strength to go on. At other times, petrified blight blocks their homes. Clara sometimes gets called to help out in both situations.

Another interesting daily task: a race through the forest to bring shadow witches to the lantern tree, where the (regular) witches perform the Ritual of Shadows to temporarily appease them. These shadow witches are certain members of the witches' coven who, upon dying untimely deaths during centuries of witch hunts, did not cross over into the afterlife. They remain trapped between the realms and are so angry and full of grief that they'll attack whoever they come across.

The daily race is a bit of a sensory overload, but fortunately the shadow witches do not actually touch Clara or her horse. Clara and horse (Opal in this case) just have to avoid the noxious potions that the shadow witches hurl down from the sky.

At the end, we always get a clip with dramatic music showing the shadow witches kind of poofing away in flashes of light by the tree. Quite satisfying.

While we enjoy the forest tasks, it is less stressful within the walls of Marchenghast, where we don't have to constantly be monitoring our lantern and making sure it doesn't run out of light to protect us.

In the storyline, the Duke's daughter Lady Margarete, who seems to be much more reasonable and open to change than her father, has permitted some of the ailing beasts to take refuge in Marchenghast.

My favorite daily task is finding 3 scared, hiding Mahr and leading them back to the kindly Hans. It's similar to the "find the baby dragons" daily that we used to be able to do in the medieval area, but it isn't quite as hard to find them, and they're so much cuter when you do.

Some other fun daily activities include:

riding a showjumping course, in which one of the jumps has lances for poles

and leading two recovering Nicchus on an exercise run around Marchenghast, while also destroying some petrified Blight with the lance while we're at it

While the witches and the castle folk are each making separate efforts to fight the Blight, Ilwedrisch the Mahr wisely indicated that it will take both working together to stand any chance of surviving as it continues to gain strength. He advised Clara come clean to both Margarete and Abigail that she's helping both sides, and fortunately neither banished her when she did. In fact, both were desperate enough to agree to a peaceful meeting in the forest. 

It did not go well, and it would seem there are some skeletons in the closet that the Duke is keeping from Margarete... We'll see what happens with time.

Thanks to all the Marchenghast activities, Cherrypeak sped through her experience levels, reaching level 15 after an exercise run with the Nicchus.

We'd have been quite happy to continue cycling through our other horses for a few more weeks, but this past Wednesday, yet another bazaar set up shop in Moorland, finally prompting us to leave Marchenghast for a while this weekend.

Since the other chunk of big news this Wednesday was that the Finnhorse, Fjord, and Icelandic have now been retrofitted (AKA they can now wear all the new tack, hooray!), we expected the bazaar to feature all 3 of them. We did get the Finnhorse:

But no Fjord or Icelandic on sale, oddly. Instead, we get the Friesian:

and the new dragon horses. Here they are in their non-dragon forms:

We are in the minority in that we prefer the original dragon horses to these new ones, but we do. So, we were not especially tempted by them, even though their fire-breathing animation is impressive.

The Friesians are much more tempting! While we've long admired them, we passed them over the first time they went on sale back in Dec, hoping for a bazaar reappearance at an even lower price. We technically got our wish, as they are slightly more on sale this time: 620 star coins (35% off) vs. 669 (30% off) last time. Lily is encouraging us to keep waiting until they make a third bazaar appearance, especially since so many of our horses haven't even gotten a chance to see Marchenghast yet, but the rest of us really want to jump on this second chance... 

At least we have it narrowed down to one of two Freisians when we do decided to purchase one, whether it be now or later. As good-looking as the Friesian Sporthorses and two non-black variations of the Friesian are, we have our hearts set on a black one. He or she will either be the more brown-toned black on the left with the tiny star or the blue-black on the right. We're torn because we prefer the darker eyes of the one on the left but the blue-black color of the one on the right. 

We'll let you know next time what happens!

Anniversary #3 and Marchenghast Castle

 We celebrated our three-year anniversary on Star Stable back on February 4! How the herd has grown!

Feb 2023

Feb 2024

Feb 2025

Feb 2026

It now takes two screenshots, as we can only have up to 18 in the stable at once. Here is a list of all 25 of them for the record:

These were the goals we set for ourselves last February.

Bethany: buy another pony - Gotland or Welshie?

Me: buy a warmblood, preferably one with spots

Julie: make serious progress on the "paths" out in Valedale and finish at least one

Lily: unlock and try our hand at archeology 

We exceeded Bethany's and my goals!

Thanks to the bazaars, we added both Vanillavalley the Gotland and Seaglass the Welshie to our herd! Hooray for pony mares!

And again thanks to the bazaars, we added two warmbloods to the herd: our sweet Ladyluck the Dutch Warmblood and our spotted Nightnimbus the Selle Francais. They rock!

We didn't totally meet Julie's goal, but we have put in considerable work out in Valedale.

We've mostly made it through the Path of Whimsy:

We still have a long way to go on the Path of Terra:

(We're pretty clueless when it come to SSO gardening. Hopefully we can make it profitable eventually.)

And we have even longer to go on the Path of Runology:

(We have yet to get excited about the runology puzzles. It's way easier to just run around chasing fireflies, ha ha.)

As Lily talked about in her last post, it came right down to the wire, but we did unlock archaeology before our year was up.

It has not been all that exciting - we're having trouble finding places to excavate other than the occasional one near Nic's camp. Hopefully it can become profitable eventually too.

Now to make some Star Stable goals for this coming year!

Bethany: buy my favorite breed added in 2025, a Jorvik Mountain Horse

Me: buy another horse with spots

Julie: keep going with the Valedale paths and experiment with gardening

Lily: get Clara well into player level 23

I think we have a good shot at reaching all of these. We will see!

A week after our Star Stable anniversary, a new area was added to the game, Marchenghast Castle! We didn't have time to check it out until today, Valentine's Day. Hence, Clara and Cherrypeak were sporting some pink during this big adventure.

The forcefield was still in place when they rode out to start the quest and met Luciana.

They detoured to Cape West to talk to some of the locals about the castle.

No one was being particularly helpful, but then Clara heard this: 

I'd say it was more of a magical message than a vision. At any rate, Luciana bowed out to go check on her horse, leaving Clara and Cherry to face the unknown by themselves. Her loss.

They approached the forcefield and...

...passed right through it!

She did not exactly receive a warm welcome. 

...but Clara was able to convince the speaker to give her a chance, and down came the drawbridge.

They rode across and met Margarete, oldest daughter of the Duke of Marchenghast, and her dragon horse Tokin.

As she lead Clara and Cherry on, she started in on some much-needed explanation. Turns out she had good reason to be distrustful, because it had only been a few months since Marchenghast had been at war with forest witches. 

At first, the area looked deserted, but once Margarete gave the okay, the residents came out of hiding.

After Clara helped out these three residents, she'd built up enough trust with Margarete to hear more about what was going on. Margarete led them to the gate to the forest and opened the doors, revealing some strange glowing pink things they call "the Blight." It came from the forest after the war, and it infects and poisons plants, trees, humans, and animals. The castle residents are sure the witches are responsible for it and are terrified of it spreading.

Margarete's rather desperate plan: send Clara, a neutral third party, out into the forest to learn more about the Blight. First, to get past the "petrified Blight" in the way, she would need a magical Pandoric lance, of course. Clara participates in its forging, though it's the blacksmith who imbues it with a pink magic shard.

It worked like a charm on the smaller ones:

And broke through the big "heart" of it with ease too:

That left the way to the forest clear, but the Blight was all over the place in dangerous fog form. Cherrypeak knew better than to enter it.

Fortunately, this cute little flying creature appeared to guide the way, carrying a magical lantern that, according to Margarete, the witches use to keep themselves and their horses safe from the fog.

They came upon a witch named Abigail who was was even more hostile than Margarete had been.

Yikes.

They would've left, had the little creature not insisted they follow it farther. It led them to a fellow creature trapped by petrified Blight. 

Clara and Cherry used the lance again to free it, and this one, Ilwedrisch, could communicate in English. These creatures are called Mahr.

Their conversation was cut off all too soon by Abigail the witch's reappearance. She was ready to turn Clara into a tree or a beetle, but the Mahr came to her defense.

She changed her tune after that. 

Abigail allowed Clara keep the lantern from the first Mahr and took off, challenging her to find the witches' hamlet on her own. 

Clara and Cherry did, and then they got a similar tour to the one Margarete gave of the castle.

Giving off Avatar vibes, there is a protective lantern tree in the center of their hamlet. And there are the Mahr too, of course. Their calls may be a bit spooky, but according to the witches, they are benevolent unless threatened.

Aw! 

We left the story there, as I wanted to get writing this and then watch some Olympics coverage. My sisters and I love this new area and storyline so far. Great job, Star Stable team!