September Shetlands!

NarrowTon quests, check. Decay Isle quests, check. We're making progress!

Despite our considerable traveling lately, we have not stumbled upon many wild horses.

We did still encounter two pretty nice +5/6 ones:

With the exception of one Eriskay Pony, all of the equines we encountered on the Decay Isles were Shetland Ponies. We fluted 3 cute little Shetties and found 2 more:

Not going to lie: I think we were all a bit relieved that they all had run-of-the-mill stats. They're adorable but too tiny for us to keep.

We have more good news to report! All of the +5/6 horses we put in our new horse store sold without us having to lower the prices! The only one left now is that +4/6 Curly. We put the Georgian Grande and NCT in there to keep her company. ;-)

Also, our Percheron finally has a name and tack! Meet Hugo! <3

We chose the 4-leaf clover blanket because we feel lucky to have found a +6/6er this year! 

At the rate we're going, he may be the only one. 

We post about horses with good stats quite a bit, so to change things up, I decided we would instead show you the ones we found the best looking in the livery this past week. 

My (Bethany's) pick:

His color may not be exotic, but it's a handsome shade of dark gold. I love his dramatically dark points and his delicate markings!

Lily's pick:

This Java's name was - appropriately - Coffee. His spots look like wispy clouds... or maybe dissolving whipped cream?

Julie's pick:

I don't think there's any such thing as an unattractive Sal on this game, but this one is especially nice. I love the combination of the dapples, sabino markings, and the scattering of white dots.

Felicity's pick:

Wow, those are some impressive black spots! Her snip, white foot, and striped hooves make her all the more special.

Hephaestus's Horseshoes

Well, as Felicity told you last time, we did finally tackle the Esroh Hephaestus's quest! It was a group effort, hence you will see various horses starring in the screenshots. 

But first a little background. We satisfied Hep's guardian's requirement of 250 pieces each of gold, silver, copper, and iron ore years ago. However, we had been stalled out since on Hep's requirement, which is to have horses shod by the farrier 100 times. Since we hardly ever compete, we don't shoe many horses. It seemed wasteful to us to shoe horses for no reason, so we didn't. 

Fast forward a few years, and we had still only visited the farrier about 70 times. We still don't care much for competing, and most of the time lately there are so few players online that we're guessing the arenas are pretty dead anyway. After occasionally spending millions of dollars on horses, though, buying 30 sets of unnecessary horseshoes no longer seems so unreasonable. XD So, Felicity gave the farrier a real workout and had him shoe approximately 30 of our unshod horses in rapid succession.

Finally, we were ready to begin the most exciting part of the quest, finding Hep's 4 missing platinum horseshoes!

PepsiSummer made the long slog underwater through the reef to Harbor Isle, where Hep's sinkhole is, to talk to Hep. Over the next few days, we had to make several more excruciatingly slow treks through that reef. We collected more seaweed and crafted more nori than I care to remember.

Hep told us that the first horseshoe was buried behind one of the blacksmith shops. Which one would it be? Julie took a stab at it first. She tried the NarrowTon blacksmith shop first, naturally. 

No one can accuse us of not being thorough. XD

Nope, that would've been too easy. She and Shady tried the PlainTon blacksmith shop next.

No. Solo and I proceeded to dig up the ground around MeadowTon's blacksmith shop...

...and then AngleTon's blacksmith shop with no luck either.

Felicity and Vinca then travelled to DryTon and found the horseshoe on their first dig behind the blacksmith shop, the lucky ducks.

Felicity travelled triumphantly back to Harbor Isle to return the first horseshoe to Hep and get the clue about the next one. Shoe #2 was buried at the center of an isle starting with the letter B.

Since Bend Isle was in the Narrowed island complex, Felicity figured it would be logical to start there. She rode Vinca out towards the center, dug one hole by the Wabbit & Turt game, and voila, second horseshoe!

Wow, that was easy!

After returning the second horseshoe to Hep, we learned that shoe #3 was buried somewhere on Arid Isle. This was definitely going to be tedious, no way around it - Arid is a big island. I made the executive decision to start on the far right of the island and systematically began digging up the island from right to left in north-to-south and south-to-north lines. Why right to left? Because I didn't want us to deal with the sand dunes and pyramid in the big bulgy part of the island if we didn't have to - it's annoying enough trying to ride straight lines with only smaller objects in the way.

Again, aren't you impressed (and maybe a little scared) by our thoroughness? What can I say? We really didn't want to have to do this over.

Flora and I made it back even to the dock house without finding anything, and we all called it a day.

Bethany and Julie took turns at searching later on too, always keeping careful track of where they stopped - we weren't leaving that island until we found that horseshoe! Turns out I picked the wrong side of the isle to start with, though. We ended up having to deal with both the dunes and the pyramid. And we never found a single wild horse, other than the two we fluted while we were there roasting. In the end, it was Felicity again who found the horseshoe. It was - of course - way on the far left side, totally clear of the pyramid and sand dunes. I was more relieved than annoyed, though. I'd actually started to worry that we weren't going to find it with our systematic ride, that maybe the location of the shoe changes with each log in. 

Yay, Felicity and Galileo!

We returned the third shoe to Hep, and he told us we'd have to search the various libraries around HI2 to figure out where to look for the last shoe. Off we went. We each got a turn at searching a library with no success.

I found nothing in the NarrowTon Library,

Julie came up empty in the PlainTon library,

Bethany struck out at the MeadowTon library,

and Felicity found nothing but an interesting (not relevant) note in the AngleTon library.

It was my turn to tackle a library again, so I tried the DryTon library. Finally, in the 6th bookcase, I found it, the legend of the platinum shoes! If you haven't done this quest yet and want there to be some surprise when you tackle it, stop reading now!

You've been warned!

Yetta and I travelled back to Harbor Isle as quickly as we could. It took 4 holes, but then we had it, the 4th and final horseshoe!

We moved closer and learned from the master. Our horses' horseshoes will now last twice as long! So, I guess it's not such a bad thing that we have tons of horses wearing 100% unworn horseshoes now, especially since one of the Esrohs we have yet to see is Ares. (His guardian requires 250 competition entries before letting someone meet him. And, with our luck, one of the random tasks he will give us after that will be winning competitions. I have a feeling this will take us way longer than digging up nearly all of Arid Isle.)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We still have tons of non-Esroh quests to complete too!

Hello New Sub, Goodbye Sheep

Yep, that's right! PepsiSummer's no longer stuck on foot! Even after clicking "USE," the color around PepsiSummer's name didn't change to subscribed blue until our next log in. Hence, we had a session of play where we could ride yet still appeared to be unsubscribed.

Here is the first wild horse we fluted once the sub was activated:

Unfortunately, I neglected to check if we had any open horse slots before fluting. We didn't. So, I had to slo-mo walk all the way back through the reef, take the wagon south to the equestrian park in NarrowTon, sell a few recently-caught wild horses, ride Arion back to the reef entrance, and slo-mo walk all the way back through the reef to Harbor Isle. Luckily, nobody else decided to check out Harbor Isle while we were gone. The horse was still there!

What a handsome Sal stallion he turned out to be!

His personality was great too!

My sisters and I decided it was finally time to build a horse store on our ranch to give this guy and the collection of nice-but-not-quite-there mares we've been holding a better, longer shot at finding new homes.

Since all our ranch plots have stuff on them already, we decided to sell the sheep pen to make room. Sorry, little sheep! We stockpiled wool and felt first, so at least we won't be in need of those anytime soon.

In went the Sal and 4 of the mares. The 5th mare, the Eriskay Pony with the best stats, didn't fit. (Unless we are suddenly bombarded with other awesome mares, I don't think she's going in anyway.)

Here are the mares one more time:

We priced them all a little below what the foreign bidder would've given us for them. The Sal stallion sold right away - as in the same day. Over a week later, none of the mares have sold. :( I guess we'll lower the prices and see if it has any effect. We just don't want to price them too low for fear that people will buy them simply to sell at auction to the foreign bidder to make a little profit. *Sighs*

We also decided it was time to start getting serious about questing again. We still have quite a few to go, and what's the point of saving them for later, really? Might as well get things moving again! Maybe we'll even finally finish the Esroh quests!

Because I was on Narrowed Isle, I figured we might as well start with the quests we had remaining on the various islands in the Narrowed complex. There were only 4 of them, and one of them was for the Esroh Hephaestus.

Bethany and Lysithea took over for one involving the sheep in the pen on Bend Isle. They found 3 wild horses and a pot of gold while they were there! It seemed like every time they lassoed one horse, a new one appeared somewhere else on the isle.

The first was a Standardbred, a breed we really like but still don't have in our herd.

She's a lovely mare as far as browns go, but sadly the stats weren't there. 

I think these are the prettiest of the treasures that can be found on the isles. It seems like they crop up more often than the others too (except buried treasure - those are wonderfully abundant).

Wild #2 was a handsome Belgian. Flaxen liver chestnut is soo cool!

And wild #3 was a gorgeous Swedish Warmblood.

Good thing his stats weren't higher! It would've been really hard to part with him otherwise, and the last thing we need right now is another stallion.

After that, Bethany headed back to the NarrowTon auction house. She also visited the adoptable horses in the livery, naturally, and found two lovely mares worth mentioning.

Wow, she's one of the coolest Georgian Grandes I've seen! I love her name, her birdcatcher spots, and the dark spots on her white socks. If that conformation stat had been positive, it would've been really hard to pass her up! I bet she didn't wait long to be adopted!

This horse has some of the most extreme left-side personality stats I've ever seen on the game! If she'd had a more interesting avatar, I'd have been tempted to adopt her for our Millennium Fields. Sure wish I knew why she was named "Raven."

That's it for now. We have more to share about the next quest we tackled, Hephaestus's quest, but we think it deserves its own post. It's starting to thunderstorm here now, so I'd better hurry up and post this before our WiFi goes out.