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."

Here we go again...

Many good things, like summers and HI2 subscriptions, must come to an end. *Sighs* 

This post is not going to be a downer, though, I promise. End of summer/early fall brings us some of our best weather, which we are all thoroughly enjoying. And if and when we are ready, we can always get ourselves a new sub on HI2. 

Our old sub went out with a bang! The last wild horse we were able to flute is quite something! 

She is +108! Of all the non-Grade equines we've ever caught, she has the second highest stat total of them all! Balderdash, our +110 New Forest Pony, still reigns supreme, but Vinca the +104 Newfoundland Pony has been bumped into third place.

Lily's Balderdash

Felicity's Vinca

Yay! Our top 3 are all mares. =)

She is likely going to be Bethany's, since Bethany and Widget found her. <3 Since she has the "explorer" persona and has "borg" in her breed name, Bethany is wracking her brain for a Star Trek-themed name for her. Nothing has inspired her so far.

Also, in case you were wondering, I decided to keep the Curly, not the blue-eyed AQH. The AQH was quickly purchased from our ranch store, so no need to feel too sad. =^)

Something else came to an end yesterday, but in good way! Mom completed her hedgehog cross stitch project!

Yep, it looks just how it's supposed to! Way to go, Mom. 

She has quite a few new cross stitch kits to work on, so it'll be interesting to see which one she tackles next.

One more big piece of news to share! We figured out... almost 2 weeks late... that HI3 has officially gone live, and Macs are supported!

Naturally, we were eager to give it a whirl. The downloading process was not the lengthy, frustrating ordeal we were expecting. We got in without issue. PepsiSummer was reborn in 3D form. Sort of. Our default character didn't exactly fit the bill, so we had to do some adjusting.

There, that's more like it. That outfit is not exactly our style, but it could be worse.

So there we were, in some deserted little town called Elder Ridge Village, nearly as clueless as when we first started HI2 and just as sadly horseless. We wandered out of the village into the surrounding area to collect floating, glowing bundles called "essence" and tried to get a feel for how to control our avatar, all the while being paranoid of wandering so far away from the village that we couldn't find our way back.

After a while, we stumbled upon our first wild horse! There he/she is off in the distance on the left.

Though we figured out how to unlock and use the lasso, we failed miserably at actually lassoing the horse. It got dark while we were making our many dogged attempts, making it even more of a challenge. Eventually, the horse had had enough of us and vanished.

Morning dawned. We started our day off by accidentally walking off a cliff and taking an unexpected swim.

We made it to a less steep section of cliff and got out. XD 

Our luck finally started to improve from there. We found wild #2 on a cross country jumping course near the village. Our persistence finally paid off, and we successfully lassoed her!

Unlike on HI2, we have no idea what breed she is... yet, anyway. Apparently we can pay money to have an expert determine it, but we currently have no money to spare. At any rate, she is a 17-hand linebacked brown buckskin with a tiny little star and a long mane. Her randomly-generated name is "Nitro."

Riding her tackless was possible but not much of an improvement over walking. Pepsi fell off constantly, and the pair couldn't go faster than a trot. 

Not long after, we happened upon wild #3. We had Pepsi dismount Nitro, slowly approach, and give lassoing another go.

Many attempts later, success! Meet "Enigma," a shaggy 14-hand linebacked pale yellow silver stallion. 

We gave both horses time to graze and petted them like crazy, then figured out how to unlock the bucket, fill it from the fountain in the village, and give them each a drink. We also figured out how to plot the village on the mini map so we could quit worrying about getting lost.

Riding was still a huge struggle, though, especially on Enigma, who is constantly slowing down because he's super lazy. XD In our wanderings, we explored alpine, fjord, and rainforest terrain, and also found 3 pots of gold!

We crossed paths with wild #4 and figured we might as well try lassoing it too. Another player rode by and watched for awhile, probably laughing at our ineptitude. Meet "Thingvellir," a 14.2-hand bright bay stallion.

He's possibly the best looking of the 3 - I love his dapples and markings!

After finding the 3rd pot of gold, we finally had enough gold dust to buy a saddle pad and saddle from one of the player stores in the village. (Not enough $$ for a bridle yet...) We weren't choosy and went for the cheapest we could find, which happened to be Western style. Here is Nitro modeling them:

Riding immediately became so much better!

So, yeah, while we're still rather clueless and have a lot more learning to do, I think HI3 is going to be pretty fun! We're not thrilled with the aging-horse aspect of the game, though. I think our next task will be saving up like crazy for an infinity amulet for our favorite horse, whoever he or she turns out to be. ;^)