Crazy? Perhaps. It would've been totally unfair if I didn't get to participate, though.
Yetta and I fluted this very expensive wild horse out on tiny Palm Isle.
He's nice enough looking, but other than that nothing extraordinary.
Here is the October horse on Mom's work calendar:
Well, the manes and tail colors are similar. That's about it.
And here are my birthday dogs! What cuties!
We'll see how my Gelderland stacks up to my sisters' birthday flutes in a future post. I have too much to get to in this one to go there right now!
Since then, we've been making an effort to put the sub to good use. We continued Apollo's quest by going after the remaining record presses scattered around HI2.
It took us forever to find the one on Desert Isle even with the Esroh Legends map, but at least we found this while we were at it:
On Oak Isle, we paused to flute a wild with this result:
And here is Pepsi about to press our final record, #24:
Now we just have to make our way out to Apollo on Bud Isle and ace the quiz. Easier said than done!
My birthday was also a big day on HI3! Pepsi was cantering along on Gryffindor when they came upon a herd of 5 wild equines!
We lassoed the shaggy-maned grayish pony stallion on the far right first.
The one on the far left was an enormous 18 hand horse, our tallest to date.
Pepsi then lassoed a huge, somewhat awkward-looking bay mare:
and a delicate pony mare:
We couldn't lasso the last horse, the gray pinto, because the game told us we had too many horses. So, we marked our location, teleported back to Elder Ridge Village, sold the 4 horses, and teleported back.
The gray pinto was still there! We had saved it for last because it was the most touchy about being lassoed. That's a recent change to the game, by the way: wild horses now vary in how easy they are to catch. Instead of just standing there unless you get too close, they move around a lot more, and some now freak out and move away when you throw a lasso at them. We've given up on a few that proved too difficult. (Side note: I get that this adds more challenge and realism to the game, but I still wasn't thrilled, especially because personality distribution is no longer random, but now tends to be better the harder a horse is to catch. It's fortunate we found Gryff when we did!)
With lots of persistence, we finally caught him!
Yeah, I suppose his spots are rather... silly: small, irregular white blobs on his withers, the left side of his rump, and all 4 legs. I'm not sure if grays lighten as they age on this game or not, but his base color, seal brown silver, hasn't grayed out that much. What really caught our attention though is that he has the highest stat total of any wild horse we've caught so far!
He stood out so much that it didn't take long for us to agree to keep him, even if it did mean filling our last horse slot. We nixed "Silly" in favor of "Cloudburst," though, since his coloring and mane texture make us think of rainclouds.
His antisocial-ness hasn't been an issue yet, since we haven't encountered many other players lately. The laziness is interesting, though. Even though we get an annoying "lazy horse slowing" message every time Pepsi first gets on him, he doesn't seem to slow all that much more than Star and Gryff. Unlike the other two, however, he chooses to follow paths whenever given the opportunity.
After deciding to keep Cloud, we intensified our search for a good spot to build our ranch. We originally tried to find someplace near Elder Ridge Village, since those fjord cliffs and highlands are where all 3 of the horses are from. We didn't want to invade the areas near other players' ranches, though, and we also wanted a spot near clean water of some sort. So, eventually we gave up there and tried finding a good spot near the world's center. No luck there either - we realized fall forests are great for having lots of small streams, but it just wouldn't feel right to build there when our character's name has Summer in it, plus we encountered the same is this too close to somebody else? issue. We explored the terrain around there and still weren't inspired. Next, we tried visiting some villages we liked the names of and their surrounding areas. Here's Gryff posing in Hogwarts Village:
Some of the shops there have such amusing names!
Still no luck finding the right spot. Finally, we looked through the villages' descriptions and targeted ones that mentioned our favorite types of terrain. We chose to visit one near lots of sequoia rainforest, since we all love the deep greens, mist, and giant trees. Just as we were losing hope of finding a spot near any water, we found a little pocket of those lavender pools that Bethany, Julie, and I like so much. It seemed meant to be!
We bought it!
Step 2: build our ranch house. Luckily, there are lots of stones lying around in the rainforest to use as building material. Fjord highlands are also a conveniently short ride from our parcel. Their tall lodgepole pines are ideal to chop down for wood. (Don't worry - they miraculously regrow in a few game days.) We built the house way up in the top corner... but couldn't figure out how to rotate it, so the door is facing the side rather than the lavender pool.
Step 3, build a horse shed, took a few days. We had to gather even more stones and wood, which uses up Pepsi's energy quickly. After all that work, we again accidentally placed the thing before figuring out how to rotate it in our desired direction. So... guess we get to start over and collect another boatload of building materials. (Next time we'll try using a mouse rather than a touchpad and see if that makes a difference.) Oh well, at least the eyesore we have in the meantime will let us hold up to three more horses without any negative effects.
