Whale on Land and Moose in Lake

It took some time, but I eventually convinced my sisters to part with Vice Versa, the oversized palomino pony, since his stat total didn't make 900 and his personality wasn't stellar. 900 seems to be a pretty good benchmark, since so far we don't find them very often.

I am pushing for this to become our unofficial policy: that unless a wild has an awesome personality and is exceptionally cute/good looking, we will not consider keeping it unless its stat total is over 900. So far, my sisters seem to be on board with me.

Not long after parting with Vice Versa, we found another interesting stallion, this time in the savanna at dusk. Check him out!

He's a huge 18-hander, his conformation seems pretty normal, he has a cool facial marking, and his stats are over 900! Nice!

However, he is skittish and ornery like Vice Versa, only his "ornery" is even more extreme. We found this out when Pepsi tacked him up and rode him. He bucked poor Pepsi off every few minutes. She is impervious to injury, thank goodness, but Julie and Bethany agreed with me that of all the negative personality traits a horse can have on this game, being ornery enough to buck Pepsi off is our least favorite. Felicity was unwilling to agree yet, since we haven't had much experience with extremely stubborn ones or extreme leader ones to know how annoying they are, but I don't really see how they can be worse. Getting thrown off is not only embarrassingly obvious to any nearby players but also quite inconvenient, as you are too far from the horse to do a 1-key remount and have to walk back over to it.

As you may have noticed from the above screenshots, White Walker is a tobiano. His spots are even more minimal than Cloud's, though, and are best viewed from above:

It sort of looks like a whale that's blown a little cloud of warm air from its blowhole.

Sadly, you wouldn't even know he's a tobiano when Pepsi rides him. Saddle pads and blankets almost totally cover the whale.

For being 18 hands, he doesn't actually seem that enormous when Pepsi rides him. It's nothing like when she rode our tallest wild to date, this 19.1 hand bog horse:

Pepsi looks tiny on this maneless giant, who was amusingly named "Arabian Dancer!" XD

This leads me to the second half of what I think our policy should be when deciding whether or not to keep a horse. Even if the horse's stats are over 900, personality and appearance should still be very important in our deliberations. We can be a little more forgiving with over 900's than with under 900's, but no extreme orneries unless everything else is amazing. Infinitum amulets are way too expensive to be used lightly! 

So, what about Heat Wave, the lazy silver bay Hotblood? We have kept him around and given him our last infinitum amulet to halt his aging, but we still aren't 100% sure about him. We're waiting to see if another wild that we like even more comes along before the end of the year before we totally commit. (If it was just up to me, we'd have sold him already so that we can keep our entire focus on our original four, but it's not just up to me.)

*Sighs* He is cute. I'll give him that. XD He seems small after White Walker, though.

It used to be that the only animals on HI3 were equines and rabbits, but that recently changed. HI3 is now home to a variety of other critters that are specific to the different biomes. The prey animals flee if you approach on horseback or on foot, but the large predators stand their ground and turn to face you. 

So far, we've encountered:

cheetah

deer

elk

fox (and yes, that's White Walker's head)

mountain lion

brown wolf

dark wolf

tiger

snow tiger

moose

We are happy to have them all on the game, even though so far they serve no purpose other than looking cool. The only downside is that from a distance, it's easy to confuse the larger ones for wild horses, leading to lots of unfruitful veering off from our intended course.

Thankful for Horse Isle 3

December may just have begun, but it's felt like winter for us for some time already. Mom's been practicing Christmas songs for the church program since October, and we had some major snow for a stretch in early November. After a break from the snow but not from the gloomy gray skies, we got another big dump of snow early this morning to ring in December. *Sighs.* Good thing there's Christmas ahead to lift our spirits.

HI3 has also been a great way to help keep our spirits up.

We finally figured out how to rotate the "camera" around PepsiSummer to view her riding from different angles, which is quite entertaining. For fun, here is Pepsi riding each horse:

Here is the stable so far. We added on a 3rd section to make room for temporarily holding more wilds. Felicity isn't super thrilled about the lavender, but we think it looks nice next to the lavender pool. The green she wanted wasn't enough contrast for us - it looked like moss.

We're realizing too late that it wasn't the best decision to select such a sloped parcel of land to build on. Since then, we discovered a larger lavender pool not that far away with flat surrounding land. Figures, right? Oh well, we'll stick with our little patch of arrogant damp rainforest for now. (We'd better be sure we show proper respect to these particular giant sequoias!)

Now to share with you a some cool wilds we've encountered lately.

A few days before Thanksgiving, we lassoed a spotted wild mare named "Butterball" on the edge of some badlands.

We loved her coat, her size, and how agile she was. However, we were bummed that she had no mane. I don't think it's a good look on pretty much any horse, especially not on a mare. That and her laziness (appropriate of a "Butterball," though) made it easier not to get attached. 

While exploring a wonderland region near dusk, we found another noteworthy mare, Gabriella. The timing was a bit eerie, because we could hear our aunt watching High School Musical: The Series in the next room when we caught her.

At first glance, she seems pretty great, right? Really cool coat and markings and fun two-tone mane. She holds her ears out to the sides a little bit naturally, which is also pretty cute.

She's a "silvery grulla silver," which means she is a silvery shade of grulla (dun on black) and also has the silver gene, which dilutes black pigment on a horse. (In this case, her would-be black mane and tail turned a silvery color.) So she's sort of double silver. Fancy! She also has a unique exactly 900 genetic stat total. 

Her personality isn't stellar, but none of the left-side ones are extreme enough to cause much trouble when ridden in normal conditions. 

Lily wants us to fully train and get special tack (or at least saddle pads) for all 4 horses we currently have before taking in any more, which will take ages. Felicity, Julie, and I were thinking we'd probably have to disappoint Lily and insist on keeping this one anyway. But then we realized that Gabriella shakes her head and pins her ears back when Pepsi approaches. Not exactly endearing. She also has an oddly crested neck and holds her abnormally long head in an odd position when being ridden.

She's actually somewhat typical for a horse found in the wonderland biome according to the library:

Rare color: check. Ostentatious stance: check. And even though her personality chart shows she's not especially antisocial, she still totally does the ear pinning thing. Sadly, she's not gaited, nor is she very intelligent.

Sorry, Gabriella. You're a bit too fancy for us.

Then, on Thanksgiving Day itself, we found quite a few wild equines in the fjord highlands near our ranch. One of them was this palomino stallion:

 This is an action shot of him lowering his head to graze. He holds his head low, but not this low. ;^)

We think he's adorable (now that's a mane!) and appreciate how evenly distributed his genetic stats are. He's built like a pony and was labelled a Grade Pony, but he's actually just tall enough to be considered a horse.

Interesting. Very interesting. Gryff looks like a horse and was labelled as a Grade Pleasure Horse, but he's an inch too short. Now we find this guy who looks like a pony but is an inch too tall.

Here he is under saddle:

Yep, super cute.

Then, on the last day of November, we found a fourth cool horse in the volcanic region near Where the Drafts Go Village. 

(Sidenote: this village is built on a smoking caldera. Good thing we have Gryff, because this is very scary!)

I'm not sure if he is from the volcanic region, the strangled fig forest, or the swamp, because when we found him we were right on the verge of all three, and it was the middle of the night. Had we not stopped and swerved from our course to solve a riddle box, we probably would never have seen him.

Like Cloudburst (and Gabriella), he is a silver, but his silver is on a wild bay base. His only white marking is a small white star like Starfleet's, his mane is the same length as Gryff's, and it turns out he gets the same breed designation as Windfall: Grade European Hotblood. 

Aside from being mildly skittish, he doesn't really live up to the "Hotblood" designation. He's a lazy slowpoke. Otherwise, he seems like a pretty great horse. And he looks great, which is clearly not a given for above-average-stat HI3 wilds.

Here he is under saddle: 

Yay, no weird head carriage here either. 

Hmm, it's going to be hard to part with both of these guys!