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.