Cup of Tea, Anyone?

The fun continues on HI3!

We've encountered more non-equine wildlife, including:

bear cub

black panther

boar 

(these look a lot like the tiny decay biome ponies from a distance)

polar bear

wolf pup

The day after finding our chestnut Finnhorse mare, who was swiftly named Talvi (winter in Finnish),

we experienced another first on the game. 

Here is the special horse, "Teatime." We found her in a fairly small patch of taiga bog. Bog horses tend to be stout and short-legged, and this mare fits that mold well. This first view of her flatters her er... figure a little...

...but as you can see from a full-on side view, she's... ok, I'm just going to say it...

... a sausage with legs.

Understandably, her speed stat is by far her lowest, but her other stats rally to give her a respectable stat total in the 800's. 

Big deal, Felicity, you may be thinking. Sausage-like horses are nothing I haven't seen before. And there's nothing that spectacular about her metrics or personality either. True, true. We weren't impressed either until riding her.

Walk: normal. Trot: normal. Canter: wait, what is this? Why are we gliding?

Turns out that Teatime does not canter. A side view revealed that instead, she paces! 

For anybody who doesn't know, the pace is a two-beat gait where the legs on the same side of the horse move in tandem. (I think of it as the opposite of trot, where diagonal legs move in tandem.) On Teatime, the pacing action is so rapid and awkward that it amuses us to no end. I have no idea how smooth or bumpy it is to ride a real horse at the pace, but for Teatime, it is incredibly smooth. As in, you conceivably could enjoy a cup of tea while riding and not make a mess.

We know it's ridiculously soon to be considering another horse after just finding Talvi, especially one whose appearance, stats, and persona are not extraordinary. The pacing is pretty entertaining, though, so we're keeping her around for now and letting her use one of our precious infinitum amulets. 

Dangerous, we know.

While delivering a letter yesterday, she and Pepsi had to cross some salt flats, which is when I discovered something else interesting. We'd heard horses travel faster on this terrain but had never given much thought about what that would look like until Teatime started doing something that was definitely not a pace at her non-sprint max speed.

A side view revealed that she can gallop!

I figured out later that she can also gallop when you ask her to sprint (Perhaps all HI3 horses do this?), but she still won't ever canter. XD 

As we've been doing for weeks now, we're taking every rideable equine we catch for a short ride just to double check that it's not gaited before selling it. You'll be sure to hear about it if and when we find any more! 

If any of the too-small-to-ride ponies we catch happen to be gaited, we'll never know! Maybe someday we'll invest in one of these cool pony carts. 

Aw!

For now, our focus is on training Bethany's Starfleet and my Gryffindor, and it's turning out to be a huge, highly expensive undertaking. To fund it, we're delivering a lot of letters, and en route catching wilds, solving riddle posts, and picking up special findables (pots of gold, mother horse stones, etc.) I've noticed that Gryff is getting a bit faster already. It's going to be fun to see how much of a difference all the training has on him and Starfleet.