Summer's Epic Finale

September's chugging right along. I figured I'd try to pull together one more post while the calendar still says it's summer. As I'm typing this, occasionally looking out the window, I can imagine it's still full-fledged summer: sunny skies, lawnmower humming in the distance, hardly any fall color yet in the leaves. Step outside, and it's a very different story. It's been struggling to make it into the 60's this weekend. Not that I'm complaining. I'll take all the 60's fall deigns to dish out.

On HI3, we've actually been seeking out those fall colors. We're trying to find an open fall forest cave, since we've read that that's where you can find coal, which is now needed to fire up our furnace. (We used to be able to use wood. Sure wish we still could.) Why do we need the furnace? So that we can burn up some kelp and make soda ash. Why do we want soda ash? So that we can bleach experimental dyes gone wrong out of our saddle pads and polos and reuse them. Right now we have more rejects than we know what to do with. (Old asparagus, innuendo, or dirt road, anyone? Didn't think so.) Could we just buy coal or soda ash in a village? Or take it even further and buy ready-made dyes, or even saddle pads and polos already dyed in colors we like? Oh, probably, but we are incredibly cheap and like to do things ourselves. No luck finding an open fall forest cave yet because we've been distracted by a new aspect of the game.

Structures called epics have now been scattered throughout HI3, and if you're the first player to come across one, you get labelled permanently as its discoverer and earn an epic token. The game has not revealed what the epic tokens will be good for yet, but it will presumably be something good.

Here's the first one we happened upon, which had already been discovered by a player named Mayonnaise:

We decided to venture out due east from our ranch, which is not exactly in a bustling area, and see if we'd be lucky enough to come across any undiscovered epics.

Sure enough, Pepsi and Ossagon did eventually find one! Hello, viking epic! 

It didn't look like much of a viking from the angle they approached it, but it does this way!

They persisted and came upon this mesa epic:

Can't remember what these were called, though. Oops.

At any rate, we found another at night:

We also rode due south of our ranch and discovered two more epics:

The panda epic is my favorite so far!

This huge gaia tree (in the background, ignore the birches) is cool too!

We may keep this going in various directions until we run into a vast ocean or quick traveling back to civilization gets too difficult, just for the fun of it.

For once, I do not have any new wilds to introduce. No, we are not exerting better self-control. We just haven't found any with high stats, noteworthy performance metrics, or amazing personalities. We did find this cool but untalented brindle last weekend, though:

I'm so happy we have Clorox, but I sure hope more great brindles are in our future!

Our newest horses (4 in Aug, 1 in Sept.) are settling in nicely, even if they don't have their own special saddle pads and polos yet. They finally have names!

Zonko has been Zonko for awhile now, as we already posted about. He was the easiest!

StarWind was renamed Lyra after the constellation:

Since we're not tennis buffs, Deuce is now Showtunes. I can't remember if we were actually listening to show tunes when we lassoed him (we do on occasion), but he is flashy enough that it seemed to fit.

Pacer is now Maral, after the Caspian red deer. Topi is quite taken with her, so it just seemed to make sense.

Finally, Brownie's name no longer makes us yawn. Since he is dun and has that spiky mane, he reminded us of Norwegian Fjords, so we've named him after a Norwegian city and fjord, Trondheim. I think it sounds like it should be the name of a kingdom in Lord of the Rings. XD