A Cornucopia of Wilds

Shortly after Julie published her post on November 1, Pepsi and Maral happened upon this big lug in the rainforest. Since he looked suspiciously unlike most rainforest wilds, which tend to be much lighter in build, we were really hoping he'd be our next lucky find.

Sure enough, the lucky find messages immediately popped up when Pepsi lassoed him!

Gotta admit, he does sort of look like a "Clavius."

At only 5 years old, he is the youngest that a wild can possibly be when lassoed on the game. He's also only the second corn roan wild we have ever caught! (The corns are the darker spots on his roan areas.)

As you'd expect, he is not exactly a speed demon or a jumping king, but he's one of the strongest pullers we've ever lassoed. Our second strongest to date, in fact, and he has a much more agreeable persona than the one horse who had him beat (an extremely skittish, stubborn, and lazy taiga bog wild).

Here he is under saddle:

So clunky and, yes, so cute. Any guesses as to what breed he is? 

Because he is roan and doesn't have much feathering, my first guess was Breton. I also thought maybe Brabant, Russian Heavy Draft, or Ardennais since they are sometimes roan. My first guess was the right one! To be more specific, he is the heavier type of Breton, a Heavy Draft Breton. Way to take it to the extreme, Clavius! (Fun fact: Clavius is the name of one of the largest craters on the moon. How appropriate that we found him when the moon was nearly full! XD)

Later that same day, we also found our first ever badger-faced wild! 

(The name here was also oddly appropriate, since we'd watched the installment of The Hobbit - the one where Bilbo gets a chainmail shirt made of mithril - the night before, Halloween night.) We did not keep him, as he was too small to ride, and his stats were underwhelming. 

After snowing most of Sunday, Nov 1 (the ground was still too warm for it to accumulate, thank goodness), the weather swung dramatically back the other direction. We experienced a record-breaking stretch of sunny days with highs in the low 70's, and we thoroughly enjoyed it while it lasted.

HI3 was as generous as Mother Nature during that warm spell. On Friday, 11/6, we stumbled upon two more especially cool wilds. 

We found the first one while on a mail run, after finally breaking down and buying some coal from a player's store in Equinae Village. (The few open fall forest caves we'd been in had all been sadly coal-less, as far as we could tell.)

The name doesn't suit him, clearly, but the genetic stats aren't bad!

His swiftness and interesting personality made him really tempting to keep!

You can't really tell in these pics, but he was sharply oval in barrel shape, with Pepsi seeming to sit especially high up on his back. We were not sure we were going to keep him, since he was not that brave and in light of other recent events (read on), but then Bethany - totally by accident, she promises - sold him to the trader, which made the decision for us. That will teach us not to change the rank of horses we're considering to "not for sale."

On another mail run, this time through the jungle outside of Ad Astra, we found this cool mare:

We were not in the least expecting the lucky find messages this time! =D

Her genetic stat total is the by far the lowest of any of our lucky finds, but let's not dwell on that. 

She's speedy, has a low stamina drop, and has excellent jump power! Only 2 wilds we've lassoed have had higher jump power, in fact, and both were tiny in comparison: 13 and 12.2 hands. She's also brave and social, so theoretically, if we ever were to want to compete in show jumping or cross country, once she's trained, she'd likely be our best bet.

Here she is in all her athletic, long-legged glory:

Can you guess her breed? I figured she was probably a warmblood of some sort, since she looks like a Thoroughbred but isn't as incredibly fast as they are. Clicking through various warmblood breeds in the BBB, though, I gave up trying to guess. She's definitely on the more Thoroughbred-y end of a Thoroughbred-draft mix, but that didn't narrow it down very much!

The expert determined that she is an Irish Sport Horse! I think this is quite amusing, because this is one breed of horse we never kept on HI2. (The game gave us multiple nice Irish Draughts, but we never got an ISH we loved. We never tried hard to buy one either because something seemed off about their necks in the artwork.)

We all approve of Silver Wind, that's for sure! <3 She may not have the most exotic coat color, but her height makes her stand out all the same: according to the BBB, ISH mares are typically only between 15 and 15.3 hands! Since she was so similar in color to Shamrock, that foal-like wonderland wild we were on the fence about, we ended up selling the original Shamrock and renamed the ISH Shamrock. (She is Irish, after all.) 

Since we parted with the original Shamrock, whose stats were much higher than Zane's, the curly-coated bay wild we were also on the fence about, we decided to part with Zane too. She made it easy on us by being in an ornery, hind leg-kicking mood the final time we groomed her. (It's like she knew?)

We were like, whoa, two lucky finds within the same week! Thanks, HI3! That's amazing! Then, two days later, on another mail run...

Plains wilds can come in any size and shape, but this guy still looked suspiciously like a purebred draft...

Sure enough, he was November lucky find #3!!!

Highly unusual, alright! How incredible that we found two lucky find bright strawberry corn roan draft stallions a mere 8 days apart! Throw in the ISH mare in there too, and wow! 

This one is slightly larger, isn't sooty, has feathering, and doesn't have a snip. He also has blue eyes, while Clavius's are more of an amber.

As we expected, his performance metrics are quite similar to Clavius's too. Unusual is slightly faster, but Clavius is slightly stronger. =) 

Feathering! Finally!

According to the expert, he's a Dutch Draft, which is a rare breed that wasn't even on our radar. Up until now, we've had no repeats with each lucky find breed's country of origin, but now we've had two from the Netherlands (Mariette the Groningen was our first.) That's cool by us - the Netherlands is one of the many countries Mom's ancestors hailed from. =)

Even in the excitement of finding him, we still remembered to deliver that letter. Interesting that we found our third lucky find of November right by Third Eye Equestrian Center. I wonder if that third eye saw it coming?

At any rate, we're thinking of naming him after another large lunar crater. Aitken, Apollo, or Lorentz, maybe? Or I suppose we could go for a Martian crater, like Antoniadi, Herschel, Huygens, or Kepler?

We're quite relieved that none of the 3 lucky finds had cringe-worthy personalities! (Shamrock is just ornery enough to buck, but we'll forgive that and hope it doesn't happen much.) I wonder if lucky finds have a better chance at having more personality charts on the right (versus left) side of the chart than your average wild, or if it's totally random? If it is totally random, we've had exceptionally good luck!

Not so when it came to finding coal. Mere days after breaking down and buying coal, we finally found a cave that had some. It figures, right?

Oh well, at least we finally have soda ash to bleach out our numerous dye fails. Our newest horses will soon have saddle pads and polos dyed in more pleasant colors!

Nala's Halloween Feast

Nala had a great Halloween. 

(Not because of her koala costume. She hated it.)

Was it because she ate...

A. this pumpkin:

B. this pan of pumpkin seeds

C. this Halloween-themed dessert:

D. this jack-o-lantern shaped pizza:

It wasn't A., the pumpkin. It went on to become this:

She didn't technically eat B., the pan of pumpkin seeds, either, but she did quietly jump up on the table and eat some raw pumpkin seeds earlier in the week when Mom left the room for 30 seconds.

Nala consumed an entire chocolate bunny once, and around a dozen unbaked chocolate chip cookies on another occasion. She came through both with minimal side effects. Still, it's probably fortunate for her that she also did not eat C., the ghosts in the graveyard dessert. (The dirt contains chocolate pudding and crumbled oreos, and the Milano cookie tombstones have a layer of chocolate inside.) This went straight into the fridge when it was completed.

Unfortunately for the hungry humans, Nala ate D., their supper. There were actually 2 jack-o-lantern pizzas. Mom took the photo you see above of one of them, then shut the box and left the boxes stacked on the kitchen counter. She went upstairs to tell Grandma the pizza had arrived, then got sidetracked helping her try to change a lightbulb. (I know, I know, but in their defense, it was one of those long, fluorescent tube type ones in the ceiling. To say it did not go smoothly is a sad understatement.)

Even sadder, when Mom realized it was way too quiet downstairs and rushed down, she found Nala eating one of the pizzas off the kitchen floor - only about half of it remained, and it was face down with its cheese stuck to the linoleum. Nala had pulled the box off the counter and gotten the pizza out of the box somehow with minimal box damage. Mom found the second box similarly intact in the next room, empty but for the jalapeno peppers.

Needless to say, it was not the best Halloween night for Mom. 

It wasn't the greatest night for us either. We wanted to play HI3, but the graphics were lagging. Not the issue we've had before where there's a big delay every time you try to bring up a menu, place a horse, click on something, etc., but where every movement we tried to make (rotating the camera, moving our avatar) was slow, jerky, and headache-inducing. It was doing it in a less-extreme fashion on Friday but really got bad last night. No idea what it was about, but it was still doing it somewhat even when we switched to "lowest quality" graphics, which, we discovered, is aptly named. 

This morning, November 1, wasn't so great either. 

=(

At least HI3 seems to be behaving itself better today, so hopefully we won't regret that we just stocked up on more mobia earlier in the week. Thanks to the issues, we did not find any more wilds in October to be tempted by, so the same 4 are still vying for permanent spots in the herd. We are fairly confident that Snappy and Wayfair (now Thriller) are staying put, but we still aren't sure about Zane or Shamrock... Lily says it's a sign neither should stay. The rest of us are not convinced.

Ugh, I'm sorry this post is kind of a downer so far. Let's end with something happier. Not sure how long this has been around, but we realized just this week that it is possible not only to see what your horse was like as a 4-year-old, but also what it was like at birth! This has a very practical purpose for all the HI3 breeders out there, I'm sure, but it's also really cute seeing what mature equines looked like as teeny newborn foals!

For example, here are our first 4 as foals:

Starfleet

Gryffindor

Cloudburst:

Windfall

I love how they aren't just cookie cutter, how they all still have their unique characteristics, only in awkward foal form. =)

Here's what our most draft-like horses looked like as foals:

Teatime

Blitzen

Clorox

Torridon was a dark grullo before he grayed out!

Zonko always had his jumbo-sized hooves.

Rock that tail, Showtunes!

Wow, Maral! You were even more deer-like as a foal!

Here's Shamrock. Her body shape has not changed much. XD