Archie, Slinky, and Pricey Chickens

Mom's birthday last Saturday was taste of mid summer in mid May: 80's and sunny. It was so warm that she did not do anything outside other than a morning walk, during which she was already grateful for every bit of shade.

She had an awesome day of relaxing (Saturday birthdays are the best!) and then celebrating with the fam. For the record, here are her gifts pre opening:

And post opening:

This Memorial Day weekend has been much more spring-like weather-wise, which is ok by me. No need to rush headlong into premature summer the way Star Stable has this year, ha ha.

Speaking of rushing headlong, Magicmirror made up for lost time and now has earned not one but two championship ribbons! Both were due to us just hanging in there and making it through the courses (yay for tiny pools of entrants!), but they are ribbons nevertheless. =)

First ribbon ever from the Baroness's Championship! 

It even happened to match the color scheme we were going for that day.

We might have gotten better than third in this Firgrove Championship had we not somehow missed the final checkpoint and having to circle back for it. Oops. At least we didn't accidentally go through it the wrong way and get disqualified yards before the finish line. That really would've stunk.

Snowsecret was Clara's mount on Mom's birthday. Before heading out to Starshine Ranch, they pulled off a win in a small Moorland Championship. Great job, Snowy! <3

Why the trek out to Starshine Ranch? Because Camp Western came early this year, kicking off on May 15 instead of in July like last year. The timing is puzzling to us, since we thought Camp Western was a summer camp, and we're earning summer tokens. Um, Star Stable, this entire event is taking place in spring, and kids are still in school. You do realize that, right?

Along with Camp Western came the rollout of a new horse breed, the American Saddlebred! Loads of them have been prancing around the Starshine Ranch area with their proud new owners, bedecked in western tack. 

My favorites, naturally, are the pintos, but they're all quite nice.

It's not my favorite breed in real life - they've always given me showoff vibes - but I'd say Star Stable did a pretty good job with them. 

Camp Western itself seems very similar to last year, but happily, the pets you can earn are different. There is also one new set of western gear that can be purchased with those summer tokens. (Aw, man. This seems to be the year of the salmon.)

The beasties are back again, of course. 

The wolf population seems to have decreased somewhat from last year, but there are still more than enough prowling around to keep us on our toes.

Thanks to YouTubers who are faithfully posting daily video guides of wandering horse and renegade chest locations, we're finding those without much trouble. 

Returning to the corral with all the wandering horses in tow

Some of the more interesting chest locations:

by that gravestone again

behind some random blue storage boxes in a little valley (still wonder how the boxes got here)

in a wolf cave

Like last year, the most desirable chest with a key inside is somewhere in the wolf den area every single day. *Sighs*

The number of daily tasks you can complete for summer tokens has been dramatically reduced this year. You can still return wandering farm animals, participate in training races, and lunge your horse, but they only give shillings and horsey experience, not tokens. There are still 3 varying daily ranch chores that reward with tokens, though, and they are the same ones as last year.

leading a hesitant foal in circles in a paddock

shearing sheep while avoiding the bull

(we had to do this one every day for about a week straight)

herding ranch horses to the beach to cool off

(the bull came at us right after this screenshot was taken...)

filling a water trough with this small, sometimes slightly levitating bucket

Magic?

making various trips to pick up or drop off items

We've herded many a farm animal for shillings anyway and haven't had any issues with them getting stuck.

The most time-consuming task we're facing is collecting gold nuggets. It will take a whopping 6666 gold nuggets to take home both of the new chickens, Penny (black) and Henrietta (gold).

We whack at most rocks we come across and veer out of our way to snag many floating lone nuggets, but  they're not adding up as quickly as we'd hoped. Will we manage to collect enough before the event ends on June 5? We'll sure try!

Again, thanks to the YouTube guides, we jumped through the necessary hoops to take home the other two free pets, Archie the terrier and Slinky the cat, without any major issues. 

Yay! I think they're every bit as cute as Atlas and Kerfuffle from last year. =)

And finally, the most exciting part of this post for me, is that a 1-week horse bazaar is currently going on! From left to right, we have the Lusitano, the Welsh Pony, the Shire, and the Irish Cob all on sale!  None of these are particularly western, but whatever.

The player on the Thoroughbred was still standing there when we eventually signed out, probably either trying to decide on a horse or a name. We feel you, fellow player.

The first 2 don't tempt us much, nor does the Shire since we already have one (Magicmirror.) However, we've had our eye on the Irish Cob ever since our first visit to Valedale. One of these three pintos in particular:

the palomino sabino

the black tobiano

the seal brown tobiano

We're all on board with taking home one as our 9th horse, even Lily. (How could you not love these guys?!) Which one will we choose, though, and what will we name her? Bethany will let you know in our next post!

Let's Not Go Get Ice Cream

Hooray for May! It's been warmer than usual here most of the time since our last post, frequently feeling more like summer than spring. We're not complaining, though! Mom performed the biannual closet swap today: goodbye, sweaters and hello, summer clothes!

We've been slowly bringing short-sleeved shirts back into Clara's rotation on Star Stable too, as you'll see in some of our screenshots to come. 

Brighty squeaked out a win at the Fort Pinta championship on the final day of the Equestrian Festival! That brought our championship ribbon collection to an even 10. Thank you, Brighty! Way to go!

Here are Magic and Clara saying goodbye to the Moorland festival grounds. Until next year!

We've gained enough confidence to occasionally participate in championships now without being super stressed out. It will never be our favorite thing, but the shillings payouts make it worth it! We've noticed the pools of competitors tend to be smaller now that the festival is over. Once it was just us and one other player! (Other player won. Shocker. It was weird, though, because they were invisible to us the entire race.) Artie has earned two ribbons now, which just leaves Magic without any. Sorry, girl! We'll make sure you get more chances!

Things have been relatively quiet on the game since the festival ended. One small addition is that you can perform 3 varying chores a day from inside your home stable to earn a few shillings. These include the expected things like feeding, watering, and mucking stalls, but also new things like tack cleaning, chicken chasing, and showering a horse. (Why we are getting paid and who is paying us remains to be seen, but we'll take it!)

Since we have 12 stalls and only 8 horses, frequently random stall selection for these chores goes awry. It's especially amusing when we have to clean up manure piles from unoccupied stalls. I guess the horses sometimes leave their own stalls when Clara's not there to go unload in a different stall, ha ha.

The end of the festival was a little sad, but we feel like 4 weeks was an appropriate length of time. We're enjoying the slower pace and being able to focus more on questing. 

Here's Clara searching for a needle in not one but multiple haystacks. She did actually find it! (Only in Star Stable!)

In another, we teamed up with Bonnie to retrieve a councilman's pants from top of the clock tower. Long story.

Unfortunately, this involved Clara "distracting" some angry wasps while Bonnie retrieved the pants.

Clara headed back to the Valley of the Hidden Dinosaur on Artie and got to help out Nic Stoneground with various scientific pursuits, including taking small samples from the giant "dinosaur" skeleton. They also rescued this woman, Professor Einstein, who miraculously survived a helicopter crash without suffering any bodily harm.

Oops. Clara's hair and this coat are not compatible. XD

In another more extended quest, we ran into Maya out at her family's sad, mostly abandoned family farm in the Forgotten Fields. Maya still goes out there to tend some animals. A rouge horse scared and scattered her sheep, so Snowy and Clara helped her round them back up. Unlike the sheep during special events or at Starshine Ranch, these ones nicely follow behind rather than having to be herded.

They found and calmed down the loose palomino horse. 

She was injured enough that they wanted to take her to the rescue ranch on South Hoof, yet not so injured that she needed a trailer. Off they all went.

While the horse was being cared for, Clara had to figure out who she belonged to. Turns out she was from Paddock Island and frequently escaped her paddock. The owner seemed nice enough but hadn't even noticed the horse, Elli, was missing yet.  

Once recovered, Clara, Frosty, and Maya brought Elli back home.

Elli's owner could see that she'd bonded with Maya and thought she'd be happier on the grassy expanses of the Forgotten Fields, so she generously gave Elli to her! Aw, totally saw that one coming. <3

On a more ominous note, she did not have anything good to say about the farm's future prospects. Poison from GED? Curse? Both? We shall see!

The most lengthy quest we've been on recently is a continuation of "save Nightdust and his companions." Mr. Anwir had taken some wild ponies from South Hoof to perform mysterious sinister experiments on. Madison, the girl NPC who has bonded with Nightdust, will never learn and once again snuck off to try to save him single-handedly. Her dad and Clara needed a distraction to get into the sketchy warehouse/lab after her, as the area was crawling with guards. 

Madison's dad was not impressed with Clara's idea for a distraction, so he did the distracting instead while Clara snuck in.

Reunited with Madison, it was then a long, involved process to sneak past security cameras, figure out the code to get into the control room, and then get the cameras to loop yesterday's footage so that they could continue their mission undetected.

Madison's dad arrived in time to help them free the horses. Nothing fancy this time: they just took crowbars to the cages.

I'm guessing the noise alerted Mr. Anwir, because he showed up despite the disabled security cameras. Why everybody waited to free Nightdust last, I don't know, but Madison's dad left with the other horses while Madison and Clara hung back to free him.

Clearly, Nightdust was not himself.

Freaky stuff, right? Nightdust and Clara had a moment, and after that Nightdust seemed to start fighting what'd been done to him with all he's worth. 

It made him very erratic to ride but also very effective at destroying the lab.

Mr. Anwir then had the bright idea to inject himself with the same stuff he'd injected Nightdust with.

Once transformed, he immediately left the lab to rampage through Jorvik City and ended up on top of the ice cream parlor.

He's still there. After luring him down and getting him to chase us - while on flat, solid ground, I might add - we randomly started falling into nothingness on loop. The game then booted us and had the audacity to tell us we were suspected of cheating! No, no cheating here, we promise. Just a weird bug!

Fortunately, we could log back on. When we did, we were safe on solid ground at the bus stop outside Fort Pinta. All has been well since. We haven't had the time or desire to go back to face the monster or risk falling limbo again. Sorry, Jorvik City!