Garnetgazer

This year, we made it all the way until November 28, the latest Thanksgiving can possibly be, without any accumulating snow. (No complaints here!) That all changed overnight: we woke up to a very white Black Friday! It is certainly helping all of West Michigan get into the Christmas mood! *Cues the Christmas music.* Mom and fam were very glad they'd had the foresight to set up the outdoor Christmas decorations last weekend, when it was dry and in the 40's.

Star Stable hasn't undergone its snowy transformation quite yet, but there's still been plenty going on to keep things interesting.

The Noriker, an Austrian draft breed that comes in appaloosa patterns, has been added to the game!

Aww! They are now high on the list of horse breeds we'd like to add to our stable someday.

The Silverglade Equestrian Center's layout got a big makeover. The bridge is so fancy now! That's probably my favorite part, but it's also fun that dressage and lunging areas have been added to the area.

Clara and Frosty celebrated by picking up trash, ha ha.

Star Stable rolled out another Trailblazer Track, where you get various daily rewards just for logging on and doing any game tasks you want. We find it to be a great motivator! In addition to some various horse treats (food, mood boosters) and human treats (stable care passes, gold worth lots of shillings), we also earned a new set of clothing and tack! Here are Brighty and Clara modeling it! 

Everything but the gloves and helmet are new!

It's a shame not everybody can wear this tack set - it's a pretty one! Will Star Stable ever retro fit their new tack to fit older generation 3 horses? We know it is possible, since they did it for the Jorvik Warmblood. We'd sure love it, but who knows? 

The only Black Friday sale we took advantage of this year is Star Stable's horse bazaar. Unlike last year's Black Friday week bazaar, which featured a bunch of magical horses on big discounts, this year's discounted horses are all non-magical beauties. The lineup includes:

the Paso Fino (yet again), the Andalusian, the Lusitano, the Dutch Warmblood, and the Finnhorse!

Those first 3 are easily ruled out, since we already have a Paso Fino (Riverrock rocks!), and since we find the animations for the Andalusians and Lusitanos dated and lacking. 

We had a much more difficult time choosing between the Dutch Warmblood and Finnhorse! 

The Dutch Warmblood is one of the newest additions to the game. Their standard price is 950 star coins, which I think is the max on the game currently? At any rate, it's 50 star coins more than the even newer warmblood to the game, the Selle Francais, which makes no sense to us. The Dutchies are on the biggest discount right now, down to 649 star coins. That means one would spend roughly three weeks fewer star coins to take one home this week, which is great!

We have admired these guys from a distance ever since they came out. They do a bit of head tossing, but it's not as extreme as it is in the Belgian Warmblood or Selle Francais, hence they are our favorite Star Stable warmblood of the three. The downside: there are only 7 color variations, and our favorite two are already NPC horses at stables we frequent.

The dapple gray is hands-down our favorite - so striking and realistic. Many other players seems to think so too - we've seen more of them being ridden around than any other color. It (with a mohawk-style mane) is an NPC horse at Silverglade Manor. 

The chestnut is fine, but the chestnut color is so monochromatic, and the markings are so symmetric and perfect, that it just isn't doing it for us.

The seal brown is cute, but it reminds us of Riverrock.

The liver chestnut is equally cute, but it reminds us of Desertdash.

Our second favorite is the bay, but we already see an NPC horse like it (with braids) every day at our home base, Moorland Stables.

The black horse doesn't have any markings at all, which we find kind of sad. We think we might add a black Friesian to our herd someday, so this one probably would not have been in the running even if it had had fun markings.

Option #7 is a stand-out cremello. This would probably be the one we went with if we had decided to buy a Dutchie now. In a game like this, where skin issues are not a factor and you can just enjoy their pale beauty, why not take home a cremello? Their sky blue eyes are gorgeous, and they'd be able to rock just about any color and pattern of tack. 

However, we decided to bide our time and pass on the dramatic Dutchie this time around. We're hoping that maybe the two festival-only pinto coats will come back and be on sale at some point? They wowed us more than any of these. Or maybe some more color variations will be added later on like Star Stable has done with other breeds? We think it's worth waiting to see, since we only plan on adding one horse max of a particular breed to our stable. It worked out for us with Eveningecho, after all!

This means that yes, we passed over an elegant dressage horse for a small, chunky Finnhorse who won't be able to wear a lot of the new tack. Impractical, definitely, but we passed the Finnhorse over for Riverrock at a bazaar last October, and we just couldn't do it a second time.

The Finnhorse comes in some nice solid colors, but our hearts were still firmly set on the black/chestnut mosaic. 

Naming horses from Star Stable's frustratingly limited dropdown lists isn't easy for us to begin with, plus we are still following our silly, self-imposed alliteration rule. (It's going to have to stop at some point - not planning on naming anybody Zapzombie - but we're not quite ready to give up yet.) 

Finnhorses make us think of the far north, and the far north makes us think of the northern lights. Garnets come in various colors (not just reds) that remind us of the northern lights. That's the line of reasoning that led us to choose the name for our new buddy, Garnetgazer.

Committing:

Here he is, our lucky horse #13!

Hand placement here is a bit off, oops. XD

Clara's first ride!

We're so pleased with him - he's even cuter than we had anticipated. <3

Welcome to the herd, Garnet!

Fabulous Fall

We've been enjoying unusually great fall weather here in the Mitten this year: above average temps and an exceptionally sunny October. Even now that it's November and we're back to it getting dark ridiculously early, Mom's been able to take walks outside in the evenings without bundling up for an arctic expedition. When fall is like this, I can see why it's Lily's favorite!

Lily has been in such a good mood, we'd probably have been able to talk her into taking home a horse #13 on Halloween. We didn't go there, though, don't worry. 

Halloween night itself was exceptionally windy but dry and relatively warm (50's, as I recall), so our house saw an above average number of trick-or-treaters. We watched them come and go from Mom's bedroom window. Was this creepy? Maybe, but we were stealthy. All anybody who happened to look up could see were Mom's cute stuffed dogs closest to the window, ha ha. Best costume prize goes to the boy dressed as a Hufflepuff Hogwarts student, complete with the classic scarf and a wand.

These, plus an old string of Halloween-themed lights (alternating skulls, Frankenstein heads, pumpkins, and ghosts) were there to greet the trick-or-treaters. One of the owl eyes blew away early on, never to be seen again, but luckily we had extra flowers and on hand!

Once it got too dark to see much, we enjoyed a slice of this jack-o-lantern pizza, helped ourselves to roasted pumpkin seeds and leftover Halloween candy, and watched the finale of a Halloween-themed baking show we'd recorded. All of this while dressed as Hogwarts students ourselves, naturally.

We played Star Stable during, on, and after Halloween as well (the portal stayed open through 11/5), of course, and we continued to participate in almost all of the Halloween activities. 

One major highlight: we didn't run into an invisible wall at this cave/hideout and could finish the Galloper's revenge quest line this year. 

Unfortunately, mid conversation with ghostly Broderick, Galloper and his horse, Morrigan, showed up. They took him who knows where to do who knows what, and Linda and Clara were left with more questions than answers.

Maybe we'll learn more next year? 

This second time around, we've gotten a lot better at completing the races without incidents (like running into things that zap you or even cause you to fail.) We've also ridden the Haunted Trail Ride area enough now that we don't worry about getting lost anymore. 

I'll miss you the most, tagalong ghost donkey!

We've even gotten better at finding the gourds.

The final week of the event, we helped 6 of the 7 wandering ghosts get back to the Keep. 

Most were ghosts of people:

Our favorites were the ones that weren't:

These quests went easier the second time around too. We sadly still don't have access to where ghost #6 was, so that one was on its own.

Until next year, Galloper. It's been fun.

It was sad to see all of it go, but it was time, I suppose. The Halloween costumes went back in the wardrobe, and the sweaters and coats have started coming out.

Speaking of Clara's fantastic magical wardrobe, it just got revamped. The thumbnails are bigger, each page holds more items, and there are more pages to fill. There's even a search feature, which is helpful if you know the name of what you're looking for. The snag: wardrobe contents didn't transfer over neatly from the old format. What was on page two is now on the bottom of page one, etc. 

It was a tedious process to fix, and it must've been way worse for players who had bursting wardrobes before. (Ours wasn't anywhere near full yet.) We really wish there was a way to reorder the pages, or even to just drag and drop items from one page to another rather than having to dump things into the backpack as the in between step.

It's possible to zoom in and rotate the camera on Clara and horse (thank goodness - this default view is not ideal for viewing what's on the horse, especially the saddle bag and pet!), but I do wish they took up more like 1/3 or even 1/2 of the screen rather than being this small. I also really miss being able to see Clara sitting on the horse from the side in the stable lighting, no rotation necessary to see how things look and no boring beige background. Oh well, as far as we know, nothing went missing in the transfer, at least. Long term, it'll be great having more room.