Another Happy Anniversary!

Welcome to February, everybody! We will celebrate our two-year anniversary on Star Stable this coming Tuesday! 

2023

2024

2025

Wow, how the herd has grown! We are so proud of our choices. And this screenshot, too - nobody had their head down or was sticking their nose into another horse! (Note Evie is dozing, of course!)

For the record, here's a list of all 14 of them. Frostflight's been there for us since day 1, 2/4/23. Our most recent addition is Opalowl, who came home with us on 12/31/24.

...one more just for fun, with an awake Evie

These were the goals we set for ourselves around this time last year.

Bethany: buy a halter for every horse. (Tigertin looks so cute in hers!)

Felicity: buy a third horse with spots

Julie: expand the stable at least once, so we'll have room for another 7 horses

Lily: meet the missing star riders, Lisa and Anne, officially

We met my sisters' goals, obviously. Still a big no on mine, I'm sorry to say. Here's hoping we'll get there this year, but realistically, who knows? Right now we're dragging our feet on the main quest line because we have to go back to the heavily-guarded floating fortress of villains. Not a fun, cheerful place, as you can imagine. XD

I asked my sisters if they wanted to set new goals for this year, and this is what we all came up with:

Bethany: buy another pony - Gotland or Welshie?

Felicity: buy a warmblood, preferably one with spots

Julie: make serious progress on the "paths" out in Valedale and finish at least one

Me: unlock and try our hand at archeology (setting my sights a bit lower this year!)

Let's see how we do!

A lot has happened on Star Stable since our last post. 

The colorful Criollo has been added to the game. 

Love the coats! I personally prefer the Paso Fino (they just look so happy!), but I think Star Stable did a great job with them.

We completed another trailblazer track. The clothing and tack set was another western-themed one and not our fave, but we gladly took it and the other prizes. We have enough weekly stable care tickets now that we won't need to spend nearly so many star coins on stable care in the coming months, which is what we're happiest about.

We joined a club! We've received many a random club invite and seen many a club advert in global chat, but we have been in the habit of disregarding them. Get this: somebody actually took the time to talk to us and ask us to join their club! So, we did. I don't know how long it'll last (dealing with immature players has got to be exhausting for the leaders), but we'll do our part in participating. 

The first club event was a trail ride on a Friday evening. Everybody - I think there may have been around 10 of us at the peak - followed the club leader on a leisurely trail ride around Moorland and then out to Fort Pinta. 

We left our horses all lined up at the hitching posts by the disco, then boogied for a while on the dance floor. 

We had a short race on the way back to Moorland, though there was some confusion about the finish line, ha ha. That all went pretty well, but things kind of degenerated into chaos when a jumping show was attempted after that. It'll be interesting to see how future events go!

Star Stable gave us another horse bazaar! All four horse breeds on discount were breeds already in our herd, so there was no danger of us buying our first horse of 2025.

All fine choices! Would highly recommend!

We finally tried out the Icelandics-only race out in New Hillcrest. There are sections where you must tölt, hence the Icelandics-only. It's fun, but honestly, not anything worth making special trips out to New Hillcrest for. 

Finally, another championship challenge kicked off this week. This collection of ribbons is medieval-themed, since we are being urged into competing by an NPC from the medieval area, a knight of the Yellow Wolves. 

Challenge accepted. We've been showing up to lots of championships this weekend. So have many other players, but it doesn't seem as crowded so far as it did over the holidays. Makes sense, I guess!

It wasn't that hard to earn the first four ribbons. The remaining three are going to take progressively longer, as you can see from the required points.

We won't be heartbroken if we don't make it to the sword or helmet ribbons. The flying pig, though, we're eagerly looking forward to. I hope it lives up to our expectations!

While clicking around on the menu, we stumbled upon the championship schedule! (Never noticed it before, but it's a sub page under the "High Scores" area.) Even better, it tells you in the lower left corner what the current game time is. This has made tracking when and where the competitions will be sooo much easier. No more having to open a new window to Google what the current military time is in the evenings, or having to consult Jorvikpedia for the schedule. Yay! I wish we'd known about this a long time ago!

I will leave you with this pre-competition screenshot with the Northern Lights in the background. We will miss them the most when winter leaves Jorvik next week!

Winter Wanderings

Winter is chugging along full steam here in the Mitten. We've been getting a lot of cold and snow, and it shows no sign of letting up any time soon. We've missed out on major storm systems so far, though, which is fine with us!

It's quite wintery on Star Stable as well. Clara and Opalowl enjoyed the final days of Winter Village access to the full.

Other players did too. We never tried it ourselves, but we saw two who managed to travel back to Jorvik on the Winter Village animals. =)

It would've been amazing to be in a race against a bear! 

No sign of it once the championship started, though.

For the record, the final 3 ribbons we earned for all of our competition efforts were a snowman, a gnome, and an antlered foal. They're all great, but the snowman stole the show for me. He's probably going to come out a lot all winter long.

getting a really good look at the Christmas decorations

pied pipering the reindeer one last time

one last ride over the magical sky bridges

It's been fun, Winter Village! Until next year!

The snow is lingering longer. We toggle it on and off depending on our mood and what we're doing. Fishing sometimes works in snow...

...and sometimes doesn't.

Opalowl progressed swiftly through her experience levels, largely thanks to the Winter Village.

She's also won several championship ribbons! Competition has been much less fierce now that the championship ribbon event is over.

Another boost to Opalowl's horsey experience: the fireflies in Valedale. Without a whole lot going on now, we've been spending more time there working on the various labor-intensive "paths." We've progressed on the Path of Whimsy enough that each firefly caught gave her 5 horsey XP, and that adds up quickly!

She hit level 15 while out there this weekend!

We've also been completing Farah's task board sometimes: we can craft and deliver 3 different items to 3 different NPC's each day for star coins. Thank goodness for Google - we know where many of the NPC's are but have certainly not memorized all of them!

Clara gets really into the crafting.

We can use the horse trailer to bring us close to our NPC recipients, and sometimes we do. Other times, though, we make our way there the long (but free) way. This frequently involves using ferries.

We just noticed this weekend that different ferries have different colored life preservers and storage trunks!

You're welcome!

These deliveries remind us of delivering letters on HI3. <3 

I will leave you with a couple of cute screenshots from our recent snowy wanderings. 

Toggling the snow on and off in various locations amuses us to no end.

Even the little pigs leave trails in the snow! Well, done, Star Stable!

Opalowl can tölt now! She's so fancy. <3

You know us, though: we still spend most of our time galloping full speed.

Until next time!

Flying Into 2025!

Happy New Year!

You know those "mystery bundles" Felicity mentioned last time? Those were dresses! Not just any dresses, either, but glamorous, sparkly, red-carpet-worthy gowns!

with the fabulous boas

and sans boas

These were gifts from our aunt, though Mom had significant input on the selections. <3 Our aunt's own American Girl dolls have similar floor-length dresses in different colors/variations. This was inspiration for all of the 18" dolls in our house (there are a lot of us!) to dress up and throw ourselves a New Year's Eve party in the basement. It worked out perfectly this year because the humans were off at a party of their own. Disco ball, great music, sparkling grape juice and snacks, and then changing into pj's to watch Frozen 2 when we were too tired to party anymore... it was quite the night!

Felicity deliberately did not mention this in her last post (she had more than enough to talk about already), but on Christmas Day, a wintery horse bazaar set up shop in that usual grassy expanse a short gallop away from Moorland Stables.

From left to right, we have the Icelandic Horse, the Dartmoor Pony, the Ardennes, and the Norwegian Fjord!

We did not see this coming, but what great choices for a winter bazaar! 

Taking home a Dartmoor would be the most practical, since they can compete in the ponies-only race and championship. They're also the newest pony and the cheapest of the breeds at the bazaar. But we just don't love them, due to the underwhelming coat colors and that lip-curling animation.

Being the newest breed, the Ardennes is the most realistic graphics-wise and can wear most of the new tack. (No leg gear, obviously.) There's nothing exclusive to drafties race-wise, at least not yet, though, and their discount is the least impressive. 

We love Norwegian Fjords, with their stockiness, distinctive manes, and dun coats, and it's great that they can compete in the pony championship despite not technically being ponies. It's just hard for us to look past their older, more clunky animations. 

The Icelandic Horse, though... irresistible. We have been waiting quite some time for them to go on sale, both because they are very cute but also because there is an Icelandics-only race out near New Hillcrest that we've never been able to do. 

They come in quite a few coat colors. Below are the ones we liked enough to screenshot.

flaxen chestnut

silver dapple

black tobiano

grullo

Ýruskjóttur bay dun

flaxen red dun

buckskin calico tobiano

Or, for 200 star coins more, Kátur the magical snowy Icelandic could've been ours. Like Brinicle and the other magical wintery horses, he's only available while the Winter Village is around.

magical coat

non-magical coat: dapple bay pangaré

He is adorable, but is he worth spending 200 star coins more? Umm, probably not, as amusing as it would be to ride him around in magical snowy form in July.

It took us nearly a week of deliberations, but on New Year's Eve, we finally made our selection. 

Ýruskjóttur, which translates to "speckle," is a new coat pattern that recently cropped up on a real-life bay dun Icelandic stallion named Ellert. Efforts are underway to breed for the pattern, which is pretty cool! 

Our speckled beauty is a mare. "Opalowl" looks kind of funny smashed together, like some funky fantasy name, I guess, but we just went for it anyway.  None of the other double "O" names we tried fared any better, and Opalowl goes nicely with Garnetgazer.

Yay, snow in the girl-meets-horse screenshot!

Here they are on their first ride: bareback

and then with tack

We sure think we made the right choice. She's so pretty, and it's really fun that she does the flying pace in between canter and gallop! 

Once she's trained more, she'll be able to do yet another special gait, the tölt! So fancy! We haven't been out to New Hillcrest yet to see what the Icelandics-only race is like, so look for that next time. Until then, enjoy the brand new year! =)