Fire-breathing Friesians? When Pigs Fly!

Star Stable's focus over the last few weeks has been on the medieval area, where new races and other new items have been added. It has not inspired us to shell out major shillings for the super expensive medieval tack or clothing, though a lot of it is really cool. 

Clara took Snowy for one last evening ride in the snow before it disappeared for the season. 

Impractical but very pretty!

Goodbye, virtual snow!

Winter still has the Mitten tightly in its grip: our real-life cold and snow and aren't going anywhere anytime soon. *Sighs* So, while we may have retired the holiday sweaters for the season, we still have Clara wearing wintery outfits: non-holiday sweaters, fleeces, quilted vests, or coats, usually paired with mittens. 

In our quest to earn all of the medieval-themed championship ribbons, we continued participating in quite a few championships The club we recently joined even held a "competition night" last weekend, where the intent was to participate in the championships together. Participation was pretty sparse - a lot of the time it was just Clara and the two club leaders, plus plenty of other non-club competitors, of course. Ironically, the best attended was the one in Valedale, where most of us (including Clara and Panda) failed to complete the course. Oops. Clara did much better in ones that followed, even winning two "regular" ribbons before the end of the night.

Here are a few fun pre-championship screenshots.

I wish we could've seen how they got up there!

Somebody else has a twin Paso Fino to our Riverrock called "Riverracer!" I guess we're not the only ones who think the reverse dapples look like rippling water.

All the competitions mean extra shillings to spend! 

We spent some on this forest green top and saddle pad, figuring they will get lots of use in March especially.

Here's a peek at the new purple saddle pad, leg wraps, and top we treated ourselves with in honor of Valentine's Day. Unfortunately, this is the most expensive saddle pad we will (hopefully) ever buy. We were clicking too fast and accidentally used star coins to buy it rather than using Jorvik shillings. The mistake cost us 55 star coins, over half of what we make in a week as a Star Rider, or over 2 weeks of what it costs for every-other-day stable care. Ugh, we hope never to do that again. We felt so bad about it that we haven't spent any star coins on stable care since. Instead, we spent a week caring for all 14 horses ourselves, and now we are midway through using one of our precious tickets for a week of free stable care.

Another unfortunate recent development: a persistent, super inconvenient bug. Usually at least once a day, this screen randomly appears when we click on something. The only way to get rid of it is to force quit our Star Stable session. This may not sound like that big a deal, but if you have partially-completed tasks when this happens, you lose all progress on said tasks. For example, this has happened to us multiple times when we had completed a championship but hadn't yet returned to Moorland or the far-flung medieval area to claim our daily championship rewards. Hence, we have to revisit Moorland and the medieval area to restart the tasks, complete another championship, and return yet again to Moorland and the medieval area to claim the rewards. Not cool.

It seems to happen most often when we're doing stable chores or clicking on gather-able plants or recyclables, but it's also happened twice now when trying to claim our reward after one of the Baroness's training races. We've wised up and avoid doing these things when we have major tasks in progress, but we sure wish we didn't have to. Fingers crossed this gets fixed soon!

On a happier note, we did finally complete our medieval ribbon collection this weekend.

As anticipated, the flying pig is our unanimous favorite, though we also like the helmet a lot more than we thought we would. =)

In other news, we've been occasionally hanging out with a new buddy on the game. We've visited each other's stables (she has gorgeous horses, none of them duplicates to ours), and we've done some comps and group races together. She even led us to a hard-to-find star!

We both love the Icelandics and bought ours at the same end-of-the-year bazaar

Her dapple gray Ardennes is so cute - and it matches the NPC horse near the well in Moorland.

The hidden (and waterlogged) star! 

Our buddy has collected almost all of the stars, while we are nowhere close.

Finally, here's a look at the two new dragon/Friesian horses that joined the game this week, Ryume and Keima. (Ryume, the black one, was also in one of the pre-competition screenshots above, as you may have noticed.)

So far, Keima seems to be more popular, judging by how many we've seen being ridden around by their proud new owners. The opalescent thing they have going on with their scales in dragon form is a fantastic touch.

They're great in both dragon and horse forms, and the fire-breathing feature in dragon form is especially impressive. Will we ever buy one? Alas, probably not. Bethany and I really like them, but Lily and Julie aren't as wild about them in dragon form. Lily would prefer we stick to horses only, this being a horse game. Julie finds the dragons' crocodilian mouths a bit off-putting and prefers the older dragons, Aldrach and Faramawr.

It's all hypothetical anyway, thanks to the steep 950 star coin price tag on all 4 of these guys. As long as we can keep from inadvertently clicking on things we shouldn't, our star coins are safe for now. Until next time!

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!