A Very Horsey Birthday

My birthday was a big day for us on HI2! We agreed to spend major virtual bucks on a month subscription token just so that we could complete our sisterly birthday fluted wild contest.

Crazy? Perhaps. It would've been totally unfair if I didn't get to participate, though.

Yetta and I fluted this very expensive wild horse out on tiny Palm Isle.

He's nice enough looking, but other than that nothing extraordinary. 

Here is the October horse on Mom's work calendar:

Well, the manes and tail colors are similar. That's about it.

And here are my birthday dogs! What cuties!

We'll see how my Gelderland stacks up to my sisters' birthday flutes in a future post.  I have too much to get to in this one to go there right now!

Since then, we've been making an effort to put the sub to good use. We continued Apollo's quest by going after the remaining record presses scattered around HI2. 

It took us forever to find the one on Desert Isle even with the Esroh Legends map, but at least we found this while we were at it:

On Oak Isle, we paused to flute a wild with this result:

And here is Pepsi about to press our final record, #24:

Now we just have to make our way out to Apollo on Bud Isle and ace the quiz. Easier said than done!

My birthday was also a big day on HI3! Pepsi was cantering along on Gryffindor when they came upon a herd of 5 wild equines!

We lassoed the shaggy-maned grayish pony stallion on the far right first.

The one on the far left was an enormous 18 hand horse, our tallest to date.

Pepsi then lassoed a huge, somewhat awkward-looking bay mare:

and a delicate pony mare:

We couldn't lasso the last horse, the gray pinto, because the game told us we had too many horses. So, we marked our location, teleported back to Elder Ridge Village, sold the 4 horses, and teleported back. 

The gray pinto was still there! We had saved it for last because it was the most touchy about being lassoed. That's a recent change to the game, by the way: wild horses now vary in how easy they are to catch. Instead of just standing there unless you get too close, they move around a lot more, and some now freak out and move away when you throw a lasso at them. We've given up on a few that proved too difficult. (Side note: I get that this adds more challenge and realism to the game, but I still wasn't thrilled, especially because personality distribution is no longer random, but now tends to be better the harder a horse is to catch. It's fortunate we found Gryff when we did!) 

With lots of persistence, we finally caught him!

Yeah, I suppose his spots are rather... silly: small, irregular white blobs on his withers, the left side of his rump, and all 4 legs. I'm not sure if grays lighten as they age on this game or not, but his base color, seal brown silver, hasn't grayed out that much. What really caught our attention though is that he has the highest stat total of any wild horse we've caught so far!

He stood out so much that it didn't take long for us to agree to keep him, even if it did mean filling our last horse slot. We nixed "Silly" in favor of "Cloudburst," though, since his coloring and mane texture make us think of rainclouds. 

His antisocial-ness hasn't been an issue yet, since we haven't encountered many other players lately. The laziness is interesting, though. Even though we get an annoying "lazy horse slowing" message every time Pepsi first gets on him, he doesn't seem to slow all that much more than Star and Gryff. Unlike the other two, however, he chooses to follow paths whenever given the opportunity. 

After deciding to keep Cloud, we intensified our search for a good spot to build our ranch. We originally tried to find someplace near Elder Ridge Village, since those fjord cliffs and highlands are where all 3 of the horses are from. We didn't want to invade the areas near other players' ranches, though, and we also wanted a spot near clean water of some sort. So, eventually we gave up there and tried finding a good spot near the world's center. No luck there either - we realized fall forests are great for having lots of small streams, but it just wouldn't feel right to build there when our character's name has Summer in it, plus we encountered the same is this too close to somebody else? issue. We explored the terrain around there and still weren't inspired. Next, we tried visiting some villages we liked the names of and their surrounding areas. Here's Gryff posing in Hogwarts Village:

Some of the shops there have such amusing names!

Still no luck finding the right spot. Finally, we looked through the villages' descriptions and targeted ones that mentioned our favorite types of terrain. We chose to visit one near lots of sequoia rainforest, since we all love the deep greens, mist, and giant trees. Just as we were losing hope of finding a spot near any water, we found a little pocket of those lavender pools that Bethany, Julie, and I like so much. It seemed meant to be!

We bought it!

Step 2: build our ranch house. Luckily, there are lots of stones lying around in the rainforest to use as building material. Fjord highlands are also a conveniently short ride from our parcel. Their tall lodgepole pines are ideal to chop down for wood. (Don't worry - they miraculously regrow in a few game days.) We built the house way up in the top corner... but couldn't figure out how to rotate it, so the door is facing the side rather than the lavender pool. 

Step 3, build a horse shed, took a few days. We had to gather even more stones and wood, which uses up Pepsi's energy quickly. After all that work, we again accidentally placed the thing before figuring out how to rotate it in our desired direction. So... guess we get to start over and collect another boatload of building materials. (Next time we'll try using a mouse rather than a touchpad and see if that makes a difference.) Oh well, at least the eyesore we have in the meantime will let us hold up to three more horses without any negative effects.

An Afternoon at the Farm

Mom and a few relatives recently visited a local farm, as many people like to do around here in fall. 

First order of business: ride the trailer behind the tractor out to the pumpkin patch and pick out a pumpkin!

In addition to tons of traditional orange pumpkins, various other gourds were also growing:

fancy

bubbly

watermelon-like

ghostly

Here are the ones Mom's group picked:

Mom's is the orange one in front with the purple sticker. (The stickers, all glittery happy faces, indicated they were bought.) =^)

After enjoying fresh donuts and hot apple cider, they also visited the farm animals. No equines, sadly, but there were bovines galore!

Most were black or piebald, and a few appeared to be totally white. They were shy at first, but eventually they moved in to investigate.

They also visited rabbits:

turkeys:

goats:

sheep:

pigs:

and an especially sweet brown calf:

What a great afternoon they had!

Lily will be posting later this month about her birthday, which was this past Tuesday. It turned out to be fairly eventful both on HI2 and HI3, but I will wait and let her explain.

In the meantime, enjoy these screenshots of our recent HI3 wanderings:

We caught another horse named "Thingvellir!" It's the only duplicate name we've had so far.

Swamps glow in the dark!

Wild horses still roam at night. We have yet to determine if they disappear when a new day dawns.

Hello, cacti! No hugging them, though. We've kept a respectful distance, since we've heard they can injure your horse if you ride into them. 

Pirate treasure - HI3 version! They seem to be way more rare than on HI2.

Pots of gold glow faintly in the dark. :*)

A wild hanging out on a sandbar. He was one of our coolest-looking wilds so far.

Maybe he was out there standing in the sun too long...

2 Weeks In

It's been 2 weeks, and I think it's safe to say we are all thoroughly enjoying HI3. Two of our first three wild equines are still hanging around, so it's about time we introduce them in a bit more detail.

Let's start with our first wild horse. Here are the screenshots of her profile from soon after we caught her:

As you can see, she's pretty huge. I'm not sure how Pepsi ever got on her without a saddle, because her back is taller than Pepsi. 

She's mildly skittish and ornery, but otherwise she's a pretty easy horse to ride. We love how high she carries her head, her luxurious mane, her eel stripe, and her tiny star. "Nitro" didn't seem to fit her very well, but it took us almost two weeks to decide on a name that did. We finally agreed on Bethany's suggestion, Starfleet. She just seemed to need a space-themed name.

Any guesses as to her breed? We were thinking maybe some sort of light draft horse. Well, we had her breed determined, and it came back as "Grade Baroque Horse." (Think powerful hindquarters, arched necks, and thick manes and tails. Lipizzans and Andalusians fall into this category.) I guess we weren't that far off. 

Okay, side note. Turns out that all wild equines on HI3 are grades. Getting a purebred takes careful breeding over several generations, if I understand correctly, or ordering one with Mobia, HI3's equivalent of ordering a horse with tokens. We currently don't have much desire to breed or order horses, but we think this system is pretty cool. It means wilds come in a wonderfully overwhelming range of shapes, sizes, and colors. We've lassoed 39 of them already, and no two have been much alike. The downside is that there are only a few possible types of grades, and you never know which type you have for sure unless you pay to have it determined. 

Now on to our third lassoed horse, who came with the name "Thingvellir." What the world is "Thingvellir?" My best guess was that it was a character from some obscure movie or video game. Lily thought it was randomly made up by a name generator and had no significance. Wrong and wrong. We Googled it, and it turns out it's a national park in Iceland. XD The name means "assembly fields."

This guy doesn't look anything like an Icelandic Horse. His breed determination came back as "Grade Pleasure Horse" even though he is technically an inch too short to be a horse. Pepsi no doubt had a much easier time getting on him bareback.

We love pretty much everything about this little guy, from his winning personality, to his athletic build, flashy markings, and dapples. It quickly became apparent we did not want to face parting with him any more than we did Starfleet. We have renamed him "Gryffindor" because he is so brave. 

So, two of our three horse slots were filled from day 1. Typical us, right? We've been keeping the third slot open for wild horses, forcing ourselves not to get attached to any of them. We were tempted by these 3 guys, though:

I thought he looked like a bull, so we'd probably have named him Toro or Taurus if we'd kept him around.

He's so cute and playful!

He gets the prize for coolest spots so far!

We have wandered our way to several villages beside Elder Ridge now, including Mount Olympus, which really is built on a mountaintop.

Here's my sisters' favorite so far, Sanctum of Solace Village. Its buildings match the nearby sparkling lavender waters.

We've seen lots of other cool things, like snow:

very slippery ice sheets:

islands:

and tons of wild horses!

We're getting way better at throwing that lasso. =)

We also journeyed to the exact center of the HI3 world, just to see what was there. We arrived in the middle of the night, which made it that much more dramatic.

Giant stone horse head? That's appropriate!

You know us. We're so used to HI2 Eternal, where horses are immortal, that we were having a really hard time watching Star and Gryff age. Infinitum amulets are so out of our price range right now that we lost hope of being able to buy them with in-game currency anytime soon. So, we bought ourselves 500 mobia with 5 real dollars, enough to give infinitum amulets to 5 special horses. Here's hoping it will eventually be easier to get our hands on these amulets. If not, our herd will be staying very small.

Anyway, we felt a little funny about putting the amulets on the horses. It reminded me a bit of turning them into vampires like in the Twilight series, since it sort of freezes them in time so that they can never have offspring (females, anyway.) The sterilizing effect is permanent, even if the amulet is removed. Oh well. They will now be our faithful steeds as long as we play the game, and that was way more important to us. =)

Our biggest goal right now is to find a spot we can all agree upon to build our ranch! This will probably take us a while, since we want to explore a lot more before we commit to a spot. In the meantime, we'll pamper our two horses and hopefully buy ourselves some non-white clothing and boots so we don't stick out so much as "new player."