Birthday Horse Contest Winners 2019

Finally, it's time to decide the winners of what was probably our last HI2 birthday flute contest. It's rather sad that this might be it, yes, but it's not all that likely we'll be spending much time there now that our sub has expired. The lag, which used to only be an issue for us in forests, has gotten worse and is quite annoying. *Sighs.* There's nothing stopping us from doing a similar contest on HI3 next year, though. Maybe with the first wild horse caught on our birthdays?

Okay, enough of my rambling. Let's get to the winners!

Category 1:
Fluted wild that looks the most like the horse on Mom's calendar

The winner is Julie's Shagya! It's far from a perfect match, but the horses have the same base color, chestnut. That was all it took this year.

My Swedish Warmblood (perlino tobiano) wasn't that terribly far off from my palomino, but the spots vs no spots and different eye colors counted against them. Bethany's Sugarbush Draft (buckskin blanket appaloosa) and pale palomino were pretty dissimilar, as were Lily's Gelderland (dapple gray) and palomino. (Side note: what's with all the palominos on Mom's calendar? They're nice looking horses and all, but isn't variety the spice of life?)


Category 2:
Fluted wild with the prettiest/handsomest profile artwork

All four of our flutes were quite good-looking this year! First place ended up a tie between my Swedish Warmblood and Julie's Shagya Arabian. (The risk you take when there are 4 judges.) Let's just say my flute gets the prettiest profile artwork prize:

and Julie's gets the handsomest profile artwork prize:

Category 3:
Fluted wild with the coolest avatar

We unanimously awarded this one to Bethany's Sugarbush Draft. <3 It doesn't get much cooler than buckskin with a frosty rump.

If my Swedish Warmblood had had a tail that matched her cool orangey-gold mane, it would've been harder to choose between the two!

There were no boring or unattractive avatars in the bunch this year. Third place is a tie again, this time between Julie's Shagya:

and Lily's dapper dappled Gelderland:

Category 4:
Fluted wild with the best personality

Bethany's flute was the clear winner. Interestingly, 3 of the 4 flutes were "Unique" personalities this year. Julie's broke the mold with the "Drill Sergeant" personality label. 

My flute was a not-so-distant second, also with 3 traits on the desired right side of the chart.

Category 5:
Fluted wild with the highest sum of stats for its breed

My flute crushed the competition with an impressive +54 total!

Second went to Bethany's Sugarbush with a +12.

Julie's Shagya squeaked into third with a -12.

Lily's Gelderland came in last with a -13. Sorry, Lily!

The competition was fierce in this category this year. Last year the totals ranged from a mere +5 (Bethany's) to -82 (Julie's.) 

Category 6:
Fluted wild with the highest total sum of stats

My flute wins yet again with a stat total of 2254! 

Julie's Shagya squeaked into second with a 2238 stat total. 

Bethany's Sugarbush is just barely in third with a 2237 stat total.

Lily's Gelderland is fourth again. 

And now for two more random categories we decided to add for fun.

Category 7:
Fluted wild that coordinated best with the dog of the day on Mom's calendar

Bethany's Sugarbush wins!

Yay for spots!

Category 8:
Most Intelligent Fluted Wild

Let's hear it for Lily's Gelderland! We think he ought to win something after how much it cost to flute him. XD

Bethany's and my flutes have tied with 3 wins each, so we are the winners! We're not sure what the prizes are going to be, now that HI2 is so laggy. Maybe we can each choose something to build next on our HI3 ranch? Or we could concentrate on doing something special for Star and Gryff first, like getting them their own tack or stat training them first. Hmm...

Before we get totally sucked back into HI3, though, I have to mention what happened on November 15, during literally the last few minutes of our expensive monthly subscription. Julie had logged on to flute one last wild horse. Roughly 2 minutes remained before the sub expired. Not knowing if the sub expiration would immediately take effect, she and Ravine hurried to a non-Ton island and played that flute (sound on so we could hear the effect one last time.)

It was a pale horse whose avatar reminds us of Zephyr's, one of our first +6/6 wilds.

This horse, however, was not a cremello sabino APH, but a fancy "golden ivory champagne" sabino Mangalarga Marchador! Behold:

Wouldn't you know it, he had great +6/6 stats too: they add up to +85!

Turns out the sub expiration did not immediately go into effect - it doesn't do so until you log out and log back in. This means we had some time to ride around the very handsome Manga and dig up some pirate treasures on Narrowed Isle. 

I don't know if HI2 was thanking us for the 6+ years we faithfully played or was trying to get us to re-subscribe, but at any rate it certainly got our attention. XD Maybe it will motivate us to resubscribe for a while once the novelty of HI3 has worn off a bit. We'll see...

Apollo and a New Buddy

We completed Apollo's quest at long last!

It wasn't near as difficult as we'd feared, thank goodness. We thought Apollo might play a short clip from somewhere near the middle or end of a piece, but he seemed to stick to the beginning. We still had to consult our chart a few times to identify some of the less familiar pieces, where we had described each in words. (For example, our note for Dvorak's Symphony 9 - 4th Part was "starts like Jaws/epic Western.")

One piece he asked us to identify several times, including for the last question, was Moonlight Sonata. It's one of my favorites. =)

That leaves us with only two more Esroh quests to complete, but it's looking less and less likely that we'll ever complete them. For Ares's quest, we still have to get those pesky remaining 20 or whatever competition wins. HI2 is a ghost town, and we're guessing anybody who would agree to compete with us would compete our socks off. Without completing Ares's quest, we can't meet Zeus. :^( Oh well, the world will go on.

I'm much happier to report our latest HI3 news!

There is now a usable "rotate" option for existing ranch buildings. We were able to rotate our first barn without having to tear it down and rebuild! Since we'd already gathered enough wood and stone to rebuild by the time we realized this, we were able to build a second barn! Pepsi was somehow standing on it as it was going up, hence she ended up like this. =)

On November 1, we happened to lasso this mare out in the savanna near Agartha Village:

Okay, so she's not going to win any conformation contests. (And if you think she looks a bit awkward here, you should see her grazing...) Nevertheless, she is quite special. Her genetic stat total is even higher than Cloud's, and despite those forelegs, she's faster and stronger than our other horses. Her dapples, random eel stripe, orange mane, huge star, and 3 white feet dress up her basic chestnut coat quite nicely. 

Out of curiosity, we had her breed determined. The result: Grade European Hotblood. From what I've read online, people don't seem to be in total agreement on which breeds count as "hotbloods," but the Thoroughbred is definitely an European breed in that category. We think our mare looks fairly Thoroughbred-like with those long legs.

We weren't sure about her at first, but she's been growing on us. Her two personality traits that are quite extreme, skittishness and antisocialness, have not had much of an impact when we ride her. (We don't care much for dark forests or crowds anyway.) So, we made it semi-official and gave her an infinitum amulet, which froze her in time at the same age as Starfleet, 5.7 years.

4 horses means my sisters and I can each have one of our own now: no more sharing. =^) Bethany picked out Starfleet's name, and both have luxurious dark manes, so they seem meant for each other. Felicity claimed Gryffindor because he's brave and has so much chrome. Lily chose Cloudburst, obviously, because we caught him on her birthday. That left "Pansy" for me. (I plan to rename her, thanks to the unsavory Pansy Parkinson character in the Harry Potter series, but I haven't decided on a new name yet.) Don't worry, I'm quite happy with this turn of events: I get a speedy horse with a personality I can relate to pretty well.

Our focus the last two weekends was determining our horses' favorite treats. And yes, it really did take us several hours. Horse treats on HI3 combine 3-5 different ingredients of 11 different flavor types. Each horse has 4 favorites and a couple of flavors they don't like. We systematically combined flavors until we discovered each horse's favorites. 

Here's Gryff's treat chart. ;^) Turns out his favorite treat combines sweet, savory, starchy, and fibrous.

I'm sure there's a more efficient method, but we got there in the end for all 4. The hardest part was learning which ingredients were which flavors and then tracking down the different ingredients. We tried to harvest them all in the wild to save money, but we ended up buying a few of the trickiest ones to find. Discovering each horse's favorite treat made PepsiSummer his/her favorite human permanently and gave them a serious bond boost. I guess the way to a HI3 horse's heart is through its stomach! =^P

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...