Talking with Luca (in space) — Chronicles from Concordia

Luca on screen. Credits: Ivan Bruni PRNA/IPEV Dr. Nadja Albertsen is the ESA-sponsored medical doctor spending 12 months at Concordia research station in Antarctica. She facilitates a number of experiments on the effects of isolation, light deprivation, and extreme temperatures on the human body and mind. This blog entry is translated from her original in…

via Talking with Luca (in space) — Chronicles from Concordia

Mini-story: A Dark Night

This was in response to a challenge to write a spooky story in 200 words or less. According to Libre Office, this is exactly 200 words.  It certainly helped me get more bang for my buck, verbage-wise!

 

Why is that bell ringing?

I wondered this as I walked along the dark, foggy street. It was late and I knew the people at home would be wondering.

I checked my phone again – no signal. Strange behaviour for a trusty device.

The bell continued to toll, deep and sonorous. It sounded like nothing modern.

My steps quickened as I dashed from pool to pool of light, cast by the yellowish streetlights. A chill went through me as I thought about the darkness that lay in the alleyways. No one else was around, and I suddenly realized that all the shop windows were dark as well.

Still the bell rang. An image came to mind, an old Buddhist temple in Japan. Though I tried to focus on the modern details around me, the pavement and the signs and the street lights, I couldn’t help but think of mossy stone walls and a festival honouring the dead.

I hurried on, wanting nothing more to get home. Then, as I passed one particular alleyway, I heard drums and dancing feet. The bells were loud enough to split my head…

…I ran off into the fog, turning my eyes away from lantern light.

 

 

Horse Isle Hints

These tips assume that you have been playing a while and know your way around.  They are are simple things I have discovered that can be surprisingly helpful.  Mixed in are a couple tips for beginners as well.

Finding Essence Stars

If you have a map, and are going to an Essence Star finding contest, when you arrive at the club town, set your map heading to the town.  That way, you always know exactly how far from the village you are, and can stay the right distance away.

Spacing Ranches

Similarly, you can use the same trick if you are trying to build a ranch near a club town, so you know when you are far enough away from it to begin homesteading.  If you are tapping maple, rubber, or dragon trees, save their location in your Travel destinations – including the time of day that you tapped the tree in the location name.  That way it reminds you to go back to the tree, tells you where, and reminds you when it’s been 24 hours.  You’ll be much less likely to lose your taps or forget to collect!

Ranch Size

If you want to be reminded about exactly where the borders of your ranch are located, start to build something (like a fence post) but don’t proceed with the construction.  Don’t cancel out yet either.  Then you can walk around and see your borders.  When you are done looking, just cancel out and don’t build the object.  While building, there are grid lines to help you with spacing and alignment!

Easy Stone Gathering

The easiest way to collect stone and driftwood is to mount a horse, zoom out slightly, and ride slowly over a rocky beach while hitting E repeatedly.   Fall Forest beaches are excellent for this.

Ornery Horses

When you need to make a horse breedable but they are too grumpy, feed it a bunch of coconuts then pet it.  Grooming isn’t necessary for breeding, and coconuts are free but help both hunger and thirst.

Which Horses to Train

Only train horses you will be using to ride or compete with.  Breeding stock just uses inborn stats.

Rescuing Yourself

If you get stuck in a deep hole, you can usually jump out by pressing up arrow plus right arrow, and hitting the space bar as fast as you can.  Point your view up a bit so you can see when you are making progress.

Rescuing Yourself Part 2

When you are exploring and get near a rainforest biome, where holes are frequent and sometimes hard to avoid, set a Travel location.  That way you can warp out and not lose much progress.

Random Items

A cheap place to get rare though random items is in swamps, by searching pitcher plants.  However, it won’t work for gathering Quests.  It’s great if you are trying to find rare flowers or crystals!

Wishing Coins

If you get Wishing Coins, save them up for when you need energy or money – it’s no fun to have nearly full energy and have the Wishing Coin refill your bars.

Selling Horses

Blood Ruby Knights Club has a list of all the trader puns so you know where to find all the different breed traders, and the Newspaper has an updated list of where you can sell the horses for the best prices.  Auction rare ones like horses with rare colors or affinities.

Essence Anomalies

If you are going to try for an Essence Anomaly, make sure and join the party that is going.  You’ll get bonus Essence along the way if you stick with them and also you can Quick Travel to various members if you fall behind.

Essence Anomalies Part 2

When trying to get to one, start by finding the closest club that’s there.  It’s worth looking at their Wagon Routes, sometimes you can get closer to the Anomaly that way. Also, they may have a tower to glide from.  If you have a glider and a balloon and no launch point, because the club is on an Atoll or something, you can use the Balloon to get to the top of the Clubhouse and glider launch from there.

Conserving Travel

If you have traveled way the heck out to the back of beyond and you want to get back to civilization without using a bunch of Travel, wait till a Party Invite pops up.  Then use the free travel to get back to that club.  It’ll be a lot easier to teleport to wherever you’re going from there.

Remembering to collect from tapped trees

If you don’t usually tap trees, set a travel location with the time you tapped the trees.  Then you know where they are, and also when to go back.

Dangerous Dig Locations

This last item is not a tip but a warning.  If you are writing a Club Quest and a step involves digging, make sure you do any final editing of that spot at your dig location because the game might reset that dig spot otherwise.  This is true even if you are only fixing a typo.

TigerTon Village overview.PNG

I tried the Rotten Zombie Skittles…

…and they weren’t that bad!

If you haven’t seen them, these are Skittles with various evocatively named flavors, mostly delicious, but a few of them are purported to be flavored like “rotten zombie.”

Most people who have written about them think they are absolutely horrible, and the company says that different palates may experience them differently.

I liked them.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I have a taste for well aged human flesh.  To my palate anyway, when tasted with an open mind, I found the flavor of these Skittles to be rather like spiced hamburger.  It was like hamburger with paprika, a hint of garlic and perhaps cinnamon, the kind of thing you might have with spaghetti.   The main oddity was that it was still sweet, because it was still a Skittle.  So maybe even mincemeat?

Anyway, if I had a wild imagination and was thinking of zombies, and it were closer to Halloween, they might be grosser tasting.

You may be wondering why in the world I would want to try Skittles that promised to have a gross flavor hidden among them.

Well, curiosity killed the cat – but satisfaction brought her back.

So when my coworker handed me this fun size bag of Skittles though, emblazoned with the legend “produced with genetic engineering,” I realized that the flavor couldn’t be too gross.  After all, this is a product meant to be safely eaten without having anyone sue the company for attempted poisoning.

Just like the Every Flavor Beans that Jelly Belly makes, the flavors are nasty but don’t really taste entirely like the originals.  Quick example, and it’s probably not the one you’re thinking of:  I ate plenty of grass as a kid.  Lawn grass, beach grass, you name it.  I chose relatively clean sources and long blades, I chewed grass and made whistles from it too.  The grass jelly bean doesn’t taste like anything like the real green plant matter, and I should know.  Therefore, I’m pretty sure that imagination has a pretty large part to play here.

So I ate the Skittles and lived.  My taste buds could be worn out I suppose, and there is that caveat from the company about differing palates, but it really wasn’t that bad!

Welcoming New Guest author -Rayven

Today we have something different.  Mindflight is all about creation – whether it’s writing, painting, drawing, or even creative MMO games.  Rayven joins us as a guest author and for her first post she’s writing about body image.

 

All my life I admired cats.  They are absolutely shameless.  By this I mean, they are without shame – especially the crippling kind.  If a cat is fat, for example, they won’t let that stop them from enjoying a sunbeam – giant belly on full display.  They seem proud of their various parts.  I’ve had plenty of cats say “look at my butthole!  Look at it! It’s amazing, isn’t it?” as they wave their tails in my face.

All my life I’ve been ashamed of myself.  My body, the secret parts of my personality, those hidden desires I could never admit, everything.  I’ve become the mistress of creative draping, hiding behind my clothes, and basically hiding all those things your average cat gives absolutely zero shits about.  This has not been good for my relationships.

When I was little I wanted to explore my body, and those of my agemates.   When I was four years old I was fascinated in how boys were different than me, why I didn’t have what they had, what they looked like, everything.  However, when my sister was caught exploring, and given the sternest lecture I’d ever heard, I quickly realized that this was a Bad Thing and I shouldn’t ever talk about my curiosity.

Later I satisfied some of my curiosity by reading the Clan of the Cave Bear, hiding in the school library.  Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask) was a little better.  Porn helped a bit too but I quickly realized it was fake.  Also, back when the dinosaurs walked the earth there wasn’t any internet so I was reliant on quick peeks at people’s magazine stashes.  I came to maturity with some rather funny ideas.

It wasn’t till I turned forty-one that I woke up.  I had a lackluster sex life, not because of any lack of interest on my partner’s part, but because of the shame on my part.  I was so inhibited and I couldn’t figure out why.  I vowed to fix that part of myself, I didn’t want to die a prude.  I decided that I wanted to be liberated by the time I reached the Age Of The Question.  You know, the question of Life, the Universe, and everything.  42.

How to do this?  I’d gotten to the point where sex was actually kind of scary, and I had trouble getting out of my comfort zone.  My body was so weird, it wasn’t shaped right, I didn’t feel comfortable in it.  Even the fat models and body positivity folks were fat in all the hot ways.  They weren’t lumpy like me, and off balance looking, and asymmetrical like me.  It was impossible to feel attractive, I couldn’t imagine anyone looking at me with desire.  I always did it in the dark.

I’m not sure how this happened but I started listening to a sex-positive podcast.  I downloaded a bunch of them to listen to on my long, boring commute.  I started with old episodes of the Sex Talk radio show, and soon found a fabulous program – the Mystery Bod Show from Portland, Oregon.

The stories were wonderful.  The entire GLBT spectrum, straight people included, were telling their stories on stage.  They told of their triumphs, their failures, their joys, their fears, their journeys.  They honest accounts began winding their way into my brain.  I started to feel normal.   One day, I was re-listening to a particular story at home, and I took a look at the woman who was telling her story.  It was an incredibly kinky story – but I was stunned as I realized that I might as well have been looking at myself in twenty  years!  This woman looked so much like me.  Her hair was the same only silver, her face like mine except with a bit more of a double chin, her top was small and her bottom big, and yet she was telling me about this wonderful proud confident sex life and all this self love and love for others, and knowledge of herself as well as her partner.  Never before had I seen someone in a venue like that who looked so utterly – normal.

Seeing her gave me wings.  I started looking at the other people on the program, and saw how they were thin, fat, old, young, normal looking, wild.  Every kind of person was represented there – nerdy looking people and average looking people included.  Yet, each one had their moment in the sun, and had the audience in the palms of their hands.  Something deep eased inside me.

I wept as I realized that I finally was no longer alone.  My early explorations?  Normal curiosity.  My asymmetrical body?  More common than I knew.  That weird thing I liked my partner to do when I was feeling brave?  Not new.  A huge weight lifted from my shoulders.  I could be me, kinky sides and vanilla sides together.  I could give in to my butchy side if I needed to, that part of my that I call “my inner old guy.”  I could be fem if I wanted to also, enjoy the hair and the nails and the frilly clothes.  I could have a dramatic day if I want to, in this persona that is growing inside me, the one with milky white skin, deep blood red lipstick, heavy cat-eye liner, and shining black wig.  All these things could be part of me and I could sample from this incredible buffet of experience and not have to eat the same thing every day.

Knowing these things, I realized I could finally loll in the sun, enjoying the warmth, unmindful of how big my belly was.

 

-Love and fantasies, Rayven Mystere

Horse Isle 3: Club Basics

This is a guide for potential members of a club, as well as new club owners.

The advantages of joining a club

For most people the biggest advantage is being able to have a store.  You can sell items, mobia, horses, or offer stud services, and this allows you to make quite a bit of money if you price your wares right.

Another advantage is having other club members to talk to and do events with, everything from competitions to beauty shows to Essence hunts.  This varies widely from club to club, but usually clubs are pretty up front about whether they have a lot of events or not.

You can also take part in auctions, and can restrict that auction to other club members if you like.

If you are a Gold ranked member, you can have a ranch that is within 1.5 kilometers of the club.  Silver ranked members can hold competitions if courses have been built.

The Drawbacks of joining a club

You can only join one club at a time.  Also, many clubs have dues, usually a certain amount of gold, wood or stone per active game day.  Some clubs are sticklers for that, others just ask that you contribute as you can.

Clubs can pick a percentage of gold dust to add on to your store prices, and that money goes straight to the club.  Same goes for trainers etc.  It’s better to pick a club with a low markup because then your prices will be lower and you’ll get more sales.

For example, my club has a 5% markup so if someone buys an item for 1000 gold dust, it will cost 1050.  On the other hand, another club I knew had a 50% markup, so that same item would have cost 1500 gold dust.  No thanks!

If you leave a club, you get 40% of your gold, stone, or wood back, up to the amount you can currently carry.

Buying your own club

First of all, it costs $80 US to buy a club, or the equivalent amount of Mobia.  That money goes straight into supporting the game, and you own that club forever.  You can only have one.

Once you have enough Mobia either purchased from other players in game, or bought with real money, you can buy your club.  At that point you are just reserving your name.

Next, travel around the world until you find the perfect spot.  Make sure you really like it because you can’t move or delete a club.  It’s best if the spot is relatively flat so it’s easy to build on, and is close to various useful biomes.  For example, mine is in Deep Jungle, but is close to Open Jungle, Wonderland, Mountains, and Geysers.  It was founded in a spot that had a naturally open area surrounded by trees, with a couple of useful paths leading away from it.

You can choose to travel really far away from others, or be a bit closer to another – some clubs also choose to ally with other clubs, having reciprocal wagon routes and such.  It all depends on your goals.

TigerTon First Building Crop

At this point I have many buildings and that whole place is surrounded with cool stuff.  I’ll be adding decor fairly soon too.  That tiny little building is the Club House, which is the first building that needs to go up.  I took the picture when my club was just founded.  As it grew, it looked like this:

At this point though, my club is pretty well decorated and has a fair number of stores and such, so it looks like this:

There’s holiday stuff all over because of the time of year, but take a look at how much taller that Clubhouse became.

When your club is new

When you first start out, you can only have five club members including yourself, so try and find people who are motivated to donate to the club.  After all, the more donations there are, the more amenities there are, and the better it is for everyone.  If you want to make two of any given building, which is useful for things like trainers and horse traders, it will take extra Building Slots.  So your first trainer takes one slot, but your second would make two.

If you intend to add more buildings in a certain place, it also makes sense to leave extra space near them so you don’t have to go and rearrange later.

Tips for making a great club

Have a plan in advance.  Take a really good look at the area you have chosen and think about what buildings you want.  For every club level you have, you get five building spots, though club stores don’t count towards that total.  Think about what most people use a club for and set those buildings up first.

For example, my club started out with a horse trader, a breed identifier, a trainer for speed, some club stores, and an importer so we can get things like iron, wool, and garden seeds.  I built up from there and I also asked my clubbies what they would find most useful.

Pick a good color scheme.  Whether the color scheme is meant to be tasteful or wild, put some thought into it.  I’d be more likely to spend time in a club I liked the look of, then stick around in a place that was all black and hot pink, for example, with low contrast store signs.

Have fun with profiles.  Some stores allow you to put up a profile, which is short but still enough to put in a few sentences.  I chose to describe what each shopkeeper looked like and I think it adds something to the club village.

Creative club Amenities

Horse Isle 3 allows for some flexibility in thought, so I’ve used that to enhance things for my members and visitors.  For example, I bought a land parcel as close as possible to my ranch, and made sure one of the paths led to it.  I built a breeding barn there, which is a structure anyone can use, then put a lamp post near it, and put up a sign in the club letting people know where it was.  I also placed a water trough for use by thirsty horses.  That way it’s something useful for visitors but isn’t a pre-designed, official club amenity.

Some clubs also have signs with helpful hints and tips on them.  This can be fun and also helpful for newbies.  I have seen signs that tell when the club is accepting new members, ones that show where the different wagon routes go, ones that talk about different characters in the club, and more.  I have even seen signs with dye recipes on them!

Workshops and Breeding Barns – since workshops can now be shared, having one near your club (or a wagon route to one) can be really handy.  At TigerTon, ours is near the Breeding Barn.  It can be a great boost for new players who can’t afford a ranch yet.

Courses – Folks like places to ride their horses.  Some clubs have marked out long endurance trails to interesting places in the area.  My own club has a speed track I made around an oval path, a Sled-Pull, and also a multi-use course that is an easy Sled-Pull, but the low fence can also be used for jousting.

Not only that, but if you have good courses, they might be randomly selected for the Mane Event, which brings players to your general area.

Towers – now that you can build really tall towers, they make great glider launching spots and can be a popular amenity.

Gardens – some clubs have relaxing areas with benches and plants and such, so that people have a peaceful place to sit while they sort their horses or go through Super orders and such.

Quest Table – not only are quests fun for your own clubbies to do, but they will also bring other people to you when they are looking for new quests to do!  Having a variety of easy, medium, and hard ones is best.

Consider lighting.  It gets pretty dark during our ten minutes of night, so plan carefully when placing your lamp post.  It’s usually helpful to put it somewhere players will want to go , like near the trader, or the vet.  You can even pick what color your lights will be, to help create mood.

Pick a theme and purpose.  One club I know of found a club area on a mountainside and picked a Greek Mythology theme.  My own club is supposed to be a village of friendly traders who live in the jungle.  Others focus on breeding, or competitions.  One really awesome club has a knightly theme with some really cool quests.  So if you know what you most like doing, and you have some special interest that can be turned into a theme, that will lead to a cohesive club that is a pleasure to come to, and return to again and again.

Think Ahead With Building Placement  Keep in mind that new people will want things to be easy to find.  You may want to group all your stores in one place, your horse facilities in another, and your services still somewhere else.  You may want to create a ring of buildings around a clear area, or along a path.  You may want to create streets.  Keep in mind that it’s pretty hard to build more than one or two lamp posts, so save those for important places.  For instance, I have a lamp post near my horse traders, that also shows the way to the vet and the trainers, and another lamp post near my competition area.  You can also use trees and other plants to add interest and draw the eye where you want it.  I have planted a huge flower near the closest cave entrance to my club, so people will look over there and see it.

Name things!  If you have names for various land forms around your club, use them.  If you build a directional sign, for example, and want to point to a nearby mountain, you could say “this way to Blue Peak.”  When setting destinations for your Wagon, you don’t have to list the destination plainly, like “plains biome” or “mesa and sandstone.”  Why not make it immersive by listing them as “Sunlit Plains” or “Rattling Gulch.”  Of course, if it’s really hard to guess, you may want to put a sign nearby explaining what everything actually is.

Getting more Building/Decor Slots

Since the Epic Finds were introduced, we now have a new way to get more of those.  Each time a player is the first to discover a new Epic Find, they get an Epic Token.  Those can be donated to clubs and traded in for more building/decor slots.  They can also be sold and some players will just do that to make a little extra money.  Each time a club owner trades them in the amount increases for next time, but it’s still a great way to make clubs a little bigger than they otherwise would be.

Drawing more people to your club

As stated above, it’s a good idea to have several courses nearby so the Mane Event may come to you.

Another quick thing to do is to log in when the new horse traders are picked each day, or have a club member do it, and look at the horse traders your club has so that they will appear on the main trader board.  That way people are more likely to come to your club in search of a trader.  If they like your general atmosphere, they just may join.

Similarly, holding events fairly regularly gives people a reason to come to your club.  You could also have information in your club profile that is useful.  Check out TigerTon, Blood Ruby Knights, or Where the Drafts Go for examples of useful lists and information.

Quests are another fantastic draw.  If you have an Adventure Table with at least a couple playable quests, then nearly everyone will come to you – eventually.

Lastly, having a good description of your biome in your club profile will be helpful to those using the Biome Sort function to find a club.  For example, “Jungle near Volcanic” rather than “Nice warm place” or the different climate descriptions that autopopulate at the top of the screen.  The Biome Sort function is alphabetical based on the description so a no-frills description helps here.

Have fun!TigerTon Village.PNG

Interested in joining? 

Click HERE or go to the HI3 site and put in my user ID, 1023.   If you decide to buy a subscription, even for one month, you’ll be rewarded with 10 Esroh Essence (good for more energy) and 1000 gold dust to help you get started!

Horse Isle 3 – Making Dyes

Say you’ve made some tack for your horse, but that light brown and white really clashes with her pretty coat.  Or maybe you just don’t like the way it looks.  Luckily, Infinite Wilds lets you dye both clothes and tack items pretty much whatever color you want.  There is a near infinite number of possible recipes and more colors than you can shake a riding crop at.

However, before you start mixing random berries or flowers into dyes, you need to make glass bottles to keep them in!

In order to make a glass bottle, we’ll need two very important tools.  We’ll need a shovel, which is unlockable for 100 Essence, and we’ll need a Furnace.  You need to own a ranch before building a furnace, and a fair amount of stone and wood.  Unfortunately you can’t use someone else’s.  Furnace

First, let’s gather the raw ingredients for our glass bottles.

We need to go to a beach where there are seashells and gather a bunch, it only takes two or so for one batch of calcium carbonate but it’s nice to have extra.

While we’re there, we need to dig up a bunch of shovels of sand.  Just activate the shovel and hold your left mouse button down till you see “100%” then let up, and a shovel of sand will be put in your inventory.

After that, we need to find a place in the ocean where kelp is growing.  It kind of looks like big trees growing in the water, and there is enough growing in shallow areas for it to be convenient.  Pick a bunch of that, too, and on the way back home grab ten or so pieces of wood for the furnace.

Now that we’ve gotten back to our ranch with out squishy kelp and gritty sand that gets everywhere and salty seashells, we can fire up the furnace.

Use the furnace to:

Convert all the kelp to potash

Convert all the seashells to calcium carbonate

And then we’ll have all the stuff to make glass bottles!  They are made 2 at a time, so let’s make a bunch while the Furnace is nice and hot.  The Furnace will burn out, on its own, after a few minutes.

With bottles in hand, along with various berries, flowers, fruits, and other random items, dye shed.PNGits’ time to get ourselves to a Dye Shop.  You can find one in most Clubs.  This one is in TigerTon.  They look like this:

After unlocking a couple dye slots, it’s time to experiment.  Once you have something you like, you can save the recipe for later instead of deleting it.

Here’s some starter recipes:

Red

4 buckets of Dragon Blood (Dragon Tree Sap from Black Sands Biome)

or, 12 raspberries, found in Fall Forest Biome

Black

12 blackberries, found in Mediterranean Biome.

Lime Green

5 Hellebore Flowers and 5 limes

Deep Green

Kelp is great for this!  You can find Kelp in the ocean, it looks like an underwater forest.

Various shades of Blue

Bluebonnet flowers (Plains Biome) in various numbers, use at least 9.  Blueberries are good when added to this, and are found in Fjord Biome.  You can make a really nice pure blue with 8 blueberries.

Yellow:

Dandelions are great for this.  9 dandelions makes a pleasant shad, and are found in Fall Forest.

Purple:

Spiderwort makes lovely purple hues!  You can find that in Dark Forest, usually near Mulberry Bushes.

One last important tip:

If you dye anything enough, using whatever color, it eventually turns black.  It’s a good way to use up bad dyes you made while experimenting.  If you need to bleach things back to white, you can do that with kelp derived potash, also at the Dye Store.

If you ever need to know where an item can be found, the Library has a full list of all the Biomes and what grows where.  It has been updated to also tell what items are good for what colors!

 

Interested in joining? 

Make sure and use this link or place my ID, 1023, in the box when you join!

That way, if you ever decide to buy a subscription, even for only one month, you’ll get a bonus 1000 essence (helps with chatting and unlocking equipment), plus 10 Esroh Essence (gives you energy for traveling, making things, and gathering) to help you get started. 

A subscription costs 500 Mobia per month and you can buy Mobia from other players in-game if you don’t have cash to spend.

Horse Isle 3 – getting your first set of tack

There’s one thing I hear over and over as new people arrive in the Infinite Wilds.  “Where can I buy some tack?”  “How do I get tack?”  “Do you have any tack?”

You see, just as in real life, you can ride without tack – but you tend to fall off a lot.  A whole lot.  And every time you fall off, you have to get them going again.  It’s a lot easier with tack.  If you just have a bridle, the horse is easier to guide and you can ride a little faster.  With just a saddle and pad, you fall off less but are still slow.  With just a pad, it looks pretty and that’s about it.  Except a horse won’t wear a saddle without a pad.  I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t either.

It’s not so hard to get tack, especially now that enough clubs and ranches have been built that some people are selling sets.  You’ll need some money, though, so you might want to refer to my “making money” guide.  For the best deals, go to a club that has a Shopping Board and search for tack.  It’s toward the bottom of the list.  Hint:  My club, TigerTon, has one, and here’s what you’re looking for.

shopping board

They can be found in most clubs but I know for a fact that there’s one in mine!  It’s always best to look there before buying anything, since it tells you where you can get the best price, and what club the store is in as well.

Now, if you’d rather do things yourself, you will need a workshop, a textile shed, and a furnace as well as the right raw materials.  You can get by with just a workshop if you buy the other items pre-made.  It’s generally better to just make everything yourself though, and then you can go into business selling tack and other items as well.

crafting sheds

Here are all the raw materials you will need for a basic set of tack, and where you find them or how you make them.

Saddle

6 leather – peel them from the sides of giant red capped mushrooms in Wondershroom Biome

2 wood – pick up logs or cut down trees

2 wool – buy wool at the Importer (can find one at TigerTon)

1 iron – buy it at player shops, or can gather iron ore yourself in caves under the Sandstone biome.  You don’t need special equipment, and the iron looks like a big boulder on the ground.  Click it to see it fly apart, bring it up to the surface, and smelt it in your Furnace.

The ore sort of looks like the picture to the right.

Bridle

1 leather

1 iron

Saddle pad

2 bolts of linen – pick flax in Alpine or Savanna biomes, then weave them in your textile shed

4 wool

 

A basic set of Western tack looks like this:

basic tack.PNG

It’s pretty plain, though, and needs to be dyed.  Luckily, that’s not hard to do!  There are other tack items you can make, things like tail bows, ear bonnets, and polo wraps.

Update: English tack are now available, as are Monotone Tack (they are all one color) and Ornate Tack.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about making dyes to color that fine equipment!

 

Interested in joining? 

Click HERE or go to the HI3 site and put in my user ID, 1023.   If you ever choose to get a subscription, and you can earn enough to do that in-game without using real money, you’ll be rewarded with 10 Esroh Essence (good for more energy) and 1000 gold dust to help you get started!