Horse Isle 3 Update – Pony Carts!

At long last, Horse Isle players can have a use for the horses that are too small to ride.  For the quite reasonable unlock cost of 2,000 Essence with 250 of that needing to be Mesa Essence, you can have a cart that automatically appears when you try to mount a horse that is too small to ride, but over .41 in their Strength stat.  This can be trained, by the way.

The Pony Cart uses the equipment colors you set in your profile, and you can change those by going to “Myself” and then “Change My Appearance” and then selecting your two equipment colors.

Speed of your majestic pony cart varies depending on how strong your pony is as well as how fast it is, and it can only be used by horses 12 hands and below.  Now, here are some pictures!

Pony Cart
The Cart, and my brindle pony
Pony Cart 3
The view when driving
Just the pony this time
Pony wants a portrait too!

Interested in joining? 

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

Horse Isle 3: Guide to Tack Imbuement

So… you may be wondering, what in the heck is tack imbuement?

Well, it’s the way you can add special crystals to your tack so it now gives bonuses!

The bonuses are added in levels.  Level 1 takes 1 crystal and 1500 gold dust.  Level 2 takes 3 crystals, level 3 takes 6 crystals, level 4 takes 16 crystals, and you can have up to 7 levels.

So, each time you raise a stat a level, it takes more crystals, but each time it also costs more gold dust.  You can choose to raise one stat several levels, or spread it around in multiple stats.  The main limitation is how much money you want to spend and how many crystals you have.

Each stat has its own color, and you can Imbue not only the saddle but also the bridle and saddle pad, and the bonuses stack!

Your saddle pad, if Imbued, will get a nice little crystal symbol on it, and there is also a subtle edge glow on the saddle that corresponds to the color of your crystals.

Blue is Agility,

Green is Endurance,

Purple is Intelligence,

Yellow is Speed,

Red is Strength.

Where’s that Imbuer place again?

It’s a building that appears in clubs that have built one.  TigerTon has one but I know quite a few other clubs do too.  It looks like this:

Imbuer.PNG

Great!  Now, how do I get crystals?

Right now there are basically three ways to get them.  Well, four, but the fourth way is to buy them from other players.

They are sold for 1,000 gold dust each at an Import Store, if it has been set up to sell them.  (TigerTon has all five varieties of crystals, of course.)  An Import Store looks like this:

import store

You can also get them by using a Wishing Coin at a Fountain, if you are very lucky.  I wouldn’t count on that though, it’s only happened to me once.  When it DID happen, though, it gave me six crystals!

Fountain

The third way to get crystals, which is also my favorite, is to go out into a swamp and find Pitcher Plants.  They give all kinds of crazy random items, including crystals.  The ones with the “lids” open are ready to be gathered.  If you are lucky enough to get a crystal, you can get one to three at a shot.

Pitcher Plants

Now, here’s what a saddle and saddle pad look like with some Imbuement done to them.  The effect is somewhat subtle.  This saddle is one of the new Monotone Saddles, dyed my favorite color.

Imbued Saddle

Imbuement does give bonuses to a horse’s stats, but those effects are somewhat subtle.  Unless you put a fair amount of money and time into Imbuement, you aren’t going to create any Monster Horses, which is kind of a good thing.  As with the rest of Horse Isle 3, the creators set things up so you need to earn the bonuses you get, but at the same time, once you make something great, you can be proud of it!

I hope this guide was useful and if there are questions, please ask in the comments or drop me a line in-game.  I’m SandTiger.

Interested in joining? 

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

Horse Isle 3 Updates

We’ve had a number of updates lately and here are a few of the neatest things!

We have a wider variety of clothes for our players, as well as new hair and also wider color choices.

Some of you may yet be unaware of the almighty sailboat – which is great because you actually can go pretty fast in it!  Let me know if you want a Sailing Guide, or perhaps a Modes of Tranpsort Guide.

We have some new saddles, including an Ornate version and a monotone version, so we don’t have to deal with two tone saddles anymore.

We can also upgrade our tack using crystals!  A guide for that is also in the works.

And we have a hot air balloon!

We have some new horse animations, with cool reactions to things.  Wild horses also will now react to your presence and occasionally wander away.

And, along with some cool old ruins scattered around the center of the world, we also have some neat journey quests!  It’s a great way to make money, Essence, and quest points, all while getting to see more of the area.  Here’s the endpoint of the quest that leads you to the top of a Candy Mountain:

 

ruins.PNG

 

So if you haven’t played Horse Isle 3 in a while, there’s a good reason to come back.  Let me know in the comments if there’s a guide you’d like me to make.

Happy gaming!

 

Interested in joining? 

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

Horse Isle 3 – A Tour of the Dark Forest

The various Biomes of the Infinite Wilds are all interesting in their own way, and most look pretty cheerful.  The Dark Forest is a wonderful exception to that, and a perfect place to explore as Halloween draws closer.

The Dark Forest is rather pretty from the outside, with dark red cliffs and rust colored water.  Once you enter, though, your vision is limited by perpetual fog.  This gives the Biome a wonderfully spooky atmosphere.

mulberry bush
Mulberry Bush

When night falls, though, the Dark Forest really shines.  There are spooky trees that occasionally show red, glowing eyes.  There are also odd plants that cast a red glow.  Also, in the deepest parts of the Forest, you can find the occasional graveyard.  Nobody knows who left the gravestones, though TigerTon Village has a quest that attempts to explain it.

boneyardBoneyard at night

There are also plants here that your horse will be afraid of, Spiderwort flowers that make good dye ingredients, and mulberry bushes that also have silk cocoons.  It was plain that the Dark Forest was lovingly designed!

creepy plant
Eek!  Scary plant!

Two tips for adventurers:

If you are trying to gather Dark Forest Essence, stay on the edges of the Biome so you can see inside.  Spot the various glowing balls and go in after them, then come back out so you can see again.  This is a much easier way of finding Essence.

The horses here are tiny and dark, so if you want to breed miniature horses, this is the best Biome to catch them.

red light plantred lampcreepy tree onecreepy tree

Interested in joining? 

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

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

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!

We’re Live! And I’m starting over.

We’ve finally passed that long anticipated point.  While there will still be a lot of additions to the game and many cool enhancements, the horse genetics system is finally settled completely and so Horse Isle 3 is now Live.  That means no more resets, we no longer lose our progress, and the huge world has been completely refreshed so it’s completely new to all of us.

That also means we all have to start from scratch, with the main advantage anyone can have being whether they are a subscriber or not.  The fee for that is nominal, only $5 a month, and if you don’t have real world money you can trade in-game currency for it provided other players want to sell.  Right now, that seems a pretty common occurrence.

So, barefoot and wearing the game’s starter white shorts and shirt, I stood at the base of the giant horse head, and considered my options.  Other players, all similarly clad, all stood around, or ran back and forth.  I had previously decided to just pick a direction and go until I found something interesting, such as a good place to put a temporary ranch.  Nobody in the whole world had tack to sell as we all still needed to find ranches, build buildings on them, and gather raw materials to make said tack.  So we were all barefoot and horseless.  Luckily you can run at about 8 miles an hour so travel isn’t two tedious.

I picked Southwest and started running in that direction.  I ran through forests, through rivers, over plains and savannah, through a huge swamp, and swam through more ocean than I care to remember – at the swimming rate of three miles per hour.  Occasionally I’d stop to gather wood or stone, and once leather when I found a big patch of Wondershrooms.  (In Horse Isle 3, leather is harvested off the tough sides of giant mushrooms, to avoid the issue of having to raise cattle, and so it can grow back.  Vegetable leather isn’t entirely unrealistic, in ancient Rome sometimes pomegranate skin was used as a leather substitute for sandals.)

I ran and swam pretty much all day, while doing other things on my computer of course.  Through the oceans I weighted down a key to take breaks.  I finally found a fairly nice spot for a temporary ranch in a patch of Fall Forest.  My dream ranch is on one of those lovely islands you find in the middle of rivers, but this will do for now.  Priority is to build the crafting buildings so I can make tack – and therefore ride horses much faster and more safely, so I can find better gathering regions, and find a better spot for a ranch.  Oh, and more horses so I can sell them to get money.

New Ranch

This isn’t a bad little spot for a ranch, and it already has the main house (the cheapest version) and a crafting shed.  I still need to build the textiles shed and the ever important furnace and then I’ll have what I need.  I’ll save barns, hay shed, water tower, gardens, etc for later – this is a temporary while I find my perfect ranch.  I may put in some hay fields so I can start growing bales though, they are cheap and easy to put in.  It takes four real days to grow a hay bale and I may be able to build my permanent ranch within that time.

Next priority was to find a nice spot in a Jungle area to build my club.  You can’t move those, like you can move Ranches, so I had to be extra picky.  At the same time, when I found a decent sized forest, near a nice stand of Jungle mountains (love those rock formations), without too many big holes in the landscape and with a nice wide flat spot, I snapped it up quickly.  I put up the first story of my club tower and left it like that.  This way I can teleport to the spot if I need to, but with building my ranch being priority at the moment I will put off building other things for later. Rest assured I have a plan!

Tips for conserving energy when you’re new

When you’re first starting the game, it can be hard to do everything you want in a day because energy is a finite resource.  This is especially true if you’re not subscribed.  So here are some ideas for getting the most for your energy.

Have a plan.  Just like the real world, you’ll go farther if you have a plan.  For example, my plan today was to finish my crafting shed.  I already had low energy from all the stuff I did yesterday so I decided I’d focus on collecting building materials, but ignore other things like horse feed or dye materials I could also collect.

Pick up logs before you cut down trees.  If you pick up a log, you get 1-2 wood for 10 energy.  By contrast, if you cut down a birch tree, you will spend 66 energy, or even 100 energy, and usually only get 2-3 wood.  Different trees have different energy costs, but in the beginning you’re better off mostly picking up logs and driftwood because it doesn’t take much energy.

Do minigames/riddle posts to earn money.  One of the nice things about minigames is they don’t take energy.  You also get bonus money/essence every so often for earning achievements related to minigames and such.  Here’s an example of a minigame that can be found in Fall Forest.  They are big logs with a word jumble on them.  The long one here really made me laugh.

As you can see, they range from really easy… to SHENANIGANS.

Get thee to a library.  In most clubs, if not all, you will find a library.  In them you will find “tomes worthy of study,” which will allow you to pick a specialty in game.  It can be anything from getting a higher chance of gathering double items when you pick things, to being able to have double the normal amount of horses, and a whole bunch of other really useful things.  Subscribers get to pick two specialties.  The thing is, they take time, (around 2 real days) to learn and become fully active, so you are better off picking them early so you can get the benefit as soon as possible.

I’ll be adding some of these tips to my previously existing “Getting Started” guide.

I climb Mount Equus

As we’re all waiting for Horse Isle 3 to be released in Live, I’m doing things that I have wanted to do but haven’t had time for, didn’t want to spend the money on, etc.  We beta testers have sometimes gotten in game currency for testing different features and I still had some left.  So, in order to decide what horses I want to specialize in when Live rolls around, I special ordered four purebreds so I could stand them side by side and look at the differences between them.

I ordered a Kinsky, a Budyonny, an Orlov Trotter, and a Don.  They are all very similar but have important differences.  In the end I decided I like the Dons best, for their Arab like appearance which includes large, expressive eyes, a somewhat domed forehead, a nice arch to the neck, and slim legs.  They don’t have a very high tail carriage and are a bit more blocky looking than an Arab but that’s okay.  A really big deciding factor is that, like Akhal Tekes and Kinskies, they can have a beautiful metallic coat.  So I decided I want to try to create a sub breed of Kinskies with a metallic coat and a fair amount of speed.  Here are my four, all standing together.

Four russian horses.PNG

Another thing I wanted to do was climb the ruin at the center of the world.  It has a big chamber inside and is really tall, several times the height of the tallest tree.  I discovered that you can indeed climb up it but there’s a trick.  First, here’s what the thing looks like:

giant horse head.PNG

The trick to climbing up this giant statue is to start at the front of the neck, and jump up, working your way back and forth and always staying on a sloping area.  Then as you get to the spot where it curves out again, you head to the right, where there are still sloping areas you can climb up, until you reach the mane where you can get up the rest of the way.  There’s a nice safe spot to stand between the ears, where you can look around:

View from Mount Equus 2View from Mount Equuus

Once you get tired of looking around at the beautiful view, you could climb back down – or slide – or do what I did, as a being totally sure of my own invincibility.  I jumped off the nose and took a screen shot while I did it.

jumping off the head.png

Then I bounced.  Twice!

And I walked a little ways away and looked back at what I had just jumped off of.

horse head from front.PNG

Man, I love this game.

(All credit and props go to Durbin Development.)