Infinite Wilds – Page 3

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.

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

Horse Isle 3

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 2 View 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.)

Horse Isle 3: Money Making Guide

Horse Isle 3

Many of these suggestions are scattered around my other posts and guides. Here they are all in one place, plus a few more! Soon you’ll be making plenty of Gold Dust, the currency of Infinite Wilds.

First of all, what is money good for?

A little Gold Dust is needed when you build things, but really not a lot. Eventually you’ll need more of it when expanding your ranches beyond a certain point, but by then you’ll know how to make more, too. You also need it to buy things other players are selling, to identify the breed of the wild horses you have caught, to train your own horses so they can be better, and do other things like pay club dues. You also need it to buy ranch land, though it’s cheap to do that for your first hectare. Needless to say, money is good to have.

Ways of making money

Pick things up as you travel. Logs, berries, stones, flowers, what have you. You can then make things out of them, sell them to other players, or sell them to the Exporter. Check the Sales board to see who is buying.

Now that caves are open, there is quite a bit of demand for useful ores (particularly Iron) and Imbuement Crystals. Keep an eye on the news, since any time a new crafting feature is introduced, that’s a good time to load up on the components for it and sell them.

You can make big money if you keep an eye out for Pots of Gold, Meteorites, Pirate Treasures, Mother Horse Stones, and Giant Clam Shells. They can give you anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand gold. They appear completely randomly.

When you catch wild horses, check the Shopping Board to see which traders are where. For example, the basic price to sell a plain horse is 200 gold, but if you have the right size, age, breed or level of moodiness, sometimes you can make a couple thousand on the sale. A Tome at the Library will net you 1.5 times the usual fee.

Auctioning horses is another way to make money. It’s usually only beneficial if you’ve bred a really good horse, what you are selling is somewhat rare, or the horse is a Lucky Find. Non-subscribers can use the auction house here. Sometimes, players will also hold Live Auctions where people go and look at horses in the flesh. Keep an eye on Ads Chat for those.

Join a club and get a store. It does cost 10,000 gold to build a store, but it’s worth it. Try to pick a club that doesn’t have a very high mark-up (club task) because customers will be more likely to use your store.

Then you can craft things and sell them, or sell raw materials that are in demand. Tokens are pretty popular, as are any crystals. If you figure out how to make a really good color of dye, that can be quite profitable. You can also put your horses up for stud or sell them. You can make a lot that way. Again, use the Sales Board to make sure your prices are competitive.

Sell Stickers and Art. With the Art Kit, you can make and sell rump art stickers, as well as clothes, tack, and more. Depending on the art (or pattern) they can be pretty popular.

Pan for gold. If you save up enough Essence, you can get a gold pan and use it to get varying amounts of gold dust out of rivers and streams. I warn you though, that’s kind of a slow way to make money, you can usually make more by running around and collecting things.

Sell at the Exporter. The Exporter, which can be found in some clubs, will be asking for items in a certain quantity. If you have the items, you can get gold. Some of the items are really common so look around.

Join server contests. There are Star Hunts, where you ride around trying to be the first to find a big glowing star. There are card trading games where you try to get one each of four types of card There are also water balloon fights, which are a lot of fun. And they give you money if you win! They are announced in System Chat and you can usually travel to them for free. Now there are also things like photography challenges, wild-catching challenges, essence capturing, ride the farthest in five minutes, and that type of thing.

Achievements are a fun way to get gold too, and also Essence. For example, if you sell ten horses to the Trader, when you sell the tenth one you’ll get a little reward. Same for traveling, building things, making dyes, and various other feats. There are multiple levels for each award.

Riddle Posts will test your wits and sometimes your patience. There are several different kinds of questions, anything from riddles to math, with varying difficulty levels. They are scattered all over the landscape, and they all pay! For extra money, activate the Savant Tome at the library.

Minigames are fun and diverting. You can find Word Scrambles in Fall Forest, a stone sliding game in Swampland, rock stacking in Badlands, color sorting in Snow, music games in Stone Forest, ant chasing in Savannah, a version of Sudoku on the Salt Flats, snake charming in the Desert, a matching game in the Rainforest, and several other varieties of minigame. They pay you when you win them. Note: If you really loved the Sand Castles from Horse Isle 2, there is something very similar in the Swamps. Look for the hemispherical boulder-looking things.

Two of the best games for making money are the Word Scrambles in Fall Forest, because the hard ones can be solved pretty easily with an anagram solver, and the Binary Boulders in Decay, because you can find binary number translators online as well. Activate the “Savant” Tome at the Library for extra profit. I personally find the Festivus Poles in Snow to be pretty easy as well.

Do Quests. Quests are available at some clubs, and also at the giant horse head in the center of the world. They give varying amounts of money. All the quests from the giant horse head just involve traveling, and give you 5,000 gold each. There are more player-created quests being made all the time.

NPC Quests are also available if you use the “talk” option at different buildings, such as Vet, Post Office, Trader, and more. They give you money and sometimes items. There are all different kinds, from bringing an item to doing a quiz to offering your opinion on something.

Mane Event. Keep an eye on the System chat for the Mane Event, which is a randomly chosen competition that gives you a guaranteed payout of at least 1200 gold dust if you complete it. The better you do, the more you make. There’s free Travel to the event as well!

Achievements. Lastly, you get money and essence whenever you get an award. You can check your profile page to see what awards are available. Some of them cost money to win, like the award for using the Vet, but there are others – like selling horses, riding long distances, catching wilds, kayaking, making dyes, and more. You can even get an achievement by pulling up poison ivy!

There are other ways than this to make money. I’ve found that selling dyes and bolts of cloth is pretty popular, as well as rare flowers and berries. See if you can find something I haven’t mentioned!

Ways of saving money

Keep a record of training prices at different Club Villages. Those costs can vary widely due to varying club mark-ups. For example, TigerTon training costs 1000 gold because the club doesn’t make any money off the training. I was once in a club that had a 50% mark-up, so trainings cost 1,500 gold!

Gather your own materials to make things, when possible.

Travel to Swamps and open Pitcher Plants. They can contain rare or useful items, which saves you having to buy them, or possibly can give you something to sell.

If you need to buy something, always use the Sales Board so you can see who has what, and for how much. It’ll save you a lot!

Groom and feed your horses yourself. It’s more convenient to have someone else do it but it’s free if you pick your own food, and it increases your bond with the horse as well.

If you have a ranch, get the hay shed, hay fields, and water tower. Then it’ll be nearly free, and also very easy, to feed and water your horses at once.

Study Tomes at the Library. Some Tomes let you save money, others let you gather more, and there’s even one that gives you 1.5 times the payout when selling to a Trader. Well worth checking out!

Be careful of where you put your buildings so you don’t have to tear them down and redo them.

Don’t train studs or dams unless you intend to ride them. Since training the parents does nothing for the foal, there’s no sense wasting all that gold on a horse you never ride or do competitions with. I personally have a few horses that I use for riding and cart pulling and leave the others untrained.

When using studs or buying horses, again, check the Shopping Board. Some players such as myself don’t care so much about making a huge profit, or haven’t looked at the board to see how much a stud or horse is worth. For example, my stallions all have a price of $550, including club tax. I know others are cheaper. Some people charge a lot more and their studs aren’t always better. Check the horse profile pages to see.

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 Hints – Update on Ranches

Horse Isle 3

With the game getting close to Live, I wanted to share more updates about ranches and things you can do with them, as well as give tips on finding gatherables to do all that building.

One of my favorite parts about Horse Isle 3 is the ability to go out into the great wilderness, find pretty much any kind of land, and stake a claim then build a ranch in almost any configuration you want. Yesterday I was thinking about going into the foggy Spooky Forest biome and making a mysterious home among one of their creepy areas – like one of the new Ancient Graveyards – to surprise unsuspecting passerby. I could even write a short and spooky story on a series of signs for people to read. I’m still torn, though, between a ranch in a fertile valley on top of a mesa, or maybe a ranch near red rock cliffs by a saguaro forest. Now that the desert plants have been vastly expanded, both are pretty tempting. Or I could go nuts and find a sunny atoll and claim that…

This runthrough of Beta, though, I decided to have my ranch spread out on a small chain of islands, close enough to a Fall Forest biome that there are pretty red leaves drifting through. Now that we have Planters to place plants and trees of our liking, I added some red maples to to go with the drifting leaves. I also made a bridge over a waterway that was on one of the islands, and with the new Shedrow style of barns, I built a nice unified looking little barn near my stand of maples. Here are some pictures:

Here are some of the maples, the bridge, my house, hay barn, water tower, and beyond that you can get a glimpse of my storage barns.

Here’s one of those epic barns – consisting of 2 straight sections and 2 corner pieces. Tip: until this is updated, you need to place the barns on the flattest ground you can find.

At night, so you can see the lights working

My crafting sheds – crafting, textiles, and my furnace – and two storage sheds. On the left you can see a planter with a maple in it, on the right, you can see a naturally occurring coconut tree. You can collect a coconut from it every couple of days, or cut it down for wood, and it’ll eventually regrow. Beyond is a beach.

One of my favorite new features is the Pastures. They are like the Show Pens, except the horse can be petted and such while standing in them. I like how they keep the horse fed and watered while in them. I typically use them for displaying my foals while they are growing up and I can’t do much for them.

Garden plots near yet another tree. I wanted to create the effect of having sparse trees all over the island, to explain why there are red leaves floating in the air, and to add some color.

Here I am on my horse, and you can see roughly how spread out this ranch is. It actually takes a while to cross, just as it would in real life. According to game size, I have four hectares in a rough L shape, but there is a hectare of protected land between each plot where only I can gather things, so if I had this in a forest for example I wouldn’t have to worry about my surroundings being denuded.

New Updates and enhancements:

Storage sheds that increase your inventory by 100 each

Pastures so you can now display horses out in the open on your ranch

Planters for putting trees and plants

Barns that come in shedrow versions so you can make courtyards and rows

Lamp posts to light up areas, that can be turned on and off

The game devs say that more ranch and club decorations and features are going to be coming out for quite a while. In Horse Isle 2 you can have everything from castles to tipis, so I’m confident that there will be some great options in the future.

Time Update:

There was recently a big update to the way horses grow up. Because of the fact that a horse takes so long to grow up in game, it was decided that they would grow two times as fast until they reached the age of 4, which is breeding age, then slow down after that. So a favorite horse, even without having their age slowed or anything like that, should have a natural lifespan of at least a year real time. There are also amulets you can get that will slow down, speed up, or even stop the aging of a a horse. The only caveat is, if you stop the aging of a horse with an amulet, it can never breed again. But you don’t have to lose that favorite horse, you can keep training them, competing with them, traveling with them, and doing everything else.

Horse Injuries:

There has also been an update that allows you get a preventive check at the vet, that will prevent one injury while out in the field. This is helpful if you only have one fast horse (or one horse for that matter) because that way you can ride longer before having to go back. Injuries don’t happen all that often but are more common when riding on lava rock, ice crusts, or near cacti.

Biomes:

There are some more neat sub biomes now, like Winter Wonderland near Snow, Spooky Graveyards in Dark Forest, Beaver Chewed Trees in Bamboo Forest, and others. You can also now collect driftwood on beaches to add to your stock of wood. So it’s entirely possible to build a ranch without cutting down any trees at all. Trees grow back pretty fast, but it’s a nice addition.

There are lots of new plants to discover too, like tea and coffee plants, sugar cane, different flowers, mushrooms, and much more. I hope you decide to check out the game and see just how awesome this is. Soon, little critters will also start populating the land, and not just rabbits.

If you are new and want a hand, feel free to contact me in or out of game. My username is SandTiger and I’ll be maintaining a club in one of the new Jungle Biomes, so if you want some in game help, I’m there.

See you in the Infinite Wilds!

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 Ranches

Horse Isle 3

For fans of the Horse Isle series of online games, building ranches is a lot of fun and can be quite profitable as well. In Horse Isle 1, you could get a small plot and put building icons on it in a predetermined pattern. In Horse Isle 2, you could get your own island and set up buildings in specific slots, but had more control over their placement and a lot more variety to choose from. In Horse Isle 3, you can buy land a hectare at a time and build pretty much anywhere the land is flat and stable. In another important development, you no longer have to be a subscriber to have a ranch.

Since this game is still in Beta testing (open Beta, thankfully) there are a lot of features that have yet to be released. However, it’s pretty awesome right now! Here are some of the highlights of Horse Isle 3 Ranches.

You can pick any biome to build in.

If you wanted to have a ranch on an ice sheet, you could do that. It might be a pain doing everything but you could. If you want one in a beautiful forest, that’s fine too. Same for plains, badlands, Mesa country, volcanic terrain, bamboo forests, creepy woods, mushroom-filled Wonderland, beaches, savannah, giant redwood forests, and more. Once you buy your hectare it’s yours to do with as you will. Of course, it’s probably a good idea to pick a place with grass so you can have hay fields and free grazing, and a place with water is also nice, but again you don’t have to. I love that flexibility.

There is a buffer zone around each ranch.

Around each ranch plot, there is a buffer zone so nobody can move in right next to you and be an annoying neighbor. There is an exception for people on your buddy list, so if you wanted to recreate suburbia you could do that. You can also do things like bridge rivers if they run across your land.

The first plot is affordable.

It’s nice that you don’t have to work too hard to get your first plot of land, that makes having a home attainable for almost everyone. Also, the first and simplest ranch house is pretty easy to build, not taking that much wood and stone. Prices tend to increase the more luxurious the items are. Manufacturing sheds cost more than a ranch house for example, but hay fields to feed your horses are cheap. Planters to plant exotic trees, though, are more expensive. As in the real world, greater luxury equals greater cost.

Things you can do at your ranch:

Crafting

If you build a house, you can use it to craft horse treats and do a few other things. In the future there are plans to develop home interiors but for right now it’s just a building you can see on the outside. More styles of house are planned for the future as well. These could become really cool, as Horse Isle 2 has everything from castles to huts. The dev team is small but inspired.

Currently it’s possible to also build a shed for making textiles, one for crafting, and a furnace

for smelting. You use the furnace to make iron out of ore, or potash out of kelp. For example, if you wanted to oil for your oil lamp, you have a

couple of options. You could go and dig some tar out of a tar pit and then heat it in your furnace to make lamp oil, or you could gather olives or avocados and make cooking oil from them then convert that to lamp oil. I love the thought that goes into this! Try making bottles sometime. It involves burning kelp for potash, burning seashells for calcium carbonate, and melting sand for silica. Very cool.

Breeding

You can build a breeding barn and also housing barns for space to have more

horses. If you like you can also fence your land and even put a gate on it that can be locked! Breeding happens instantly but it takes time for the foal to grow, of course. Once born, foals grow normally and the creators even remembered that it can take an extra year or two for really tall horses to fully mature.

Horse Care

If you build a hay shed, you can store bales in it, and feed all your horses at once by using a bale. You can either buy bales from other players or grow them yourself. A hay field produces a bale in about four days real time, and looks like a pitchfork sticking into the ground. If you build a well, you can fill your buckets. Buckets are used for watering horses and gardens. A water tower allows you to water all your horses at once.

Gardening

Garden plots allow you to grow various crops, but one of the things I really like about them is that if you allow the crop to wither in the field, you can then gather more seeds for future planting. You usually get more seeds than you planted so it generally is profitable. It also is a nice nod to heirloom crops and seed-savers.

Foraging

Since no one else can gather anything in your land, you could use a ranch or ranch plot to secure a supply of something. Your plots don’t have to be connected either, so you could have one as a “tree farm” or maybe a place to collect fruit or maple sap. As I write this, I have two plots of land, with a ranch house, at a picturesque place near a desert oasis, and two other plots up in a high valley atop a mesa. I do all my gardening and such at my ranch house, but go up to the valley when I need hay or alfalfa plants.

Decorating

There are many ways to decorate and customize your ranch and they are coming out with more options all the time. You can have planters with bushes, flowers, or trees in them, you can build fences of various types, you can also have docks or bridges if there is water on your property. There is also an option for a show pen where you can put a favorite horse so they can be seen for others. Also, every building can be customized as far as main color of paint and trim, and the same with fences.

The creators of the Horse Isle series have really put a lot of effort into creating deep, entertaining and thoughtful games that give you a range of options for fun. I like that they aren’t a huge development company and I’m going to support Horse Isle 3 for the long term.

https://hi3.horseisle.com/www/index.php

Interested in joining?

Click HERE or go to the HI3 site above 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!