Growing Crops in your EC

Absolutely the first thing you should do when you get an EC is grow crops!

Don't spend your money on boxes, bedding, pets, staff or anything else - use it to buy fields, seeds and manure. This may sound weird but there is method in this madness...

Crops = cash!

Spend the first few weeks that you own your EC growing and harvesting crops to build up your equus reserve. Then, once you have a good amount of money, you can start to buy the boxes and employ the staff that you'll need. And you'll be able to afford much better quality. Which means your EC will get off to a flying start.

The seasons that you can plant crops (and how long they take to grow are shown below):

Carrot seeds - spring - 9 days
Wheat seeds - summer - 9 days
Barley seeds - spring - 10 days
Oat seeds - spring - 11 days
Turnip seeds - summer - 7 days
Pass seeds - autumn - 30 days
Apple seeds - autumn - A harvest every Fall
Flax seeds - spring - 8 days

The best things to grow are Flax in the spring and Turnips in the summer - these will bring in the most money when you sell them back to the store.

We'll explain about the other crops that you'll need to grow in a future post.

So it is true - sometimes money does grow on trees (well on crops anyway!)

Lucy

A rare thing

There's a good chance you will have seen a Sand Horse in the 'Beach' auctions in the last couple of weeks. The price they are selling for is increasing as players get more sand piles. We've seen them sell for 12 and 13000 piles of sand. They occur pretty much every day.

However....

Seeing a Sand Horse in the private 'Beach' sales is really rare. It's even rarer to get a screenshot. But we managed just that as you'll see. As far as we can recall, Sand Horses sell for just 500 sand piles in the private sales. So whoever nabbed this one got a truly fantastic deal.

Just a shame it wasn't us!

Patsy

Sand everywhere. Life's a beach

Well the big sand and water balloons event is now running. Many people are still unsure of the details so we thought it would be a good idea to explain things. First up - Sand.

The idea behind this is that you can earn 'sand' which is a temporary currency that you can use to buy gifts. So, the first question you may be asking is: How do I earn 'sand'? Well Jaguar (one of the Moderators) helpfully posted a thread to explain things. So here's how you earn 'sand':

- Winning competitions 3rd place and above
- Training/rides
- Logging in each day
- Birthing a foal or twins
- Buying passes ( with real money)

The fastest way to earn 'sand' we've found is to enter races. Now, to find out how much you can earn from races, click the 'Participate' button from the Howrse home page. There you will see a list of the sales as well as a list of the sand items you can win. it's a little confusing because it says you win things such as seahorses, whelks and starfish. In fact - these just represent what you win in terms of 'sand' (currency). For example, if you hover your mouse over the hermit crab icon it tells how often you will win 'sand' and how much you will win. In this case, it says "regularly when you place in the top 3 of a competition" and it tells you that you win 4 sand piles. So you still win 'sand' even if you don't win a race. Below this list is your total 'sand' earnings.

Below your earnings total are the two selling areas. The first is just like the private horse sales. You pay a fixed price (in the 'sand currency remember) for items such as Passes, Laurels and Horns of Plenty. Beneath this is just like the horse auctions. You have to bid against other players to win the item.

Beware though: you can only buy 1 item for each sale, every four days.

Well good luck and get earning that sand. Next time we'll explain the water balloons.

Enjoy the beach!

Patsy

Your Horse's Health

Keeping your horse's health up at 100% is vital if you want him to be happy and successful.

Horses lose health for a variety of reasons including:

- Being too fat or too thin
- Not going to bed before 22.00
- Going to bed with less than 20% energy
- Not being groomed

If your horse does lose health then check the above factors. If he is too fat or too thin it will tell you this when you click on the 'Feed' icon. If he is too fat, give him half of what it tells you to. If he is too thin give him twice as much as it tells you to.

Putting your horse in the meadow or box and doing lessons with him will improve his health. If you are in an EC with health mashes give him one of these - this will immediately improve his health by 10%. However, you can only give a mash every 3 days.

If your horse does lose health then stop training him. If you train a horse with low health he will gain less skills than he would otherwise have done. You can continue with lessons though until he is better and ready to start training again.

Always make sure you put your horse to bed before 22.00, with 20% or more energy and that he has been groomed. If you do all this then your horse will stay happy and healthy!

If your horse is over the age of 25 and NOT immortal then he will slowly lose health the older he gets. This is simply him getting too old. If he dies over the age of 30 and you send him to Heaven you will get a pass in return.

Lucy

Croesus

The Croesus' first appeared on Howrse in the spring of 2010. To get one, players had to be in the first 100 players to reach level 10 of the 'old' Achievements. Myself and LucyLou were lucky enough to be amongst those first 100 players. As it happened, about 120 Croesus' were given out originally, due to variations in people getting their level 10 of the Achievements.

Each of these first 100 or so players was also awarded a 'VIP' icon which remains on their profile pages. After the first 100+ players had won their Croesus', Howrse decided to allow people the chance of winning one (without the 'VIP' badge icon!) in Horns of Plenty. This obviously meant many players were buying a lot of passes in the hope of winning one of these rare Divine horses.

Now all the Croesus' have been given out and there are less than two hundred in the game - making them both rare and valuable. One or two have been sold in the auctions and have fetched a huge amount of equus - around 4.5 million!

So, what are Croesus' and what do they do? Well here is Howrse's own explanation:


Croesus is a Divine horse that produces money instead of manure. Every 13th day of each month, Croesus earns his owner 1 pass provided the owner was logged on the previous day. If the 13th falls on a Friday, Croesus earns his owner 2 passes.
Every month, one horse among those named Junior Croesus is turned into Croesus.

Aside from this, Croesus' skills aren't that great - just 470 skills when you get them. They can be Clouded so will make around 505 skills. Like all Divine's - they are male and cannot breed.

However, they are a lovely addition to anyone's collection - especially if you also have that little pink 'VIP icon sitting on your page!

Patsy

Xanthos stroking

Every day you login on Howrse you are allowed to stroke up to 5 Xanthos'. Each Xanthos you stroke gives you a chance of winning 1000 equus and a Horn of Plenty (HoP).

If you are lucky enough to win one, Howrse will let you know by sending you an email (on your Howrse account). Then you need to go to the Black Market, choose 'Horn of Plenty' and open one. Make sure to select from the one you have in your stock and not to use a pass to buy one!

So how do you find 5 Xanthos? There are several ways, but our favourite is to use one of the Xanthos lists. Not only are all (or most) of the Xanthos' listed in one place, some lists have an automatic stroke feature. This means you just click on the link to a Xanthos and is stroked automatically. The easiest list we know of is in the EC forum owned by the Moderator 'funnyone'. You can find her in the list of 'Mods' at the top of the Event forum page or the Game Play forum.

We tend to win a HoP (and 1000 equus) a couple of times a week. And getting free Black Market items in a HoP is really pretty fabulous. So make sure you get your '5 a day' and good luck!

UPDATE: We've kindly been sent a link by CraXoR, who used to play on Howrse. This link allows you to stroke 5 Xanthos' at once! So here's the link for you: Instant Xanthos Strokes


Patsy

The new Howrse Objectives/Achievements 2010

Well the 'new' Achievements (now called Objectives) are with us and players have given good and bad feedback regarding them. Personally, we believe that they are a good idea and something new and fresh for every player to enjoy.

For those of you that remember that old Achievements, these new ones are, generally, much easier to do. Obviously the next batch will surely be more demanding, but that can only be a good thing. It will be interesting to see how many of the later Objectives will require the purchase of passes. We've noticed quite an increase in pass-related events, challenges and offers recently. Things such as the chance to win Sleipnirs, Croesus' and Falabellas in HoP's seem to generate a huge demand for passes. We'd really like to see the next set of Objectives focus on the games itself, rather than the need to buy passes to make those goals. We shall see.

As for the first lot of Objectives, we've seen a large number of enquires in the Game Play forum about certain questions. Especially No.19 - the one about putting a given number of your horses to bed. This one is, actually quite straightforward: the number of horses you have to put to bed is double the number of horses you own. So if you own 33 horses, you have to put horse(s) to bed 66 times. If you own more than 50 horses though, the maximum number you have to put to bed is 100 - which was a big relief to LucyLou who has over 5000!

The other thing about the this Objective is that you can put many horses to bed or just one horse. I simply aged my horse until my Objective validated. And one final thing on No.19 - you will probably have to put your horse(s) to bed a few more times than it says. Mine was about three extra times. No idea why - but don't give up and you'll be fine.

Good luck!

Patsy