Today is the day!! We’ve been preparing for today for a long time and are excited to finally introduce the new explore system to you! 

🗺️ Explore 2.0

Before now, you were able to see random events while navigating the site, finding items and encountering wild horses. This was always intended to be an introductory version of explore where we could work out the bugs of capturing, which in itself was a large update. Now, we’re introducing what we’ve always envisioned explore to be which we’re labeling as Explore 2.0. 

🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎

Hoofbeat Plains

Our first location has been released: Hoofbeat Plains! You can access this via the menu or on the explore map. This map is 100x100 tiles meaning you’ll have quite a bit of room to move around! 

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Moving on the Map

You can move on the map in 2 different ways: keys and clicks. If you’re playing on desktop, keys will be easiest. If you’re playing on mobile, you should be able to tap the square next to the avatar to get it to move to that square.

Horses & Energy

In order to show up for explore, horses must have their working path set to Explore. Make sure to remove the explore path for any horses you don’t want to use energy in explore. Remember that energy used in explore is the same as energy used in other areas of the game such as showing, breeding, and training. Exploring 1 step takes 2% of a horse’s energy.

Just like before, actions take player energy. Capturing a horse and picking up an item both use player energy.

Injuries 

With this change comes another new feature of the game: injuries. Currently only one injury (Leg Scratch) can happen while exploring but more will be introduced in the future. 

If a horse has an injury, it can no longer explore. Its health will also immediately decrease to 0% until the injury is treated at the Vet. Each injury costs 50 bits to treat at the Vet. You can also treat all horses at once if you have a Platinum upgrade, just like gene testing and DNA testing. 

Horses with injuries can no longer breed, show, train, or do careers because their health drops to 0%. Under Herd Management, they will now remain even after being cared for with an exclamation mark next to their 0% health saying they have an illness. 

Capturing Wild Horses

This currently works the same as random events around the game. If you leave explore while capturing a horse, you can return and continue to capture it. As a reminder, there is an indicator in the header of how close a horse is to running away - green = ok, yellow = you should consider continuing to capture, red = getting ready to run. 

Picking Up Items

This is also currently the same as random events around the game. 

Site Events

Site events - where you randomly find items and wild horses - are being removed for now. We are debating on whether to leave some form of this in the future but would like to measure how only explore works at this time.

Future Plans

Where to start?! This is just the beginning. Here a few things to look forward to:

• Fables becoming part of explore and being able to encounter NPCs while exploring.
• More injuries and injuries appearing on horse images.
• Ability to see other players on the map.
• More random event types.

🐴 BreyerFest

We will be unavailable for the rest of this week as we travel to Lexington, KY to attend BreyerFest in person! Be sure to visit us at booth 507 outside the covered arena in the covered outdoor tents. We will have merch, limited edition BreyerFest items (both for in-person and online attendees), and more! We are excited to meet some of you in person, chat, and get to know our community a bit more.

Note: If there is anything major, please contact a mod. They’ll be able to call one of us and Bedouin will have her laptop.

🎨 New Team Member

We want to give a warm and very happy welcome to our newest member of the HoFa staff, Brumby! Brumby has played HoFa for many years and has been an active voice in our community. We are very excited to have another helping hand on our art team and look forward to releasing even more fun art content with Brumby’s help!

📝 Community Poll Results

Based on our last community poll, the vast majority of requests for referral prizes includes:

• Account upgrades
• Bits
• Ingots
• LE items

As we move forward with our referral system, we will be taking these suggestions and making them a reality!

⚒️ Small Tweaks

• Town Hall has been re-added to the Town menu to help new players find it easier.
• On the Estate Management page, it now displays X/X acres available instead of acres for clarity.
• On the Estate Management page, it now shows which construction items are inactive. This is important because construction items that are premium only become inactivated after an account downgrade, yet can still be demolished for a partial refund. You can now see which of these can be demolished to add back acres and which can be demolished for refunds only.

🦟 Bug Squashes

• Bug #1111 - Increased the page load ability for those with lots of horses. It’ll still take a while to load so be aware of this before opening that page. For faster loading, go to the horse page then click the Previewer link from there.
• Bug #1118 - Added tolerance to the CSV export.
• Bug #1112 - Fixed an issue where if a mare’s energy was depleted in another tab, it was still using a straw if trying to implant. 
• Bug #1108 - Horses boarded one by one on a boarding center’s page should now be fully updated when boarding.
• Bug #1107 - You can now include decimals in crossbreed campaign percentages.

🔮 Upcoming Changes

Today is a huge milestone for Horse Fable. When we initially rebranded from Eqcetera to Horse Fable, we knew that it opened more doors to us for potential features. We’re a small team with just a developer, game producer, and 3 moderators and have experienced ups and downs with pacing with completing the game as motivation came and went on this long road of development. 

We also now have fewer bugs than ever in combined Horse Fable and Eqcetera history which means we can devote more development time to feature building and less to bug hunting (although that’ll still be part of it). To clue you in on some of our future plans as we drive forward to Horse Fable’s future, here is a list of some upcoming features.

More Content

Now that we’ve completed the biggest parts of the game, we’re looking to expand! More quests, more map locations, more NPC interactions, more disciplines, more breeds, more games in the Game Room, etc.

Events

Once upon a time, Eqcetera had site-wide events including team collection events, a gingerbread barn building contest, and giving events. We want to bring this back now that we’ve completed a lot of the core game!

Player vs Player

We’ve avoided adding some disciplines to the game because they would be better suited in a completely separate feature than our discipline shows. We won’t say much about this now but know that something unique is coming for at least two new disciplines: polo and jousting.

Achievements & Placements

We’ll be adding ways  to track your wins in the game! This can be done both by achievements and site rankings. 

QoL Updates

There are some areas of the game that could be easier to use. For example, adding more to search, adding filters to the market, adding more to the stable page, etc.

More Game Avatars

We’ll be redoing game avatars. Not only will there be new avatars, you’ll only have a couple “starter” avatars. The rest, you’ll discover through achievements or other areas in the game. 

More Community Features

What good is more players if you can’t interact with them in gameplay? We’ve mentioned a few upcoming friend features in a previous news post, but we have so much more in store. 

More Players!

To date, we have never officially marketed Horse Fable. We’ve never felt it was ready. That’s going to change as we finally start to put Horse Fable in front of new eyes after BreyerFest is over. 

Summer Event Update: July 14

Have a great rest of the week!

Cheers,

Bedouin & Curly