Exploration
lucyolia [Basic || 5 posts] on 11/09/2025 11:29 am
I think it would be cool if the area of the map you explore in effects the chances of finding certain items (or maybe even breeds).
For example:
There is currently a couple of houses/town-like areas. Maybe in these places, there are higher chances of finding man-made items like whistles/lassos, as well as meeting townsfolk.
There are currently patches of flowers/mushrooms? In these areas there could be higher chances of finding flowers.
Wolves could be more likely in forested/tree areas.
The map could also be updates to include more art of different areas - for example, more explicit flower patches, forests, larger town to make these differences clearer. Maybe it would also be interesting if there were more mountainous areas, more sparse shrubby/steppe-like areas, cold/snowy areas, rich looking pasture areas (perhaps near the town), dense bushy/forested areas.
Horse breeds could be distributed like where they have been adapted to live: mountainous areas have sure-footed horses (I'm mainly thinking like, Icelandic here, which I know we don't have - I'm sure there are breeds in the game that have been adapted to these areas), thick-coated breeds like the Shetland in snowy areas, brumbies in the forest, athletic hard doers like Thoroughbreds in the rich pastures.
It would still be up to chance what breed you get, (so not like, you are 100% guaranteed to get only this subsection of breeds in this area), so there's less chance of it being ‘abused’ resulting in less-liked horses never getting caught and impacting the economy too much (hopefully). The same principle for other items like dyes and lassos/whistles, obviously whistles and dyes are more valuable than flowers, so if you could guarantee not getting flowers by avoiding flower patches that would be not great for the economy I think. So just increasing the chance a bit, still random though.
I think these changes would make exploring more strategic and fun, because as far as I can tell right now there is the exact same chance of getting any item no matter where you are on the map.
i think i've seen something like this suggested before, but not this well thought out! i really like all these ideas and would love to see more interaction like this with the map if it's possible to code. i think this would indirectly be another good change for questing too! it would make the harder quests like finding a certain flower color or breed of horse less likely for players to skip if we had places they can drop more. and it would help reduce the amount of “trash” items appearing, that people don't want to collect but take up their encounters anyway.
for breeds though, i think rather than extending the map (since that might put too much strain on the site's page and/or players browsers), maybe different maps could each have a higher rate of a body type? i can't remember for sure, but i don't think the plains are meant to be the only year-round map forever. so maybe we could have a map dedicated to our ponies with mountains and forests and other appropriate scenery, while the plains could be changed to have stock types more likely to appear, and so on.
honestly this has been suggested before but i agree with forgotten land it wasn't well thought out and this makes sense and i like it. Though the problem of different areas on the map is easily solved if you have separate maps all together we already have the halloween map and i dont know the exact plans now (because of the new ownership) but when hoofbeat plains was first launched it seemed like that was the first area of many.
PS put the idea here
Edited 1 times
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