Prior to 1.0, it was a single storey building that sported a kitchen, a common room, and 3 small bedrooms for occupants.

Twin Feather Inn: ground floor layout

Of course, the first thing that needed to be completed were the outer walls. Then some beds were built…because before then, I had nowhere to sleep on deed.

Next came laying the floors. Which was a whole lot of fun (read: time-consuming) because I wanted it all to be wooden floorboards except for the patio. Floorboards are a pain in the arse to make even now so making them 21 of them took a nice long while.

Floors complete!

Then the inner walls went up.

The rooms are all set

And finally, voila! One inn ready to accept new patrons.

The completed inn…for the time being

 And then I built up and up and up…

Then 1.0 and multistorey came out and once I had completed upgrading my other buildings, it was time to tackle the inn. I had a terrible timing deciding how I wanted it to be laid out and I didn’t exactly want to have to redo anything on it, especially since I was going to continue with stone walls. At the time, the best (and probably only) way to see a 3D concept of a multistorey house was to use Google SketchUp. Somewhere along the way…the whole thing just kind of mutated into this giant project. The design I went with ended up 6 floors high, and when over a dozen slate veins spawned in my mine, I decided to use slate roofs and some slate slab floors. The wooden walls of the patio also had to be replaced with stone ones.

Now, the sheer number of stone walls would have been the most tedious part if I hadn’t laid slate slab floors for the upper floor patios. On the outside, they don’t seem too bad. You just need 2 slate slabs and 10 mortar per tile. If only slate slabs were as easy to make as stone slabs: take a big pile of stone shards and use the stone chisel on them…tada! One stone slab done in one action. But noooooo…each slate slab is made of 20 slate shingles and 4 concrete. Cutting the shingles from slate shards isn’t terrible, it’s a lot like cutting rock shards.

The real pain in the arse was the concrete. Concrete is made of mortar and lye and uses the natural substance subskill. Mortar isn’t too bad as it uses the masonry skill to make and is just sand and clay mixed together. Lye however is made of ash and water, and uses the alchemy skill (which natural substances is under). The best way to get ash is from burnt out campfires (o.1kg for each fire). 0.1 kg of ash + 1kg of water = 1kg of lye. 1.5kg of lye is needed to make one concrete weighing 3kg. Of course, this doesn’t sound bad until you take how the alchemy/natural substances skills affect this. Both skills are difficult to raise because you only need them for making healing covers and making dye really. So I had about a 50% chance to make the lye and a 50% chance to make the concrete itself. I needed a total of 88 concrete. <insert crying here>

I believe I ended up making close to 200 campfires to get enough ash for all the lye. The road going through my deed resembled a plane runway as the Wurm Online twitter put it.

@faeldray If only #wurmonline had aircraft. That would make a great runway!

— Wurm Online (@wurmonline) January 19, 2013

I think they can see my deed from space now

It just seemed so complicated and tedious for no reason really, especially when stone slabs are made so easily. And I don’t even want to get into the grinding I had to do to get my paving skill high enough to lay the slate floors themselves.

Needless to say, while the other buildings were updated to multistorey over an evening or two of play, the inn took several weeks to finish. I still haven’t even furnished it completely because I was so tired of working it by the end. Ah, the things I do in the name of perfection.

In addition to the three small bedrooms on the main floor, I added three larger bedrooms (two 6-tiles and one 5-tiles in area) and one 8-tile master bedroom on the third floor. Each upper-level bedroom has its own 2-tile balcony. There is also a 3-tile rooftop balcony and a bell tower with an actual bell that can be rung.

I kept part of my sanity by not calculating the amount of materials I would need before or while I was building. But just now I used the wonderful DeedPlanner to calculate the total materials (this is not including the wooden floorboards I laid pre-1.0 or the wooden walls in the patio I replaced):

• 99 Small nails
• 12 Stone slabs
• 160 Slate shingle
• 2050 Mortar
• 22 Slate slabs (no need to repeat how much of a pain these were)
• 2215 Stone bricks
• 495 Planks

5053 pieces in all. Definitely a labor of love.

Here are a gallery of the finished inn

The pictures don’t really do it justice. So if you wish to explore the Twin Feather Inn in 3D, you can download DeedPlanner and import the code from Pastebin.

Or you could always stop by in-game and take a peek! Only the kitchen is locked. Don’t forget to say hi if you do.

Related posts:

1. Building mania: the workshop and smithy
2. Growing by leaps and bounds
3. Little Wurm Worlds

You see, buildings/housing are a key feature of Wurm. They have the best security on a PvE server: if you lock your doors and all the walls have been completed, no one can get in unless you allow them to. Players also love to build them because of how customized they can be. They can be just about any shape you like, even donut shaped now (the size restricted by your carpentry skill). A single tile of wall can be made of either wood or stone, and can be a solid wall, a window, a single door, a double door, or an archway. Each wall can also be dyed any colour you imagine if you choose to do so. Inner walls can be used to create rooms within a building. And with the addition of multistorey, several different floor and roof types, and parapets/fences…it’s amazing what you can build now. Just take a look at this forum post where players are showing off their new buildings.

I’ve been having my own fun building as of late, and since this is my blog, I’m going to show them off.

Ravenstone Workshop

Pre-1.0, the workshop was pretty simple. Just a 4×4 wooden building with stone slab floors, a bunch of bulk storage bins for raw materials, and some coffins for storing tools and other containers. (Coffins are one of the largest stationary containers, even if they are a little morbid.)

Front of the workshop (pre-1.0)

Inside the workshop (pre-1.0)

It wouldn’t win any awards for design but I was okay because it served as it was suppose to, as a place to work and store materials.

When version 1.0 was released, it was the first building that got a roof and floors. This is mostly because roofs and floors were so new that no one knew much about them, and I was okay with the workshop acting as my guinea pig. That and wooden floors and roofs were the easiest to make to start, based on my carpentry skill.

The roof began bothering me as soon as I finished it. Roofs have a pretty high slope which looks fine if the building is smaller or has more than one storey, but on a 4×4 single storey, it appears disproportionately large.

So eventually I got tired of how odd it looked, tore down part of the roof, and built a partial second storey with a small balcony at the front.

I’m much happier with the way that turned out. And the second storey is a great out-of-the-way place for my new oil barrel (to fuel the lamps off deed in my mine).

Ravenstone Smithy

While the workshop is completely enclosed, I wanted the smithy to be more open just like a real medieval smithy would be. Building it out of stone made the most sense because realistically, it’s a heck of a lot less flammable than wood. So pre-1.0, I built it as a 3×3 with arched walls along two sides and windows along with the other two. The windows are for gazing out at my horses while slaving away over the burning forges.

It looks rather messy because I was still working on organizing everything, so it was a dumping ground for my things as I worked.

After 1.0, I decided to build a small second storey, which will probably end up as extra armor and weapons storage, with a small balcony overlooking the horse pen. The stone slab floors that were added are quite gorgeous and go well with a pottery shingle roof.

The smithy from the outside

So far it’s gotten the most comments and everyone seems to love it. I know I do as well. I still need to set up some more armor stands and weapon racks on both the first and second floor to give it more of an armory-type feel.

The Twin Feather Inn at Ravenstone has really been a labor of love and deserves its own post, so expect that to come in the near future!

Related posts:

1. Growing by leaps and bounds
2. The Journey to Ravenstone [Part 2]
3. Some Wurm Online 1.0 screenshots

Ravenswood: what could have been but wasn’t

Ravenswood was a really pretty spot, there’s no doubt about that. Over the next couple of months, I built a small farm, some pens to hold a number of horses and cattle that I ended up collecting, a long and narrow wooden workshop building, and my biggest project: a 2×6 stone house.

During this time though, my brain would sort of stall when it came to planning out the deed as a whole. I could look at it from every angle and I just couldn’t decide how to make it come together. I even mapped it out using the WPlanner mapping tool and tried to plan something that way. But it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted. It was around October when I realized that I would probably be better off moving somewhere else.

The layout for Ravenswood

This was not a decision that I took lightly though. I didn’t just pack up my boat and sail off, hoping that I’d find something better. I wanted to keep as much of the stuff I had gathered as I possibly could, and to try and keep my animals if possible. Animals are not able to cross server borders and I had grown quite attached to the horses and cattle that I had collected. So what I decided to do was to keep my main Faeldray at Ravenswood to take care of everything, while taking my alt Thorun in a rowboat and go exploring. Before Thorun headed out, I made a list of things my ideal deed would have:

• Near open water
• Wooded or room to plant (preferably cedars and fruit trees nearby)
• Open mine or place to open a mine (with iron)
• Mine with other veins
• Nice view
• Relatively flat
• Guard tower
• Clay nearby
• Tar nearby
• Set in a little cove
• Room to expand if wanted

The ones in italics were things that would be nice but I could live without them. The others I decided were absolutes. If a potential location didn’t have one of those, I would keep on looking. I packed Thorun’s boat with food and the tools he would need to survive if he was gone for a couple weeks. Then I set out on him.

The route I planned took me down Indy’s west coast (which I had never sailed along before), along any promising coastlines on the Deliverance and Exodus servers, and then all the way back up along the east coast of Indy. The PvE servers in the Freedom Isles cluster are all connected from north to south, with Indy being the northern most and Celebration being the southern most. I avoided going to Celebration because at the time, it was the newest server. This meant it had a larger population on a smaller map and I had heard that there was quite a bit of land drama going on.

The actual trip was surprisingly uneventful and took only a couple days. I was used to sailing on Indy, where getting from one end of the server to another could take up to 3 hours. I forgot that the other PvE servers were a quarter of the size of Indy. There were a couple things that I realized over this trip. One was that none of the new servers had mountains anywhere near as tall as some of the ones on Indy. Less mountains means more land suitable for settling…but it also felt less wild because of it. Another was that while Thorun was away on this trip, I happened to walk through the abandoned lot of a neighbor who had left for another server, a place that had previously been called Maplewood Cove. It was located literally within shouting distance of Ravenswood so I went through it all the time. But this time I realized…it fit my criteria exactly, including the optional ones. I began to scrutinize the area carefully and as I did, the more it seemed like it would be perfect for me. So I decided this: if no one came and took the spot before Thorun returned, and I couldn’t find anything better, then I would grab it up for my very own.

I did manage to located one spot on Exodus that was a strong contender. It too met all the requirements on the list. However, it did have its downsides. Besides the fact that I would lose my animals moving there, Exodus is known for a higher aggressive mob spawn rate than the other servers. There was a guard tower right on the spot…but there were a dozen spiders and hell hounds just hanging around, not to mention several scorpions caught in the mine nearby.

You can’t see the beasties but I assure you that they were lurking and hungry.

I hummed and hawed between both places for a while. I must have walked from Ravenswood to Maplewood Cove a dozen times to survey the land from every angle. When I began visualizing what could go where, my excitement grew. This was what I had been lacking with Ravenswood: a clear vision of what this place could be. In the end, that was really the deciding factor. This was a place where I could build and feel satisfied with the outcome. It was a place that I felt I could really call home. I bought a settlement form before Thorun was even back on Indy.

Deciding on a name took some more time of course. I really do not like making rash decisions if I don’t have to. My goal was to make a small medieval-like village, so it needed a suitably medieval name. Town names ending in -stone struck me as having that sort of effect. So it was in the spirit of Ravenswood that my new deed Ravenstone was founded on October 28, 2012.

The beginnings of a village

My other alt Nysandra held the deed for Ravenswood while I prepared to move everything over to Ravenstone. I built a smithy, a workshop, and an inn as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t particularly fast because I decided that the smithy and the inn had to be built out of stone, while the workshop was quickly built out of wood. But I wanted to take the time to do things right, rather than build something that would only be torn down later.

Moving all my stuff was…fun to say in the least. It took several trips over a couple days because it turns out I am a packrat. I’ll store every wood scrap I can and I wasn’t going to leave any of it behind. My poor horses certainly got a workout pulling the cart back and forth.

The inn was the last building to be finished and had an important item within it: a bed. A bed needs to be within a building with all the outer walls completed, the inn having 24 outer walls requiring 480 bricks and 480 mortar total. I didn’t want to lose out on any sleep bonus so every time I logged off, I would run back to Ravenswood and hop into the bed there.

On November 11, the Twin Feather Inn was complete. I built a bed and after a quick check around Ravenswood to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, I knew it was time to move on from an old deed for the second time. Ravenswood was disbanded that day.

There is a happy ending for it though. I kept the buildings I had made on the land and posted in the Wurm forums that I would hand over the writs to anyone willing to make the trek up there for free. I had been chatting back and forth with a few interested parties when I saw someone hanging around in the area. After striking up a conversation, it turned out that this player had owned the land Ravenswood had stood on long ago. They had been checking on the houses to see if they were decaying at all, hanging onto the slim hope that they could reclaim their land. After I heard that, I handed over the writs without another thought. I just couldn’t deny giving them their old home back.

So they happily went on to deed the area, and I went back to Ravenstone feeling better now that I had made someone’s day and left them with a beautiful home. And so ends the story of how I came to be the mayor of Ravenstone.

Now that I’ve covered all of that, I can move onto all the juicy parts… what exactly I’ve been up to at my new deed. Let’s just say that even my neighbors can’t believe what I’ve been able to accomplish since I started at the end of October. It’s amazing what a little inspiration can do.

Below are the last screenshots I took of Ravenswood before handing it over to its current owner. I hope you enjoy them.

Related posts:

1. The Journey to Ravenstone [Part 1]
2. I’m new to Wurm Online…what do I do?

Why I gave it another shot

There’s many reasons why I stopped playing Wurm back in May 2011. It had seemed so long and difficult back then, particularly when shortly after I discovered Minecraft which made it so much easier to create massive and impressive projects. There was also time being spent in LotRO and later on that year I went back to WoW. WoW and Minecraft began to take up most of my gaming time and Wurm was all but forgotten.

Fast forward to May 2012. Times were rough for me. My WoW guild that I had spent 3+ years in, and had made so many friends in, was transferred to another server by the guild leader without much warning. I was devastated to say in the least but I refused to follow them to the new server for various reasons. I formed a new guild to try to keep together the guild members who remained but I’m just not the leader type. And thinking back now, my heart just wasn’t in it. I was doing it because I was upset and determined to make things work to spite my previous GL. WoW had always been my escape before but now I needed to get away from all that stress.

Minecraft wasn’t cutting it either. The problem I have with it is that each new update generally brings changes to the maps, changes that you can only see by discovering more of the map or starting again on a brand new one. So our Minecraft server has been through several new maps already, and each time I’ve started over again. It became rather repetitive…

1. Start on a new map.
2. Go through the “beginner” stage of getting new tools, build bases to work out of, and start gathering materials.
3. Build a bunch of really cool things that I hadn’t built on previous maps, because I don’t like feeling as though I’m just repeating past work.
4. A Minecraft update comes out so I archive the old map, generate some new maps until I find one that I like, and then go back to step 1.

By now, I’ve been through that process at least 5 times, probably more. It was getting to be too easy and too quick for me. What I needed was something harder, a game with a slower pace and more substantial rewards. I began remembering my previous time in Wurm increasing frequency…and I missed it. It had been lots of fun in its own way. So eventually I gave in and logged back onto my character Faeldray.

The Return to Independence

Just about everything in Wurm decays. Deeds run out, house walls fall down, animals die, farms turn to weeds. Players also have little to no compunction about looting abandoned places. Generally if there’s anything that’s not on a deed, locked up, and/or “nailed down” (some items can’t be picked up, only pushed or pulled very small distances), you can expect that it won’t stay around for very long. It’s well within the rules of the game and makes sense really. If those players are long gone, why not make use of the stuff they leave behind? Wurmians are frugal people in that sense.

I didn’t expect much to be left when I logged back in to Terhenetar. I was right. Our deed upkeep had run out a long time ago and Terhenetar had disbanded automatically. All of our houses and most of our fences had fallen down. All the storage bins and other containers had been emptied and taken, or had decayed to nothing. A forge, some stone slabs, and some willow trees we planted were all that remained of our home. It was a little sad to see but I couldn’t really blame anyone but myself. I had left it to fall into this state when I quit. I had abandoned it.

What was left of Terhenetar

But things like that promote change in Wurm. Down at the bottom of the hill where our farm and animal pens had been, someone had built a home and had their own farm going. As far as I was concerned, what had been Terhenetar now belonged to that players and any others that came along and chose to settle there.

I have this habit of carrying around what I consider “essential” tools, so I was lucky enough to have logged off with most of the tools I would need to start over. After taking a look at the player-made map, I decided that I wanted to build my home somewhere else. Glancing around one last time, I said goodbye to my old home and then headed out onto the highway.

The roundabout road to Colossus Lake

The one thing I knew I wanted was to be able to have access to open water. Terhenetar had been built on the edge of an isolated lake, with no access to the sea by boat. I had built a rowboat previously, but all it was really good for was fishing. I couldn’t use it for transportation.

So after consulting the map, I decided that my best chances were to explore the west shore of the Inner Sea, the west portion of the server. It appeared the least crowded so I thought I had a good chance.

It turns out that just because there’s not a lot of mapped deeds in the area does not mean that there’s much room to live. Quite a lot of deeds are not marked on the map because their owners have never requested them to be added. The area was also quite mountainous, and finding free workable land close to the water was next to impossible. I spent several sessions over the next couple of days just wandering around, trying to find a nice place to settle. I was chased by all sorts of bad things, like scorpions, spiders, and hell hounds. One of the good things about looking for land close to water is that you are close to water most of the time and most mobs can’t swim. I’m also pretty good at situational awareness (that’s how I usually lived through raids back in WoW) so I was able to avoid dying.

I talked to other players on my quest for land, asking them if they knew anywhere free to settle. Players generally know their local area quite well and can be a great resource for finding hidden gems that you may not have noticed otherwise. Eventually someone referred me to someone named Cerber, who knew of some spots right on the water up around Colossus Lake. He offered to show me around if I made my way over there. Now, I was in the center of the west side of the server and Colossus Lake was located in the north east. But one thing I have learned about Wurm is that you cannot be scared of some distance. So I began to walk.

It took me over an hour to make to the northeast side of the server. I made a few wrong turns along the way and eventually Cerber found me and picked me up in his cart a ways away from Colossus Lake. He then took the time to bring me to the lake as he promised and showed me several abandoned settlements that were just waiting to be settled. I couldn’t believe my eyes really. This was prime waterfront land and so much of it was unused. I discovered later that a lot of people wouldn’t even consider it because they think it’s far away from Freedom Market at the center of the map. I didn’t mind travelling an hour to get their myself so I said I’d definitely stay around there. Cerber kindly offered me a house to sleep in until I decided which spot I liked the best. After some deliberation, I picked a beautiful abandoned village surrounded by trees with a nice dock going out into the lake. I quickly built a 2×2 shack to live in for a while, and after a few weeks (on June 6 to be exact), I deeded the area under the name Ravenswood.

This story is turning out longer than I thought so I’m breaking it up into two parts. Continue onto Part 2.

Related posts:

1. The Journey to Ravenstone [Part 2]
2. Little Wurm Worlds
3. Terhenetar, our virtual home

As soon as I came back, I had to leave on a 3-day business trip to Toronto, which mostly consisted of boring meetings except for having dinner at the 360 revolving restaurant in the CN Tower. That was pretty awesome.

All of that aside, I’ve been working hard on the redesign of the Lair. Since it’s a new year, I thought this would be the perfect time to launch it. So I present to you…Lair version Umpteen.

It’s called that because frankly, I’ve redesigned this site so many times that I’ve lost count how many versions there have been. That name tells you all you need to know about how creative I can be.

I essentially coded the entire thing from scratch and made most, if not all, of the graphics. Which is why it was such a long process. I’m really proud of the background which is a Photoshop composition. The grumpy gargoyles just make me smile every time I see them. The title image may eventually be redone as I’m not completely happy with the way it turned out. There are other little tweaks and changes that still need to be made but they’re all small ones.

The idea behind the layout was that I wanted to be able to change up the background and title on a whim without having to redesign the entire theme. Because I like change sometimes but I don’t like work as much.

There is another new thing for the Lair this year…it’s finally on Facebook. I’ve only been holding off on that for how many years now? It’s nothing fancy, basically just a way to follow my posts without using an RSS reader. I’m not going to lie though…getting Likes would not be a bad thing. So don’t be afraid to click that button.

Did you know that I’m also on Twitter?

/end shameless self promotion

More Wurm screenshots and posts will be coming soon as I’ve done quite a lot of work on the place during my holidays. And there’s still plenty to do yet.

Any comments, suggestions, or errors in the new theme? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Related posts:

1. Back…again
2. Shift happens
3. A clean slate

Redoing the floors and roofs of all my buildings will be a bit of a grind but I really like that you can pick the roofing type for each tile if you wanted. And being able to make multiple stories will be totally worth it. I haven’t played around with the multiple stories yet since I’d like to finish flooring and roofing my smithy and workshop first.

I love love LOVE the new horse models, which were inspired by the Friesian horse. It was the winner on a forum poll and I think it was a great choice. Horses are used in-game for both pulling carts and riding, with or without armor, so it makes sense to have a stockier looking breed, yet they still have a graceful appearance. Friesians were also used to carry armored knights back in the Middle Ages, so they’d fit right in Wurm’s fantasy setting. Did I mention that we actually sit on our horses now, instead of surfing them like before?

Everyone got a mirror in their inventory, which is a one use item that allows you to change your character’s appearance. It’s nowhere near the complexity of say Skyrim’s character customization, but for an MMO, it’d say there’s plenty of options. You can customize your head shape, hair style and colour, eye shape and colour, skin colour, complexion, nose, and chin/mouth. Women can customize their eyebrows while men can customize their facial hair. There’s about 5-7 options for each part which I think is a good number to have for each.

They’ve updated the clothing for characters too, so gone are the green tunics and pants! They’ve been replaced with natural toned clothing which looks more realistic. Although our characters must have hobbit-tough feet because apparently we walk around barefoot.

The visible armor is just amazing. I’ve always been a huge fan of realistic looking armor so to see my main kited out in her chainmail set…oh yes, I am definitely happy with that.

Anyways, I promised screenshots so here they are.

Related posts:

1. Wurm Online 1.0: Out with the old, in with the new
2. I’m new to Wurm Online…what do I do?
3. What is Wurm Online?

So let me try and break it all down for you, starting with a couple of changes that have happened since I first started playing.

From May 2012 and onwards

I had quit playing the first time in May/June of 2011 and came back about a year later. It seems in that time, the game had been improved to a point where this time, I stayed hooked. Here’s just a couple of the things that have changed.

• They removed metal scraps. Failures happen when crafting in Wurm. That’s just the way of life there and you get used to it. But when working with metal (smithing and such), failures used to be a bit painful. It used to be that when you failed say…making small nails from an iron lump, you’d receive iron scraps. These scraps were 1/10th of the original quality, and needed to first be cooled before you could heat them to try forging again. That in itself could be a long, annoying process. But the worst part was the huge hit in quality. The quality of your materials matters; sometimes it even affects your chance of creation. An 50ql iron lump is easier to use than a 5ql lump. When you’re a new player and attempting to make something with 1ql lumps and an almost non-existent smithing skill…you can imagine how many 0.1ql scraps you’d get. And then you’d cry a little. But it doesn’t really matter now because scraps are gone!
• New servers opened up. When I played in 2011, there was only a single PvE server, Independence and one PvP server, Chaos which was once known as Wild. So everyone was crammed onto these two servers. Open land was difficult to find for a new player. Since then though, 3 new PvE servers and the 4 Epic (full PvP) servers have been introduced. This has lead to the population spreading out more, giving players room to breath and plenty of land to settle. The servers are all connected as well, which makes it (kind of) easy to move from one to another.
• Double doors had been added. The only doors that existed previously were single doors, which you could not drive a large cart though. (But you could drag it through. That’s Wurm logic aka “wogic” for you!) So you would need to keep your storage containers outside if you wanted to access them easily while driving a cart. You’d have to keep them either locked up or in a pen. However with the addition of the double door, you can now drive right into your secured workshop and grab what you need!
  
• Rare items were added. This essentially gives you a “better” version of the item. Not all rare items have a benefit yet but rare tools, weapons, and armor are especially sought after right now.
• You could now build inner walls. Previously there had been no way to make rooms within a building. Now you can separate your home into bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, workshops…anything you can imagine!
• Visual season changes were added. I think this is one of the more unique but often unmentioned features of this game. Currently it does not affect any of the game mechanics but it’s still pretty damn cool. Thunderstorms and rain come in spring and summer, and everything is lush and green. Fall brings leaves littering the ground tiles and the trees turn some gorgeous shades of red and yellow. When it’s winter, there’s snow all over the ground, the deciduous trees are bare of leaves, and snow fall from the sky.
• Crops are now visually distinct. Now it’s possible to see at a glance what crops you’ve planted where without having to mouseover them all. So hooray for farmers!

May 2012 to now

Just in the half year I’ve been back, there’s been plenty of shiny new things and improvements that make me happy. These are just a few of them:

• The wind affects the direction of rain, smoke, and the way plants sway. I enjoy little details like this. It just adds something to the game that lets you know someone cares so much, they went ahead and added something most people wouldn’t even notice.
• Fireflies now appear at night in the summer. This little unannounced feature just made me grin so wide when I discovered it.
  
• Added bison. I’m not gonna lie, I think this is especially cool because bison are the provincial animals of Manitoba, my home province. I’ve just recently managed to find a wild herd and bring them home to try and breed them.
  
• Added arched walls. These I think are just fantastic. Buildings felt quite closed off before, with the largest opening you could make was a small window. But by using arched walls, you can have a structure that feels more open and even lets you admire the great view.
  
• The graphics for house walls were updated. I think the images below speak for themselves.
  
• Low stone walls and iron fences/gates were also updated. Everyone seems to love the new iron fences, especially since they match the stone houses perfectly. More people are split on the low stone walls because their colour is noticeably darker than the stone houses and their tops have a jagged look.
  
• Animal models have been getting updated.The new model system supports animation so the developers and designers have been busily remaking some of the animal models.  (I’ve been using the unstable client, which gets a lot of the graphic updates early on, so what’s “released” or not is a bit of a muddled area for me. Some of these animal updates may not be on the stable client yet.)
  • Bulls
    
  • Cows
    
  • Deer
    
  • Wolf
    
  • Huge spider: they’re even scarier than before, but I promise you that the “after” image contains a champion spider, which is why it looks freaking huge. They’re normally not that big thankfully!
    
  • Lava spider
    

Version 1.0 and beyond!

The anticipation for 1.0 is at its peak right now. Players have been talking about it for week and I know I for one am excited to see it all. After the bugs are worked out of course.

• Multistory. I don’t think there’s a player in Wurm who doesn’t want this. And how many games let you build multiple level houses?

• Visible armor and fighting animations. Gone are the days when you look at another player and can’t actually see their armor, just their same old green clothing. And no long will our weapons and shields remain locked to our sides when we fight.

• Updated horse models and armor on horses.I absolutely love keeping and breeding horses in Wurm. So this feature right here…is so completely AWESOME.
  • Before:
    
  • After:
    
• A new server. Rolf announced that there will be at least one new server rolling out with the update, and it sounds like most, if not all, of the new players will be routed there. That means an untouched wilderness for them to explore! All I can say is this: watch out for spiders.
• Customizable avatars. There’s been talk about being able to customize our avatar’s hair and faces, and be able to dye our clothing. So far I haven’t come across any screenshots of it or how exactly it’ll be implemented, but it’ll be a welcome change nonetheless. Right now on PvE servers, there are only two models: male and female. So the entire population looks like the product of a giant cloning mishap.

More to come!

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the features that are currently available, will be introduced in version 1.0, or will be implemented in the future. (So if I missed anything, please write a comment about it. ) A lot of players would love to see bridges added, and Rolf mentioned eventually adding rivers, ice, temperature effects, better combat, and a whole lot more. But this is a damn good start, and I imagine I’ll be enjoying it for a long time to come.

Sources

• Wurm Online on Facebook
• Forums
• Dev blog
• Wurmpedia
• Log of the IRC Q&A session
• All the avid players who love to chat about new and upcoming features

Related posts:

1. What is Wurm Online?
2. Some Wurm Online 1.0 screenshots
3. I’m new to Wurm Online…what do I do?

Now I know that there are better information sources out there (such as the Wurm wiki), but on the off chance that Google picks this post up, I thought it couldn’t hurt to have more info out there.

So onto the common questions I’ve seen:

So seriously, what do I do?

Wurm Online is a sandbox game. What that means is the game does not give you a goal to work towards. There are no quests and no end game. You are the one who gets to choose what you do. Whether it’s hunting, building ships, starting a merchantile empire, smithing tools, or digging up the landside.

There are some great tips on how to get started on the wiki.

How do I teleport/get to another server?

Once out of the tutorial, you can switch between the Freedom servers and the Epic servers via an epic portal. There’s usually one near the spawn town of a server.

If you’re trying to go from one Freedom server to another (say Independence to Celebration), you’ll need to build a boat, which is one of the hardest things to build in the game. It will most likely take you many days to build one. You also may be able to pay for passage if you have in-game currency.

Either way, it can be a difficult thing to do. Which is why you should be careful on what server you teleport to after you finish the tutorial.

How do I get/eat food?

For your first 24 hours of game play, there’s an NPC in or near the spawn towns that will feed you for free. After those 24 hours, you’re on your own though. Don’t worry though, you will never die from lack of food or water. It will just make doing anything take a really long time (because your stamina bar will take forever to recover).

Your best bet in the beginning is to make a fishing pole (after getting some string or cotton from a kind player), and catching some fish. You can then cook them in a casserole with some items you foraged/botanized from grass tiles. (There are other recipes you can cook depending on what you have available.)

To eat some food, just right-click it to bring up the menu and then select Eat.

How do I open the map?

There is no in-game map. However there are player-made maps. Using your compass and the deeds you enter, you can figure out where you are and how to get somewhere. Highways, the roads marked on the maps, are generally two or more tiles wide and made of cobblestone, or one tile wide of cobblestone bordered by sand or gravel on both sides. If you lose your compass, the top of any settlement token shows the cardinal directions.

Just think of it as a world without GPS capabilities, and a chance to exercise your navigation skills.

So where can I start out?

The general advise for newbies is to find a village to join. They’ll have food, materials, housing, and possibly even tools so you don’t have to make all your own. They’ll also help you learn how to play. Having said that, there’s also nothing wrong with setting off on your own if that’s what you like. It’ll be harder but definitely not impossible. It’s what I did after all. If you’re playing with your friends, it’s also a lot easier for a group of people to live on their own in the wilderness.

On the Independence server, there is also the Inner City Orphanage, which is not a village you have to join but more of a safe area where new players can learn. If you’re looking to start in a more secluded area but are afraid of dying and respawning back in the center of the map, you can head up to my village Ravenstone (at 48x, 13y in the northeast corner of Independence). I’m happy to provide things such as crops to plant, cotton, pelts, and other basic materials needed to start out. I can also invite you to my village so you won’t have to spawn back at Freedom Market if you don’t want to.

There are so many houses and deeds everywhere, there’s no place for me to build!

The area around the spawn town on each server gets populated quickly and stays that way because some folks don’t like straying far from it. To find more open room to build, you need to get away from it. Look at the map for your server and find a spot far away that looks less populated. Head towards it.

It can be kind of scary to walk that far but if you keep your wits about you and watch for hostile mobs, you’ll probably be fine. Sticking to highways and keeping note of where guardtowers are located will also be helpful (you can call the guards by getting close to the tower and typing “help” in local chat). Any hostile mob that’s not a rat or possibly a wild cat will most likely kill you, so don’t be afraid to run.

You can also ask in your kingdom/server chat (marked as “Freedom” on the Freedom servers) if anyone has suggestions as to places to settle.

But I want to build on pristine land, untouched by any other player.

This game has been in open beta for 6.5 years. The chances of you finding any land that has not been changed or built upon by a player before you is slim to none.

However Rolf, the creator of the game, mentioned in a blog post that he is planning to open at least one new server with the official launch. So if you want brand new land to settle on, wait until the new server(s) opens on December 12.

How do I do…? How do I build…? How do I make…? What is…?

Wurmpedia is the wiki for Wurm Online. This will be the single most useful tool you can have while playing Wurm. Love it, bookmark it, make it your go-to site for information. It describes in great detail just about anything you’d need to know in the game. There is absolutely no shame in using it, even veterans use it because of the complexity of the game.

There is also an in-game wiki. It can be accessed by hitting H to pull up the search, or through the “What’s this?” choice on the right-click menu of just about anything in the game.

If all of those options fail you, ask in the CA-help channel and some kind people will help you out.

Everything is hard and complicated and takes so long to do.

Wurm Online is not a game for the impatient. It’s quite realistic and like real life, things can take a lot of time and effort. The beginning is also the hardest part because your skills are low so you will fail a lot. It does get a little easier over time though.

Joining a village or partnering up for someone could make things easier and allow you to focus on the aspects of the game you can enjoy. If you’re open to the possibility of PvP, the Epic servers have increased skill gains so leveling your skills would be easier there.

If it’s still not to your liking, that’s okay. It just means Wurm is not the game for you. I’d suggest giving it a couple days of trying before you quit however. There’s so much to see and do that you might not find the things you enjoy if you only try playing it for an hour.

If there are any more general questions you have about Wurm, please feel free to post them below and I will do by best to answer them.

If you end up on the Independence server and want to come check my place out, my deed Ravenstone is located at 48x, 13y on the map. You can also say hi to me on any one of my characters (Faeldray, Nysandra, and Thorun).

So welcome to Wurm Online and I hope you enjoy your stay!

Related posts:

1. What is Wurm Online?
2. Little Wurm Worlds

Ideally you want an image where the edges are all similar. So to have the ground and the sky to each be relatively clear and smooth, and the sides should match up as best as possible.

Wurm Online has some beautiful scenery so I set out to take some screenshots and turn them into little Wurm worlds.

Independence, the server I play on, is known for its numerous tall mountains. So when they get in the picture, it makes the end result…less than spherical.

The Mountains

I discovered that taking screenshots from the water typically give me better results in the end. The water is nice and flat and I get far enough away from the trees to be able to see the sky. Around the area I live in, the terrain consists mostly of forests, water, and mountains. No vast plains or meadows here.

The Tall Trees

I live right on Colossus Lake, so I absolutely had to include a little world featuring one of the colossi that gives the lake its namesake.

The Colossus

Even if you can’t get a picture with much sky, it’s still possible to make little worlds. And it gets interesting when you reverse the view.

As players come and go in the game, their old buildings and fences usually decay first, leaving behind scattered items, as well as the terrain changes they made.

Abandoned

Since the player base is global, Wurm has its own seasons that operate independently of real world seasons (Wurm time is 8 times faster than real time). Right now it’s fall and while the coniferous trees stay green, the deciduous are various shades of brown, red, and yellow. The maple trees, like the one in the picture below, are particularly pretty, although that leads to a bit of a challenge when trying to make the edges match up. I ended up fiddling around with the clone tool a lot. Really, trying to do this in any season other than fall would have been a better idea.

A world of Trees

It turns out that guardtowers are particularly neat looking in a little world and of course the oak trees are always stately and gorgeous.

The Guardtower

If you’d like to try creating your little worlds, Abduzeedo has a simple tutorial on it. You probably will need to look up how to use the clone tool if you don’t know how to use it already.

Related posts:

1. Growing by leaps and bounds
2. What is Wurm Online?
3. Dalea’s Pub Crawl

When that fell apart, I did try to stay in WoW. But after a while I realized that it just wasn’t enough anymore. WoW really is a cool game but what it felt like for me was just one endless grind after another. I didn’t have any ambition to do anything in game; I would log on just for the sake of doing it. So I believe WoW has outlived its usefulness for me.

But it’s not all sadness and gloom. I’ve begun playing the Mass Effect games, which had scared me before because there was shooting involved and I suck at FPSs. But now I find that my aim really isn’t that bad and boy is it fun to shoot people in the head with my sniper rifle (insert evil laugh here). Not to mention that FemShep is probably one of my favorite characters of all time. I give major kudos to Bioware for creating such a kickass female lead. Now if only the rest of the games would follow along…

I’ve also rediscovered Wurm Online. After the fast pace and high gear turnover of WoW, it’s a really pleasant change to have slower, more relaxing gaming sessions. After putting hours of work into terraforming land, building houses, or building items, it’s nice to be able to stand back and see how I literally changed the game world. They may not be big changes but they feel like they mean more to me.

But there will be more on all of that later. What I would like to do now is to say that even more changes will be on the way. I’d like to get back into blogging, start writing stories again, and exploring other little hobbies such as playing around with Photoshop. The Lair will be changing to reflect that as well, mark my words.

And so I will leave you with this image that I created last night, which may give you some ideas of things to come:

Related posts:

1. Shaping the world around you