On my previous blog, Battle Priestess, I wrote a series of posts describing my first few days & weeks in Wurm. There’s no better way to kick off the Wild Boar Inn than by reposting those here for posterity.

Originally posted April 28, 2011:

Rebecca from mmomeltingpot.com asked a great question about Wurm:

Do you know how/if it compares to Minecraft?

Minecraft and Wurm. These two games seem eerily similar due to their history, and it’s common to hear players refer to Wurm as “Minecraft Advanced”. But actually the two games have far more differences than similarities, and there’s really two different playstyles represented in these games.

Similarities:

First, they’re both nature-based/quasi-medieval sandbox games. You start the game and as a total newbie get plopped in the middle of a world full of trees, lakes, and mountains with few to zero tools and no direction other than “Go, Survive, Have Fun”. Players are able to do pretty much anything they want in both games. There’s no quests, no levels, no instances, no real goals other than whatever the player wants to do.

Second, they’re both filled with creepy-crawlies to fight, though combat isn’t really a primary goal of either game. Sure, there are players that really enjoy combat and hunting and do that as their primary playstyle, but the overall goal of both games seems to be exploration, building and creation.

Third, they both take place in first-person view, though Minecraft gives you an option to use a more traditional third-person view. It still takes some time to get used to the first-person thing if you play only MMOs, and the limited peripheral vision makes you a bit more susceptible to bad things sneaking up beside you and behind you.

Differences:

The graphics are the most immediately noticeable difference. Minecraft is… well, Minecraft in all it’s 8-bit boxy retro glory. Wurm’s graphics are far from cutting edge but are far more realistic and attractive, with trees and grass that wave in the breeze, roaming butterflies, and ripples in the water.

Setting is another area where Wurm excels over Minecraft. There’s not a lot of Wurm lore, but there are gods that you can choose to follow, each with different bonuses and penalties, and a calendar year with seasons, including specific harvest times for fruit trees and bushes. It seems to give Wurm a sense of place, time, and purpose. Minecraft leaves the setting completely up to the imagination of the players. It could be post-apocalyptic, medieval, Animal Crossing, or TRON depending on the mod pack that you use.

Minecraft is known for being a single-player game, though players can host multi-player servers with varying rules depending on who is running the game. Wurm is strictly a massively multi-player game in a persistent world, with one PvE server and one PvP server and GMs/CAs to take care of issues.

Gameplay between the two games seems to be the biggest difference. Minecraft is a “blank canvas” sort of game. If you want to build a scale copy of the Starship Enterprise out of cobblestone, if you want to build a rollercoaster theme-park out of railcarts, if you want to use music blocks to play the theme song from “Family Guy”, if you want to build a treehouse in a replica of Yggdrasil, then Minecraft is your game. It’s fun, it’s silly, and the Lego-style construction means that there’s really no limits to what you can build. There’s no real economy to speak of since players are able to get their hands on just about anything given enough time and motivation.

If on the other hand, you want something that’s more realistic, if you want to set up farms and breed animals, if you want to build pirate ships and sailboats to sail the seas, if you want to become a spell-casting priest that enchants tools, or if you want to become a specialist in paving, catapult-building, cheese-making, alchemy, or toymaking, you might want to look at Wurm. It has an active and robust player economy, with players trading and purchasing everything from tools to animals to gems to bulk raw crafting goods and services. There are some limits on what you can build. For example, there are no two-story buildings, the size of building that you CAN build is limited by your carpentry skill, and you can’t really build a spaceship or a replica of the Eiffel Tower in-game. It’s all very much setting-appropriate.

Crafting also works differently in both games. Minecraft is a 100% success rate sort of game. If you combine 3 iron blocks and 3 wood blocks together into the correct pickaxe formation, you will always get 1 iron pickaxe. Wurm throws in a hefty dose of chance into crafting. For example, if you start into tailoring, if you try to make a string of cloth out of raw wool, you’ll have about a 50% chance of being successful on each try. As your tailoring skill goes up, that percentage will climb, resulting in less wasted material and higher quality items. Once you have all your strings, you can combine those into cloth, which again, has a certain percentage of success rate. You’ll experience a lot of failures while you’re crafting in Wurm, but that also adds value to the items that are successful.

Lastly, the pacing is very different between the two games. In Minecraft, you can easily cut down a tree in a few seconds, but in Wurm, cutting down that tree may take a few minutes. Putting up a fence segment in Minecraft takes a second, but in Wurm requires you to manually attach 2 planks, 2 shafts, and a handful of nails to the segment individually, with occasional failure. Converting raw materials into usable items can quickly be done in bulk in Minecraft, but can only be done in Wurm one at a time. Some people enjoy the slower, more realistic pace in Wurm, others would rather have a game like Minecraft that they can pick up for an hour and get a good amount done in that time. Wurm is a game of patience and is best experienced by picking small, bite-size projects to work on as part of the whole.

If you enjoy sandbox-style games I definitely recommend checking out both Wurm and Minecraft, because for all their differences they’re both excellent games.

On my previous blog, Battle Priestess, I wrote a series of posts describing my first few days & weeks in Wurm. There’s no better way to kick off the Wild Boar Inn than by reposting those here for posterity.

Originally posted April 27, 2011:

I’ve been playing Wurm for about 4 weeks or so now, and while Wurm starts out kind of slow, it picks up speed as your skills increase and you get set up. Picking out your home spot is a big deal, as it’s where you’ll likely make your first financial investment in the game and where you’ll spend a lot of in-game time. You also have to think about the neighborhood… your neighbors will likely be the people you see & talk to daily, and of course you want nearby access to resources like clay & tar. Close proximity to a lake or coastline means that you’ll be able to fish for food and use a boat for travel, though the amount of coastline available in-game is of course limited and already fairly congested.

When I was thinking about where to settle, I kept being drawn to a stretch of road that I found while exploring on the first night, the road that runs between Silent Hill to the south and Shipyard of Poland to the north. The community map doesn’t exactly explain the area well, that road is basically uphill almost all the way & leads to the top of a great oceanside mountain. It was pretty much wilderness at that point, with only 1 or 2 settlements in the area, and it had almost an “enchanted forest” feel to it, with the fog rolling through the trees.

At the top of the mountain there was an area that leveled out a bit, with gently rolling hills, lots of space, and a great assortment of trees… pines, birches, cherries, lemons, & olives. I was home!

The first thing to do was pace out where I wanted the deed boundaries to be and actually set the deed up, which gave me a settlement token (looks kind of like a birdbath with a sundial on top) in the center tile. I originally went with a 10×10 deed, which actually is 21×21 tiles. I also purchased a guard for my deed, which is basically an NPC that hangs out and will kill any aggro animal or mob that wanders on deed, or any player that I’ve asked it to kill on sight.

You don’t really want to make people mad at you in this game. Those guards are rough, and WILL kill you if you wander onto a deed where the owner has added you to his KOS list.

Anyways, it was a slow start. I was happy just to have a safe spot where angry critters couldn’t reach me & where I could drop my stuff without worrying about theft. Sleeping under the stars wasn’t bad, but of course I wanted more. Because I am strange (and didn’t want to do double or triple work), I started by graphing out the tiles on my deed & deciding on a basic layout before I started doing anything else. While a lot of folks chop all their trees down & level everything out before building (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I wanted to preserve the natural area as much as possible. I started with terraforming a courtyard area, packing down where the cobble would eventually be, and setting up the forges & an oven.

A few days later, a neighbor mentioned to me that if I expanded my deed lengthwise along the road, I would be able to claim an abandoned mine that ran directly under my deed. Sold! I expanded my deed to be 10×27, which gave me a whopping 21×55 tiles & plenty of room for crop fields, animal paddocks, and orchards. Since then it’s been a gradual process of picking little projects and adding onto the deed… terraforming the crop fields, setting up fences, making paddocks, constructing houses, putting up signs, doing landscaping, and so on. For a long time, it looked terrible… dirt everywhere, half-built stuff, construction materials all over the place.

Here’s how it looks today!

Here’s the view from the road… the sign shows the name of my farm when you mouse over it. I love the shop signs in Wurm, they have a good selection of logos, everything from a beer mug to horses to a classic skull & crossbones.

The courtyard, with the settlement token & my house on the left. My crop fields are in the back, and I used olive trees (which most players hate because they obstruct views) as a hedge of sorts to hide that area.

The deer paddock. The deer graze on the pumpkins I have planted here, & I still get some harvest of pumpkins too. Deer are often bred for meat, leather, and other assorted parts. There’s a brown rooster in the foreground as well.

The forges. I decided to build two of them so that as one of them runs out of steam I can fire the other one up and keep going. There’s also a trash heap there, which accelerates the decay on anything put in it. It’s good for getting rid of scraps and items of poor quality.

The crop fields & horses. Horses, as well as cows & deer, are grazers and will eat grass until it’s dirt, which then needs to be replanted. You can also let them graze on crops, which last longer than regular grass, and as long as you don’t overcrowd your crop area you’ll still get good harvests.

The cow paddock… you can see where they’re eating my grass. Time to replant! Cows can be killed for meat and milked for cheese.

The entrance to my mine. While it was already there when I got here, it’s a really quite ingenious setup… the entrance is located on the side of the mountain ledge that my farm sits on, so it’s entirely under my deed. So far I’ve found two iron veins in it. I’m hoping for a copper or silver vein one of these days, or even zinc for white dye or lead for ship anchors. Mines have their own dangers… aggro critters like scorpions, spiders, lava spiders, and lava fiends can spawn in them from time to time and cave-ins sometimes happen as well. And they are pitch black if you don’t have a light source in them or on your person.

The crazy thing is that with all that’s already been done, I still have plenty to do. Tending the fields & animals is an ongoing project, and I still want to add a fence all around the perimeter of my deed, plant orchards, and add a guesthouse. Since my husband owns an adjacent deed, we’re also working on digging out a pathway between the two deeds, & setting up a vineyard along that walkway.

On my previous blog, Battle Priestess, I wrote a series of posts describing my first few days & weeks in Wurm. There’s no better way to kick off the Wild Boar Inn than by reposting those here for posterity.

Originally posted April 26, 2011:

Ask a hundred people why they play MMOs, and you’ll get all kinds of answers, but one thing that separates MMOs from other games is the player communities. Whether it be guilds, raid teams, instance groups, or even good ol’ Tradechat, there’s people everywhere and it’s only natural that people develop friendships and alliances in order to meet their goals, which are typically centered around beating instances, raids, or world events.

But a few nights into Wurm, I experienced something quite different and unforgettable.

I ultimately decided to settle down in the area along the street where I saw that big scorpion. There was plenty of land available, and while chatting with the locals I found them to be very nice and friendly. One neighbor showed up to build a well on my property, which means that I now have a neverending source of water and don’t have to take a 10-minute walk down to Mist Lake to refill my canteens. The next night, we decided to go exploring, specifically to check out that abandoned homestead with the creepy stone coffin.

While we were up there, we saw the young scorpion that I’d seen previously, and also an adolescent starving scorpion, which was bigger and badder. My friend (who was relatively new himself) decided to try to fight the scorpion, as he’d been killing deer, spiders, & other critters, and he had his best sword and chain armor on. The fight didn’t go well, and we had to retreat. His health was down to 50% and he had very severe wounds, which would kill him if he didn’t get them treated.

Now, in most MMOs, death isn’t a big deal. Die quickly, respawn at a graveyard, walk back to your corpse, and maybe wait 5-10 minutes to let any debuffs wear off. In Wurm though, if you die you leave your inventory on your corpse (which hopefully you can get back to loot before anyone else does), plus you lose some hard-earned skill points. Of course, in a survival MMO, that’s a very bad thing. If you’ve been playing a while and have built up your skills, you really, really don’t want to die.

To counteract that, dying in Wurm can take a long time. Wurm injuries work sort of like never-ending DoTs or bleeds, slowly ticking away at your health until they heal or until you treat them. Light wounds eventually heal on their own and aren’t a big deal, but Medium, Heavy, and Severe wounds all require player treatment, and have the potential to worsen if not treated. If an encounter goes south and you retreat from battle soon enough, you might have time to apply healing covers and bandages before you die.

So we hopped in my pal’s wagon & rode back to his homestead, watching his health slowly tick down. I jumped off at my place so that I could go get the few healing herbs that I had, but unfortunately I kept failing at making the healing covers since my skills were still low. We sent an SOS out in local and in PMs, all the way from Silent Hill to the PCGamer village, asking for any herbs or healing covers that folks had and any advice on how to treat the wound. Several people came streaming in from all directions, sometimes traveling 15 minutes or more to bring whatever they had on-hand to try to save this one player who was going to die.

We got all the wounds covered except for one… the one that was killing him, and which stated “You can see through the gaping hole”. Yikes. We found out that we needed a healing cover made of very specific ingredients, one of which none of us had. So we went out and started foraging and botanizing the grass, and after a while found the elusive herb. There was only a 50/50 chance of the healing cover being made successfully, and another 50/50 chance of it actually working. Thankfully the RNG was in our favor that night, and the wound stopped ticking away. Once we had that taken care of, we were able to bandage it (which started the actual healing process) and our friend was saved! He would live to see another day.

This whole scenario played out over about 2 hours, the same amount of time that people spend in raids or instances these days, and honestly… I like this better. It wasn’t about competition or phat loot, it was simply about coming together to help another player because one of these days, it could be you. Be it scorpions, bears, spiders, wolves, or what-have-you, there are plenty of creepy things lurking in the forests of Wurm, not to mention the injuries you can get just by accidentally falling down a steep hill or ledge. It’s a brutal game, but it also naturally encourages players to help to each other, simply because you need each other to survive.

That’s pretty darn awesome.

On my previous blog, Battle Priestess, I wrote a series of posts describing my first few days & weeks in Wurm. There’s no better way to kick off the Wild Boar Inn than by reposting those here for posterity.

Originally posted April 25, 2011:

So! Wurm. Let’s talk about Wurm. As I mentioned before, I was a bit burned out on questmania in my other two games, and started for looking something sandboxy. Wurm ended up being an obvious choice for several reasons. First, it’s F2P up to a certain point, which meant I could get all my questing frustrations out for free and then go back to my other games. Second, I’ve heard the horror stories about having to learn to climb and the Fellowship-like trek from the starter area to the other places on the map, which means I’d likely lose my patience and go back to my other games. But I also kept hearing folks saying that it’s like Minecraft Advanced or a Minecraft MMO, and considering that Minecraft was one of the highlights of my gaming year in 2010, I couldn’t not try it.

I went through the tutorial, which does a pretty decent job of teaching you to climb Spiderman-style up steep inclines as well as introducing you to the slightly overwhelming UI. If you’re used to shiny buttons & hotkeys… well, you won’t get that here. It’s all rudimentary drop-down menus and right-clicks. Oh yes, and every item in your inventory has a weight assigned to it. The more you carry, the s l o w e  r   y   o   u     g      e       t.

*ahem*

So at the end of the tutorial, I was offered the choice of going to Freedom (the PvE server) or Wild (the PvP server). I chose PvE, and was placed in an area close to Freedom Market, a player-made town/hub/market. Now I will say that the coolest thing ever in Wurm is realizing that every single fence, road, market stall, house, or landmark was made by the players. So totally cool, and it reminded me very much of my first day or two on multi-player servers in Minecraft. There was also a pretty active worldwide chat channel, and you could hear the sounds of wood being chopped and nails being hammered in the distance.

The pop-up window that greeted me to my new server said “GO! EXPLORE! The further away you go, the better experience you’ll have!”, so I started off in a northeasterly direction, armed with nothing more than a 2-week-old player-made map for navigation. Unfortunately in my haste to get started, I missed picking up a newbie compass at the market, so I was relying completely on landmarks and general directional fortitude. I walked for literally hours, having to stop to catch my breath periodically, especially at the top of steep hills, before I could go any further. I passed into the wilderness, through the steppes, past giant mountains, and into lush forestlands. Oh, and it was nighttime and raining.

Yes, it was that dark. It was actually really creepy… you have to be really careful because you never know what will be out there waiting for you.

What in the world?!?!?!?!?

AIYEEEEE!!!! Giant man-sized scorpion… and that is a YOUNG one. Apparently there was a scorpion nest in these parts. I’ve since then seen an actual giant scorpion and they are grotesquely, monstrously huge.

Just past the scorpion was a giant (but young) man-sized spider as well. I asked in chat and apparently scorpions and spiders, but especially scorpions, are an extremely tough fight, and I had zero fighting skill and no idea how the combat system works. Between the two of them, I didn’t think I would be able to make it any further, so I ran up a friendly looking path lined with oleander bushes to find a place to hunker down until morning.

Oh look, a bed and a nice bench under a tree? Oh crud, it’s not a bench, it’s a… stone coffin. This night was getting better and better.

Finally somebody in chat mentioned that I could just go around the offensive scorpion and spider, and that if worse came to worse I could probably outrun them before they killed me. Just what I like to hear. I did get past them, and eventually made my way up to the Shipyard of Poland, a player-made seaside shipyard and dock on the northeastern tip of the mainland. I was tired, cold, wet, hungry, thirsty, and wounded, and still had no particular goal in mind.

But strangely enough, I was having a blast. It’s ridiculous really… the graphics aren’t cutting-edge, animations are crude at best, and crafting (the vast majority of what you actually do in Wurm) is… well…

Open Inventory.
Equip Hatchet.
Click Tree.
Chop Tree. (10 seconds goes by)
Chop Tree. (10 seconds goes by)
Chop Tree. (10 seconds goes by)
Chop Tree. (10 seconds goes by)
Tree falls down.
Chop up Tree.
Take log.
Equip Carving Knife.
Make kindling.
Kindling Fails.
Make kindling.
Kindling Fails.
Make kinding.
YAY! KINDLING!

Make Campfire.
Despair because I have nothing to cook because first I need to fish, which requires a Fishing Pole, which requires Fishing Line, which requires a String of Cotton, which requires Cotton, which is a random drop from foraging through grass. Unfortunately, none of this is really explained in-game, so for a new player, it really needs to be played with the WurmPedia open in a browser window.

Wurm is at it’s heart a crafting/survival MMO. You can easily spend 80-90% of your time crafting, and you can go days without killing something if you stay on-deed. If you do decide to venture out though, you need to be aware of your surroundings and be prepared to fight or flee, since any area that is not deeded is open to creature spawns, including multiple spawns like pairs and trios of spiders, roaming packs of wolves, and goblins that call all other goblins in the area to you in engaged in combat.

Wurm is also very Minecraft-like (or perhaps it should be that Minecraft is very Wurm-like, since the creator-of-Minecraft Notch was a co-creator of this game as well, BEFORE Minecraft), but with a massively multiplayer twist. As I was traveling I was greeted by random players and had a couple of invites to player towns. Players generally seem eager to help and advise, and once you start frequenting a particular area you’ll find that your neighbors display a frontier settler-like attitude of neighborly generosity and assistance. After a couple of days, I decided to splurge and purchase a deed, which is basically staking your claim on a plot of land, and very quickly thereafter my neighbors were up helping me build a well (since my masonry skill was still too low), offering me the use of their forges, and advising me on fence placement, mining, and terraforming. Wurm is brutal and unforgiving in many ways, and as a result, many players tend to go out of their way to help newbies and get folks on their feet.

So what started out as a quickie-fling to send me running back into the arms of my other games might actually be love. The freedom that players experience in determining their own goals and playstyle is huge… there’s no on-rails, hand-holding experience here. While it takes a while to really wrap your head around everything, that also leaves plenty of growing room as you continue to play the game. It’s ultimately a great change of pace and style from normal MMOs, and Rolf (the sole owner/paid developer of Wurm) really seems to have a little gem of a game on his hands.