I’ve been a busy bee since we last checked in on Wildeacre. There is a bit of planning required when setting up a large deed. Lots of people start with building a small house, then terraforming around it, and eventually tearing down that small house to build bigger things. That works well if you’re brand new to the game and need to build your skills. I don’t like building something small just to tear it down later and doing double work, so I usually start by mapping a plan in Google Docs, so I know what needs to be terraformed.

This deed is being built on the side of a mountain, so the easiest thing to start with in this particular case was the smaller livestock pen. Parts of that area needed to be lowered, parts needed to be raised, and I knew that I would have surplus dirt leftover that I could then use to start terraforming the larger livestock pen. The buildings and farm tiles will be basically tucked into the mountainside and will require more intensive terraforming, so lets start with the easy stuff.

This was about the halfway point of making that livestock pen. I like this because it shows how the world of Wurm is set up. There is a base rock layer on the bottom, that is the area that you make your mines in. On top of that rock sits a dirt layer. The depth of the dirt layer varies from server to server. On Sklotopolis, the dirt layer is typically between 50-60 “dirts” deep. On the Wurm Online Independence server, it was anywhere from 80-120 dirts. On some of the newer servers, it’s fairly shallow, 30-40 dirts deep. Digging/shoveling that dirt layer is easy to do, but on the main Wurm Online servers, modifying the rock layer is a royal pain in the butt. You use a pickaxe and you are successful only 20-25% of the time. It takes FOREVER. On Sklotopolis though, this has been modified to be successful every time, so it’s just like digging and goes much faster.

All those piles of dirt were then brought over to the other side of the road and dumped to start leveling out the other livestock pen. It looks like a wall at the moment, but eventually the pit to the right of the wall will be filled in and it’ll all be one level.

Here’s the finished (smaller) livestock pen as of this morning! Over the next few days, grass and trees will start filling in. I’m planning on heading out hunting to find some sheep, pigs, and chickens now that I have a place to corral them. The next step will be to dig out the road (to the right in the picture below) and use all that dirt to fill in the other livestock pen.

Like I mentioned yesterday, I returned to Wurm Unlimited’s Sklotopolis server and immediately started scouting to find the perfect spot. Any time I start a Wurm deed, I have a few requirements:

• Coastal access: I don’t like areas right on the water, but having a coastal area about 100 or so tiles from my deed was preferable. This is tough because coastal land is usually the first to go and it can be tricky to find. I really just want an on-deed spot to park my boat.
• Good ores: This one is tricky. I’ve learned lessons from past deeds, and at this point I take care to prospect to get an idea of what is available BEFORE deeding. Iron is a must. Gold, silver, copper, zinc, or lead is icing on the cake. Slate is extremely desirable but difficult to find. Anything else is nice to have, but not super-necessary. My husband is the miner, and he hates deeds with existing mines because he likes to design his mines a specific way.
• Terrain: I like places that back up to mountains or otherwise difficult-to-deed terrain (for a mine), but I also LOVE me some forest. Lots and lots of forest, with good trees (cedar, pine, birch). Also, not tooooooo hilly, I prefer flattish deeds as opposed to terraced, and the steeper the hills the longer the terraforming will take. In addition, it needs to be relatively high over water level, so that when the husband mines, he can build the mine ceilings high and put multi-story buildings underground. We have a city above and below ground!

I found a spot just off a highway in the southeast of the server. It appears to have once been started as a deed maybe, but the previous tenants didn’t get very far. All that was left was some pavement. The tent and horse are mine. 🙂

Let’s take a closer look! First, an overhead view so you can see this spot on the live map. The large green square is my new plot of land. The grey lines are highways, and if you look at the bottom left corner, all those splotched of grey indicate that there are peaks of stone peeping through because it’s a mountain. I prospected on those exposed stone tiles and found iron, slate, sandstone, zinc, copper and tin so far, so there is a good variety in the area. You can also see in the upper right that there is a coast at least somewhat close by. Works for me!

The view from the crossroads, looking southwest toward my land. Up the hill to the south we go!

After climbing a bit, we see the road cut to the right. This will be the “entrance” to my deed, and I plan on leveling it out a bit and adding some signage, bushes, etc to make it pretty.

We turn right and climb the hill some more…

Until we get to the center, which is roughly where my tent and horse are. This is ALL going to be terraformed and leveled for buildings and farm fields and such. Not a lot to look at for the moment, just a lot of pine trees.

However, if you go all the way to the northwest corner of the deed, you see a lovely view of a mountain covered in steppe. Lots of hunting in that direction! Currently the hillside is covered in roses, which is wonderful, but I’ll probably end up replacing half of them with grapevines and putting a little vineyard house on the top of the hill. Wine making is a thing in Wurm!

One game that I absolutely cannot get away from, and I haven’t been able to leave for the past 12 or so years, is Wurm Online. It’s old. It’s quirky. It’s janky and has an unforgiving grind and an unfriendly UI. So why can’t I quit it? There is simply no other game out there that can scratch that creative, homesteading itch the same way that Wurm can.

That said, it’s an extreme grind on the Wurm Online servers. Recently I’ve started to realize that I want to play games that respect my time. With other adult responsibilities, including work, professional education, health and fitness goals, house chores, etc, I just don’t have the time to game that I used to. Back in my 20s-30s, sure, I could game for 5-6 hours a night, get 4 hours sleep and do it all again, but with age comes changing priorities. These days sleep, exercise, and health initiatives are more important.

So, I decided to head back to Wurm Unlimited, the version of Wurm bought through Steam that can be hosted on private servers and modded to add quality of life features, including faster skill grinds and action timers. Of those servers, Sklotopolis is one of the best. It’s been around for 7 years with no wipes, the servers are the perfect size, he action and skill timers have been sped up but not so much to be trivial, and starter deeds are free with no upkeep. The catch is that you have to log in every 90 days or else it will be disbanded (to keep the server clean for newer players). You can also expand the deed with in-game currency, which you can get by building guard towers, selling goods, hunting and burying animals, or of course the shop.

Another thing that I really like is that the server is run by long-time Wurm veterans that understand how the game works and how to modify the experience so that its more fun but doesn’t lose that classic Wurm feeling. It’s one of the most populated servers and the community is excellent.

When I first logged in I was on my old deed, which had long been disbanded and had been deeded over. I fully expected that, so I took what I had on my person and set out to find new lands. After wandering around the server for a couple days, scoping out various spots, I finally found a perfect place and put my stake down. Next post I’ll give you a little tour!

After a weekend of digging and fencing, here’s where we are so far:

Animal field: Fenced and Locked! I still need to dig out that mound of dirt in the middle, but all the animals are in their home now.

 

Farm field: Almost done! I still need to rip down the small temporary animal pen, level it alllll out (needs to be flat to plant a farm), and finish a few more fence sections. We have plenty of food for now though, so this project will go on the back burner.

Next up on the docket is digging out the eastern border of the deed and getting that part of the fence finished, then we should be good and secure against trolls, spiders, scorpions, crocs, and the like. I went exploring tonight so that I could find a female sheep in order to start breeding for wool. What I found is that if I go about 2 minutes through the forest to the east, there is a huge area of steppe and tundra FULL of nasties. That’s why we have so many critters wandering onto the deed, they’re all coming from here. I’m not complaining at all, that is good hunting. 😀

 

Note the big troll in the upper right – that is a champion troll (an elite) and in my mind, he rules this hill. One of these days his rule will end. 😉

Wildeacre is coming right along, slowly but surely. Let’s take a look at the progress so far:

First, I needed to decide on a level for the deed and clean up the mine pit. It’s a tricky thing because the deed backs right up on a mountain, but is rather low towards the front. I ended up picking a low height that will look fairly natural in the front, and I’m cutting deep into the mountain in the back. It’s been a process of cutting into the back and then counting off the slope over lots of tiles to make sure that I’m working on the same level in both front and back. I ran into rock at one point in the back, about 25 slope higher than I would have liked, but I’m going to roll with it – that particular corner will be hidden by tall hedges, so we’re just going to leave it as is for now. Maybe at some point it’ll get corrected.

Once I decided on the level, I squared away around the mine. This wasn’t as easy as I would have hoped since I had to do some flat-raising, but I got it, finally. Then I sailed down the coast a bit to a big maple forest and went crazy plucking hundreds of sprouts off the maple trees. With those sprouts I made…

 

 

Hedges! The mine pit has been lined with maple hedges that are short right now, but will grow into tall hedges the same height as the gate. We also built a guard tower to protect us from local wildlife, and I got the first story of my house finished. Since this picture was made, Mr. Moxie also built a mirroring house on the right side, where the packed tiles and crates are. These houses will likely end up being 3 stories high, with bavarian-style timber walls on the 2nd and 3rd floors and slate roofs.

My current project is creating a road from the front of the deed to the highway, and then leveling the entire border of the deed and getting it fenced in. After that, finishing the farm fence. Then, leveling some more space for the workshop/storage buildings, abbey, and winery. I honestly love this spot. While it doesn’t look like much now with the dirt piles and crates strewn everywhere, it’s beautiful, has great resources, a great view, a great location, and it’s shaping up to be a beautiful, cozy, lush Secret Garden-like deed.

After Blaugust, I needed a break from blogging. The whole once-a-day thing was waaaay too unsustainable for me, so I took a brief hiatus to let things settle. I’m thinking a post 2-3 times a week, or whenever I have something to say. No promises or obligations. This is for fun, right?

So as far as WoW goes, I think I’m pretty much done for this expansion. I got my paladin and mage to 100 and decently geared out via PvP, and transferred them to a fun World PvP-centric dwarf guild with great folks. Other than finishing out achievements or collecting pets or mounts or whatnot, there’s really not a ton else that I need to do, so I’m in a good spot for Legion. I’ll continue to log in periodically to do some dailies for cash, but otherwise I think I likely won’t put in any more significant WoW time in until Legion.

In other news: I picked up another old, friendly, comfortable game again: Wurm Online. Those of you that have known me for years know that I adore this game, although like anything I have to take breaks from it. Hearing the announcement about the upcoming Wurm Unlimited release on Steam got me thinking about jumping back in anyway, and then my old pal/co-worker @_Jeg_ also started thinking about it as well, so off to Xanadu we went. The first thing to decide was whether to continue on our existing deeds, or to start fresh. This was hard because we’ve both spent a ton of time and resources on building our deeds, but there were two negatives to the location: We were in the dead middle of the map and were only sea-accessible by one small canal at the far north end of the lake, and there was no activity in the area. We were basically hermits. We both wanted better access to a spawn point, a market, and foot-traffic, so we grabbed a couple of horses and went scouting in northwest Xanadu. We went north because mob density is higher (better hunting) and west for easier access to the Independence/Deliverance/Exodus/Celebration cluster.

I had a few requirements:

• Coastal access: I don’t normally like areas right on the water, but having a coastal area about 100 or so tiles from my deed was preferable.
• Close to a spawn point: We started out looking at Linton and Vrock Landing. Vrock quickly won out, one of the Wurm staff members has been working on the spawn and it has a super-cool checkerboard portal area. Also, it is further northwest (see above).
• Good ores: This one is tricky. I’ve learned lessons from past deeds, and at this point I take care to prospect to get an idea of what is available BEFORE deeding. Iron is a must. Gold, silver, or lead is icing on the cake. Anything else is nice to have, but not super-necessary.
• Terrain: I like places that back up to mountains or otherwise difficult-to-deed terrain (for a mine), but I also LOVE me some forest. Lots and lots of forest, with good trees (cedar, pine, birch). Also, not tooooooo hilly, I prefer flattish deeds as opposed to terraced.
• Neighbors: A few good neighbors and a good alliance are also necessary. Not too crowded, but not too lonesome either. Hermiting is nice until you’re hermiting for months on end.

After riding around for several days, checking out all sorts of different places, digging, prospecting, and running from entire tribes of trolls, scorpions, spiders, hellhounds, anacondas, crocodiles, and other assorted wildlife, we finally settled on two places relatively close to each other. I took the forest on the highway, Jeg took the (rare but awesome) spot on the coast. My only issue with the forest was that I was unable to prospect to check what ores were under the area, so it was a gamble. However after prospecting other nearby areas and asking neighboring deeds, it seemed like the chances were good that it would have iron at the least, so we took that chance.

It paid off. We’ve found iron AND gold so far, and I know there’s zinc somewhere nearby. WOO!

The last few times I’ve done this, I’ve forgotten to get “before” pictures, so here it is… the lovely, lush, wild area that is Wildeacre 2.0:

In Wurm, players can purchase merchants, which are NPCs that sell merchandise created or harvested by a player. You can place a merchant just about anywhere as long as its in a building or a merchant stall, but as in real life, one of the biggest things to think about is location, location, location. And one of the best places to put a merchant is in an established marketplace.

Exodus is interesting because as the server has developed and players have come & gone, there has never really been one main marketplace established like on other Freedom servers. In the early days of the server, there was Exo-mart, a small, central marketplace close to Esert & the spawn point, but it was quickly eclipsed by Exodus Trading Post (ETP), a public market ran with an aggressive marketing campaign by a cartel of players that also provided bulk goods, horses, & just about any item imaginable. The biggest problem with ETP was that it was on the west side of the server, rather than being in a central location. Eventually, both of those deeds fell and the marketplaces were left in a state of disrepair.

Down south, South Exodus Crafters Market (SECM) was founded on a man-made island and quickly gained traction as many players with high crafting skills and high quality products were/are located in the south. To this day, it still exists as the oldest continuous and still active marketplace on Exodus. It’s located very close to the Celebration server border and gets a lot of cross-server traffic, but it’s location down south again limits the number of players from all areas of Exodus from using it to its fullest potential.

Back in central Exodus, two new markets popped up: White Pearl Market, a collection of roadside stalls run by the Pearls alliance, and New Market, a large marketplace for members of New Pineview to sell their wares. While both markets have great locations & merchandise, they’re also private markets or controlled by player alliances – not necessarily a bad thing, but Exodus was still missing a large public central marketplace accessible by both land and water.

Enter Madbananas and Zerobyte. They saw the need for this as well and established Exodus Central Market (ECM) along the main highway in between Esert and one of the main waterways to the east. ECM has a ton of market stalls that are available to the public, as well as a mailbox and an open-air pavilion with altars to all three gods.

My modest contribution to ECM has been teal-painted pointing signs guiding players there from Esert, as well as a shop sign at the market and landscaping along the highway in the area. The highway was originally messed up with odd angles and mismatched tiles, so I took the liberty of fixing the slopes, repaving the highway, and planting trees to make it attractive again. I have a merchant there as well, selling ropes, sails, and other random goods.

There are of course other small local markets on Exodus, as it should be, but over the past few weeks that its been open ECM has been gradually gaining new merchants and there is getting to be a really nice selection of wares there, which makes the trip to the market very worth it. If you’re traveling by water, the closest port is New Freeport to the east- just moor your boat and head west on the highway, you can’t miss it. If you’re at Esert, follow the teal signs to the market, it takes about 3 minutes to walk there and it’s a fairly safe trip.

Happy Wurming!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates here – sorry about that. Life got crazy with a new job that requires a 1.5-2 hour commute each way (I know, I know) and a bunch of other weirdness. Generally what little time I do have to play during the week I’d rather spend playing rather than blogging, but I’m hoping to maybe post a an update on the weekends. No promises, but we’ll see how it goes. 🙂

So! Gaming. I really don’t have time to play multiple games, so at this point I’m playing the one game that has ruined me on all other MMOs: Wurm Online. There’s always something else to do in Wurm, and I enjoy the freedom that it gives me to determine my own goals. Since I blogged last, Wurm 1.0 released along with all the updates it brought: multi-story buildings, animations, character customization, new graphics, etc. I’ve been super-impressed at just how much the Wurm team has improved the game with 1.0. Let’s take a look at how Avonlea Bay has changed since we spoke last…

The big story is multi-story, really. When 1.0 went live all our houses lost their auto-roofs and we were stuck with roofless buildings to work our magic on. Above is the workshop, which has an added second story and balcony… oh yes, balconies are now possible.

The new and improved Wild Boar Inn. I tried this time to make it more like a proper fantasy-style inn, with a meeting room and kitchen downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs. Balconies are a must, of course.

The new winery, which is what used to be a villager house. I really love the way it turned out, with the wood on top of stone – it looks like a proper estate winery.

Because I can’t leave well enough alone, and because Raamkozijin showed me a picture of his horse pen setup, I tore down part of some old farm fields and am in the process of building proper stables with attached horse pens and enchanted grass.

My husband decided to expand upon his ironworks building, which then turned into a treehouse, and then ended up turning into a compound. I think he’s still building on it. What you can’t see here is that there is actually a tower reaching up towards the sky – it’s very peaceful up there among the treetops.

I also managed to get a male chicken from my pal Fatboy. Chickens seem to be super-rare as they’re difficult to take care of, but I’m going to give it a shot. Eventually I want to get a hen as well and see if I can start a bit of egg production. These little chickens need a LOT of corn laying around to keep them fed – it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep up with their needs.

In addition to all the craziness on-deed, I’ve been working like a madwoman off-deed. I finished Dead Mans Highway, a 2-tile-wide road extending from our alliance region northwards, connecting the SE to the NE. My next big plan is extending the highway all the way to Esert –  I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve also been making and planting signage to a new market in the Esert area, and doing some terraforming and landscaping along the highways around there.

On top of all that, we’ve been playing musical deeds in our region, reshuffling deeds around. I disbanded Medway Plantation so that my pal Xalorum could deed a smaller tract of it close to the coast. He in turn disbanded his deed, which was right on the highway path, so that project could be completed. Revnik deeded a large tract of coastline to the east of us, which used to be part of a deed that dropped a while back.  I bought Jewelspar from Mayrin, restored it to nature, and it has now been renamed Cherryglade Hill, after my old independence deed. And to top it all off, I deeded a tract of land just to the north of Avonlea Bay and Trueknight Haven to act as a forest sanctuary extension to those two deeds.

Phew!

A big welcome to new Brawler Delerium who now resides at Hannibal Retreat in our region as well. Always nice to have a new Brawla!

For now though, it’s time to get back to building fences!