2017-11-12

Grindity grind, burnity burn!

In my last post about wurm I wrote about my big grind and how I planed to grind one of my f2p (free to play) stuff holders to permanent ones (had premium time at east once - never gets deleted).

I must say it was better than expected to start "anew". After about 18 skills to 90+ and a few more not far below that it was I would say refreshing to see those fast skill gains. After first weekend of grind I was at around 50 mining. Wow. Its great when you have all stuff sorted out (deed to live on, high casted tools to use, scale set to wear, high casted huge axe to wield, great food to eat, materials for long grind, know how).

So I started offering my big main character for sale. I had time to sell so I was looking for some serious offer. And before my 1st prem month ended on my now new main toon Lilianth, I got it. After some haggling we agreed on price over 1k EUR for toon with nearly rare scale set and inventory full of casted stuff (I had nowhere to keep it and prices went down, so no point to keep so many).

I went on grinding hard. With my new toon I was able to get to 86.7 mining after just 1 month of near constant mining (took me another 10 days of 2nd prem month to get to 90). That was nearly enough to get to my goal of 30 body strength. But with this being my new main toon goals had to change.

My toon now officially being noob again I needed some usable skills fast. Good I started meditating from day 1 so I was already 20 before I 1st premmed it, at 35 after 1st month and 50 after 2nd (59 after 3rd month). Need 70 fast to get +25% skill gain. Should be like 2 months more.

Now what skill to choose at start? First I want to be able to participate in missions. Because that means more sleep bonus! So I needed a few skills to get to 30 item quality fast to be able to sacrifice them to various gods. That was usually just a few hour quick grind to 20ish. Only FC I needed higher because quite a lot of gods was in need of fine furniture (or strange devices)!

Next goal was to make at least some boat because I sold my last knarr with my toon able to make one (and as Shaylie was out of prem at that time I was unable to quick build one). So I needed at least 30 ship building to make me nice small sail boat. Ok, check - around halfway of my 2nd prem month.

Around that time a good friend of mine invited me to dragon slaying! So I had a day to get some FS going. Few hours to get my huge axe to 20 by killing every tree in sight with it then onto steppe to kill all that moves! FS 14-40 in just a few hours (even a few trolls in the end!) and onto that dragon. Was fun!

Then I wanted some basic gathering skills. I started to plant cotton around my house also from day 1 so I was already at 35 farming at the end of month 1 (nearly 50 after 2nd month). Enough to start CT grind. High quality exquisite meditation rugs are also good to sell so I went hard on that during 3rd month and ended up at 72. One more month and 80ql could be sell-able article again (maybe even 90 if I dedicate enough time to that).

Another good skill to have and one that gives you nice body stats gain is WC. I already have nice small tree farm next to my deed (only a few hundred pines). So cutting all very old and overaged trees twice a month gave me 40 skill after 1st month, 53 after 2nd and 61 after 3rd.

But what skill gave me most income last time? Yeah, good old WS. Its easier to grind it 3rd time around ;) It took me only 3 weeks of hard grind to get to 50 and I ended up with 70 at the end of my 3rd prem month! Close to be able to improve weapons to 80 quality and start selling some again.

So as you can see I keep on grinding and burning (= use effectively) sleep bonus (SB) at that. Every day I try to at least burn bonus I got from last day. But that prove as not enough so I even bought and consumed 7 sleep powders in my 3rd month of prem during long weekend grinds. Time is money :)

Especially burning SB on WS proved quite time consuming. I had only like 100 weapons in forge so I always improved them as high as skill let me, so quite a lot of failures (even with 90ish quality tools with 90ish coc casts). So I always imped all of them with iron and water before turning SB on, then continued imping till all wanted iron/water again. Then SB off, repeat. Good for saving SB where real skill gains occur. Slight problem was that after like 30 min of SB you get more than hour of preparing for next round. With full CCFP from excellent food (thanks, neighbor!) and its bonus to SB timer length I ended up with around 5 hours of "work" to burn 1 hour of SB. Hardcore!

I used even some legal automation (wurm even supports macros). I have keyboard with macro keys. If you use that only to fill your action queue and do not add any pauses between key presses its all good and legal. So I have keys for digging (select shovel on tool belt then dig, dig, dig), tree cutting (select hatchet, cut, cut, cut), same for mining and picking sprouts from trees. Only macro for other skills is imp+repair on bottom left key so it can be pressed easily. Nothing else is needed.

That burning in title have one more meaning. With all this hard grind (not a hour of lazying around when prem is on) pauses between prem months are even more important (at least for me) to not burn out. Its nice to look at those graphs at niarja, but even better is when you get home from work and you DONT have to grind today :)

Maybe I will start using that new prem option for half a month soon :)

Keep on wurming folks!