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!

My big wurm grind

In my last post I wrote about my first premium months with my current toon (character in Wurm). Nearly from the beginning I started grinding hard to get some skills going.

My neighbor was so nice to me. Helped me a lot in my humble start. And I found a way to repay him. I started to tend all his wemp fields so he had more yield for making cordage favor for his priest. That's how I got my first skill to 90 - farming. Second was not far away and fast to get - carpentry.

Then it was worse - what would be good to grind? The big grind? So I choose weapon smithing (WS, one of the slowest skill to get). First only because I wanted to make rare huge axe. In first batch I made 3. I got pretty coin selling them (you get around 1 silver for normal huge axe at 90 quality but 7-8 for rare one). And I was hooked again.

In first month I got my WS to just over 50. Then I exchanged whole bunch of weapons directly from my forge to a friendly priest (that one I ordered whole set of skiller tools earlier) for some great casts on more tools. Every bit helps especially when WS grind is so slow. I also hurried to get meditation to 70 to get +25% skill gain bonus.

I grinded WS on huge axes, large mauls, sickles, carving knives and long swords - stuff that sells great when rare. I even made 2 supreme carvers! Sold one and exchanged second for a rare knarr (it was my big goal with first toon to make one, unsuccessful in like 30 tries or so).

It ate quite some iron so I needed to grind mining too (always good to have). Took me long 5 months of daily grind to get my WS to 90 (of course with frequent pauses when my prem time expired) - my 3rd 90 and mining was not long behind.

From my WS nearing 80 I started to get nice money selling 80ql weapons and mainly improving others weapons for cash (nearly all my skill 90-94 was from paid jobs!). Somewhere around that time I started my merchant page on forums to sell leftovers from my grind (now it has over 800 posts - I write there nearly all sales I made - kind of chronicle or ledger).

Then I made great deal with my neighbor. I make tools, improve them (if needed) he casts them, I sell them and we divide profit 50:50. Was nice money. Sometimes even better than my improve jobs. I even spared enough money to buy me red dragon scale set - easy to get to 90 PAS with it (no need to make huge amounts of steel to grind on plate sets).

After I reached 90 WS all was possible so I choose myself a worthy goal - be the imp-all-to-90 toon. And I'm getting quite close to that now. I already have that important stuff covered (all armour types, weapons and tools).

For my next prem I selected another goal - grind one of my free to play (f2p) toons (that holds skiller tools for sale for me in its inventory) to be permanent f2p (when you paid prem at least once your toon never gets deleted) with twice inventory size (30 body strength) and riding knarr (23 mind logic). Probably by nonstop mining or similar stuff. We will see how fun that will be (for a month)!

You can read about that (and more) in this post.

How I started to enjoy wurm again

As I wrote in this post, I quit Wurm after I burnt out with my first toon. Took me nearly 9 months before I got back. At first only with new character to look at my old place, then I spent a few weeks with old friends on their new deed on Xanadu.

I was hooked again. Then I posted on forums that I want to buy some starter character - I did not wanted to skill it all the way from start. Then I found my current toon. With only one skill above 50 (carpentry), it was not expensive, but saved me quite a few weeks of skilling.

Only small problem was that this toon was located on Independence server and all my friends were either on Celebration or Xanadu. I needed ship fast to get there. Fortunately I found unfinished knarr nearby with all hard parts (ropes, sails and composite components) already in and only bulk (planks, pegs, rivets and such) waiting to be attached.

But I was quite frustrated with my low skills. Everything now took much more time than I was used to. So I bought complete set of skiller tools and started grinding hard. Then I found quite helpful neighbor and things started to look much better.

I finished that knarr in just 4 weeks, skilling shipbuilding from 1 to nearly 50, same with woodcutting to get better chance at attaching remaining parts. I even get meditation to around 50 in those first 2 months of premium time.

That friendly neighbor deeded place I was squatting on, but let me stay on his new trader deed so I was happy. I had a place to stay and even don't have to pay for it.

The best thing was pause after those 2 prem months. This first pause was partly because I wanted to wait for next meditation question. But it was better than expected. From that time I keep my schedule of grinding hard for 1 or 2 months and then pause for 1 or 2 months to gather strength for next big grind.

When I bought next premium time and with my ship finished I went on sailing visiting my old friends. I stayed on Celebration for a few weeks grinding fighting from single digit to nearly 60. That deed was near big plains so lots of things to kill around.

I kept myself useful by improving all I found around. For example all pans in forges around :) But that will be for this post.

How I nearly quit Wurm

Wurm online is great game. Definitely game I spent most time with from all games I ever played. Its quite addicting. It have so many things you can master that even a few lifetimes wont be enough to try everything to the fullest.

When I started playing back in 2012 I immediately fell in love. Finally game where everything you do rewards you in its own way. I started small with just 1x1 wooden house just next public mine.

I slowly learned how to get along the game. It was quite a bit more difficult and unwelcome to new players that its now. Everything took great effort but that satisfaction was worth it when you reach your goal.

Then I moved a bit further away near shoreline. Made my 1st 3x3 stone house with a good friend of mine and started to claim area around. With every starter house in the area falling into disrepair I claimed a bit more until I had enough space to deed it.

Now I had place of my own with a way to grant permission to people what they can and cannot do there. I made my 1st 5x5 house with 2 story and felt I have more space than I ever need to work in.

I started farm, fruit orchard and small animal pen area. I learned slowly all as I went. I started to work on ships. Started selling knarrs with 100 raft each for around 30 silvers each. Along with other stuff I had left from skilling I get my 1st money.

Started buying enchanted tools, even spared for drake hide armour. Met great people around, joined a few alliances helped people around a lot. But with all that stuff going around, farm to tend, animals to groom, jobs to finish, deed to pay for, it started to look more like work than game. And I spent tremendous amounts of time in game (nearly 1/2 of my wake time).

It started to be boring. It was more like I need to get inside and do stuff when I paid for premium time (I bought a year of premium twice) and my personal life suffered quite considerably. So in December 2013 I decided I need a break. In a week or so I managed to sell all my stuff I had in game for $500 (so I get more money out of the game than I put in and even have some change left).

I was free at last! But not for long :) Once wurmian, wurmian for ever! But that's another story you can read here.

How I became wurmian

When you don't like reality, virtual reality is good place to hide (and to spend time before enjoying dream reality at night). Some games are better than other (depending to your individual taste). I ended up spending quite a significant portion of my "free" time on Wurm Online.

You can say its Minecraft for adults (and its not that far off - Notch even worked with Rolf on it before switching to more mainstream version). Wurm is not your average MMO. Everything in it takes time and sometimes quite significant time. Its one of those survival / crafting games of old (more than 10 years now running!) in medieval times with some magic. Genre that is getting to spotlight lately.

All skills (more than 130 of them in now - see for example my current character stats) are increased with use, so no levels as in standard RPG. When you just kill what you see you only get better in killing and still don't know a thing about building houses. Skilling most skills also improve body / mind / soul statistics. Those also help you survive (for example body stamina increases your HP).

Land is divided into squares 4x4 meters and its fully modifiable by players. Nearly all you can see around is player-owned and player-made (only a few NPC in starter town are provided, the rest is just untouched nature at start).

All Wurm servers are connected now. Every one is one island in big lake (fresh water you can drink). Sailing to border will get you to other servers. Most of those servers are PvE, just a few PvP (where players can kill you or steal you things from your corpse / house / deed).

For a newbie, it takes quite some time to get its bearings and start enjoying the game. Even building the most basic house is not easy. You need to:

• find good place first (with some resources and water nearby) that is not owned by anybody (you can purchase - deed - land for in-game money)
• find / make 1 flat tile (digging must be learned on flat land first to enable you to dig in greater slopes)
• make 20 planks for each of 4 walls - you need to cut down some older trees (young trees do not give enough wood) to make logs then saw them to planks
• find iron ore (in mines or rummage around), smelt it to iron lumps, make anvil and from more lumps create large nails, 1 set for each wall
• plan your house with mallet (make one if you don't have already)
• plan your 4 walls (don't forget doors)
• attach all remaining planks to walls
• great satisfaction when you finally done that all!

And that just a start. Imagine your first 8x8 tiles 13 floors mansion finely decorated and finished after a few months of hard work. But it all gets faster and easier with higher skills, higher quality tools and materials and knowledge.

Best thing about Wurm is its community. Always some people around that help you (whats crap for them is treasure for newbies) or even invite you to their village (to get your bearings faster in safer place). And people do commend you for your achievements because they know how hard is to get there.

This game is "unlimited demo". If you do not mind, that your skills are capped to 20% (and a lot of good stuff starts above that) you can play for free as long as you want. To get higher, you must pay for premium time (see official Wurm Online Shop). I paid 3rd day I was there.

As people know that getting high quality / quantity stuff is not easy, they pay you for your work. And you can then buy (after some months getting your way around) your premium time just by in-game work.

Its now more than 5 years ago I discovered this marvel. I don't play it now continuously, but in small doses (always 1 or 2 months premium then 1 or 2 months pause) and I love it! Maybe you will like it too?

And if you want to know how I fared in Wurm, you can read it here.