Wurm Online Beginner’s Guide

Wurm Online Beginner’s Guide by Dannyiron

CONTENTS TABLE

Tutorial 1 – First Time in Wurm
Tutorial 2 – The Deed – Animal Trick
Tutorial 3 – Weapons and How they affect Combat
Tutorial 4 – Fighting and Fightskill

Tutorial 1 – The first time you open up your eyes and embrace the light of the Golden Valley

Firstly, Congratulations and welcome to Wurm! The first things you need to do are start learning about the basic survival instincts you need in Wurm. This includes staying safe, getting food and water, and of course building skills.

On Freedom, I intend to open a learning school for new players, and I would be welcome to sign you up. You will learn all of this and more there!

Staying Safe: You can do this through a number of ways. The obvious one is to stay alert, on your toes, and if you get attacked run like the wind. Well, you have to firstly know what your enemy is – and for this example we’ll use a large rat. If you move your cursor over this rat, it will have a red outline. This indicates that it is a hostile animal, and if you approach it or get too close it will automatically attack you. Other animals, such as dogs, will have a blue outline if you highlgiht them. Green highlighted animals are animals you have tamed, or villagemates have tamed. With a rat, however, you shouldn’t have too many problems even as a new player killing it.

Here is an example of an animal with a red outline, once you move the cursor over it. It is a black bear:

You should avoid hostile animals in your first experiences of wurm, until you have ways of defending yourselves. Animals that are hostile include: Large Rat, Wild Cat, Mountain Lion, Brown Bear, Black Bear, Black wolf, Crocodile, Huge Spider, Lava Spider, Lava Fiend, Anaconda, Goblin, Troll, Scorpion. Animals with a blue outline, and therefore will NOT attack you if you approach them (But will if you attack them first) include: Hen, Rooster, Calf, Cow, Bull, Pheasant, Chicken, Dog, Unicorn, Horse, Deer. Please also note that such animals with the prefix “Champion” in their name are alot bigger, (besides lava spiders) alot more powerful and harder to tame. You should not even approach these as a new player. With this list, you should know what animals you can and cannot approach – but always see what colour the animal highlights to first! Also watch out for swimming animals. Some animals can indeed swim, which is disadvantaging for you as an able bodied fleer or a low rank fighter. If you’re fighting an animal that can’t swim, everything is easy. You can hope in a pool of water to avoid death or serious injury. But if that animal swims, what can you do? The animal would chase you through the water, and what’s more, now that we have drowning you could drown too. Swimming Animals include: brown bears, dogs, large rats, crocodiles. The crocodiles, large rats and brown bears are the three main swimming animals essentially; so you should especially avoid these. Bear in mind that black bears and brown bears are different – brown bears are slightly weaker but can swim; black bears are slightly tougher but can’t swim.

Secondly, use a guard tower or a deed. On a non-player vs player server, these are intended to fight off hostile animals except non hostile animals you have aggrevated. Deed guards work by spawning on the deed after you have planted it (they have interchangable options on the deed, and token.) These will attack any animal that walks onto the deed, and are most likely to kill it. If a deed guard is killed, they respawn back at the token soon after. Tower Guards work from construction of a ‘Guard Tower’ (Masonry skill, 500 stone bricks, 500 clay of 2 weight, and 100 planks). Up to 20 quality, these will spawn one tower guard that will attack any hostile animal that approaches it. These will respawn at the tower pretty quickly if they are killed. All the way up to 5 guards, increasing with 1 guard per 10 quality from the point of 20 quality. They walk in random directions from the guard tower, and will attack together or on their own to kill animals. These can be made on or off deed, and do not require any form of money or pay to spawn. These should be a good method of getting an animal killed if you cannot overpower it yourself. There is a trick to killing animals that refuse to walk onto a deed, but I will elaborate in another tutorial called Deed – Animal Trick.

Thirdly, overpowering the animal yourself. You need a certain amount of fightskill as a basis for killing animals – but this is also affected by the armour you are wearing (What type, quality and enchants it has) and also the weapons you are using to fight with (Swords, shields, axes, mauls etc. as well as your weapon skill, weapon quality and enchants on the weapon.) We will go over enchants in another tutorial called Enchants, and weapons in a tutorial called Weapons and how they affect Combat. Basically, different animals require different fightskills, different quality of armour and different weaponskill levels. Rats, for instance need very low. Crocodiles, for another instance, need fairly high. As a new player, you should avoid any fighting yourself until you have trained fightskill. We will go over fighting in a different tutorial called Fighting and Fightskill.

Penultimately, having a tamed animal can make all the difference. This is affected also by the amount of taming skill you have. We will look at this in a tutorial called Taming. A tamed animal will fight any hostile animals that attack you, but will not fight non-hostile animals that you have aggrevated. A tamed animal can be the very deciding factor of a battle, because there is also an advantage for having a larger number of fighters than another party; as they are attacking from different angles. We will look at this in a tutorial called “Gank” Rule. And again, with champion animals they are alot stronger and will prove a more rewarding companion than their regular counterparts. As a general trend, the stronger the animal, the harder it is to tame. Also note that some animals cannot be tamed altogether, as they are classified as “Monsters” Rather than “Creatures.” These include: Huge Spiders, Lava Spiders, Goblins, Trolls, Scorpions. We will look more at these in a tutorial called Creatures and Monsters

Finally, having a house and ignoring the creature also works. A house, or fences for that matter, means there is a wall between you and a hostile creature – this means that they cannot attack you and you cannot attack them. Naturally, animals and monsters walk about and roam, so they will lose interest in you if you remain in a house or fence over time, even if you are directly beside them. Note that no animal can walk, jump or cross a fence without bashing it. Animals that bash fences from the outside are: Trolls. Although, some animals will bash fences if they are inside them. These include: Cave bugs, Lava Spiders, Huge Spiders, Trolls.

Getting Food and Water
Getting food and water is a crucial part of your survival in the Wurm World. Water determines the rate of your stamina regeneration, and Food determines your level of nutrition, your hunger, at 8% hunger or below, how much work you can do, and also stamina regeneration. We will study alot of this in a tutorial named Food, Hunger, Thirst, and Nutrition. Basically, you need food and water to survive in the World of Wurm. Little food isn’t too bad until very low levels such as 20%, but at about half of your water bar, any tasks become strenuous and hard to complete as stamina regeneration is very slow.

Food bar may be filled in many ways: You may eat raw or cooked meat/fish (This is quite a low nutrition food), with gulasch, casseroles and soups (These are medium nutrition dishes), with raw vegetables, herbs and berries (Quite high nutrition foods, but fill very little nutrition bar) and meals (Highest nutrition food). You may fill water bar with liquids, these include: Wines, lemonade, water, milk. You can carry some foods in your inventory, but some like soups will require containers. All liquids require containers, and some items will be allowed to be in the same container but some won’t. It depends on the object in question (ie. meals will be allowed to sit in water, but iron nails won’t.)

Building Skills
Building skills takes time, practice, and often tools. There are many different skills in-game, and each has their own function. At 50, 70 and 90 skill, most skills will enable a title that can be changed and/or activated under the command “/titles”. You may also view your current title under “/title”. Skills will allow jobs and tasks under them to either become possible (With percentage chances), improve chances of succeeding tasks, increase the end quality of products, increase the improving quality possible of products etc. and is generally a very handy thing to build. We will elaborate on this, but as a non-premium you may only gain up to 20 skill. This is helpful, but premium time and no skill cap is much more helpful and will assist you much further on your travels and endeavours of Wurm. For now, you don’t need to worry so much about skill. Remember that sleep bonus, which can be obtained by sleeping in a bed or sometimes as compensations for unexpected server crashes will increase speedgain for the time it is in use. You may hold up to 5 hours sleep bonus at a time.

Tutorial 2 – Weapons and how they affect Combat.!

Welcome to Tutorial 2, where you will learn about the Deed – Animal Trick. Basically, this is where a stubborn or resilient animal, creature or monster refuses to follow a player onto a deed. There is a specific trick which is perfectly fine to use, and it involves the 4 corners of a deed. I don’t know why, but animals have no problem entering a deed through the corner square of a deed, even if they have problems entering the deed through one of the sides. This means that you should lure the animal to one of the corner deeds (You can tell where these are by simply walking to the edge of the deed to find one side, and then moving another direction to find the tile where both sides lap, which will result in being one of the four corners.) I tested this only today, Saturday 23rd May 2009, and this indeed works. They will follow you through a deed corner. This means that they will walk onto the deed, and both event and local chat will recieve messages. Event will read a message such as the following: let’s use First light, and an adolescent black bear as the examples:

[19:43:26] Adolescent black bear raises the village alarm![19:43:26] A horn sounds and the gate is locked. First light is put on alert!

The event you will recieve in local chat is (Here is an example):
[19:43:26] I’ll take care of Adolescent black bear!
[19:43:26] I’ll help you with Adolescent black bear!

At this point, a number of deed guards will proceed to attack the creature or monster in question. “Spirit Guards” are stronger than Tower Guards but weaker than Spirit Templars. “Spirit Templars” are stronger than Tower Guards and Spirit Guards (‘under the ‘Light Guard’ Option), but cost alot more to have on a deed (Under the ‘Heavy Guard’ Option. The Medium Option should be a larger number of Spirit Guards on a deed. This costs somewhere inbetween light and heavy)

This trick is widely known and well-used. Always try through the side of a deed first, as the corners may be tricky to use. But desperate times call for desperate measures!

Tutorial 3 – Weapons and how they affect Combat. Learn about how you’re weapons are your best friend out in the forest!

Hello, and welcome to tutorial number 3. In this tutorial, we will study how your weapons will help or hinder you in combat.

Firstly, it all depends on the weapon. Different weapons have different characteristics – for instance, short swords are very quick to attack, but deal low amounts of damage. Longswords are medium speed attacks but deal medium damage wounds, and 2 hander swords are slow to attack but deal large damage. This is a generalisation, for the weapons all at the same skill level. Higher skill level means higher chance to use that weapon to parry, better chance of hitting your target with your weapon and general better proficiency with your weapon. There are also special moves attained with certain weapons at 30 weaponskill, and above from there. Swords at 30 weaponskill have the special move of “Carver”. These are individual attacks with their chance to deal extra damage.

A good way of training sword skill is by using them to chop trees – it is slow and fairly arguentous, but this steady exercise brings up your sword abilities and therefore aids your combat abilities. Maul skills can be trained with bashing – huge shod club, maul, small maul and large maul – these are all weapons that can also be used to bash lairs, fences and walls. Axes – hatchet, small axe, large axe, axe – these can also be trained by chopping down trees, in the same way that swords can be used. (Some are intended for tree-chopping use and it may be less effective) At least this means they all have a way of being trained!

Quality also affects how well they perform. Higher quality means larger efficiency and higher damage, so a high quality weapon is worth investing in. It can also mean more parries; this entitles the skill “Weaponsmithing.” Higher quality = mroe damage when chopping trees and bashing fences. It means lower skill gain however; so for training purposes you will wish to use a lower quality choice of weapon – this should mean you have high quality weapons and equipment for combat but low quality for skillgaining and training purposes.

Enchants are also now a key factor – such weapon enchants include Rotting Touch, Flaming Aura, Circle of Cunning, Dragon’s Demise, Selfhealer’s Demise, Dragons Demise Wind of Ages and so forth. Demise spells means greater efficiency when fighting the creature or person type you have the demise spell against, eg Dragon’s Demise is extra efficient against Dragons. Wind of Ages is now proven to speed up attack rates, which will prove invaluable. Circle of Cunning will increase skillgain within weaponskill – not nescessarily fightskill. Flaming Aura means that each wound you inflict will add extra damage to as a “burn”, and Rotting Touch means your weapon suffers extra damage, but the wound gets worse after you cause it for three ticks. This can make a large difference. For shields and armour, there is also Aura of Shared Pain, which means a percentage of damage inflicted upon someone else will end up being reflected onto you as well.

Tutorial 4 – Fighting and Fightskill. It’s handy being able to throw a powerful blow!

Hello, and welcome to Tutorial 4. Today, we will be covering Fighting and Fightskill.

First of all, fightskill is relevant to all combat that goes on in-game. The higher your fightskill, the more formidable a foe you are. It is not the only deciding factor of combat – others include armour and weapons. However, very little fightskill with amazing weapons and armour will still mean you are a fairly simple prey to high level players or strong creatures.

The first thing you will want to do before you go out and do any fighting is train. The best way to do so from scratch is by using a Practice Doll and a shaft. The shaft will be in your hand, and by using it rather than a sword, the dummy needs less repair and maintenance work but you still gain the fightskill from it. The dummy is good because you know it won’t fight back, and with a good carpenter you always have a way of gaining some fightskill. (Please refer to the wiki if you wish to find out more information about creating a practice doll)

Train up your fightskill on this doll to a reasonable level, until you cannot gain much more skill. For a base, try raising it up to 2 or 3, as that is a good foothold. By this point, you still aren’t ready to tackle everything in the wide forests, lakes and beaches of Wurm. You will need armour and you will need weapons, but we will once more cover these in different tutorials. 2 or 3 fightskill should be a good basis for overpowering small prey such as deer, dogs, wild cats and rats. Killing such small animals will get you more fightskill from their defeat, and at a faster pace than using a practice doll. (Note that you only gain the fightskill after defeating the animal, and you gain less skill if you have help, you back off and attack the creature a number of different times or someone else takes the damage.)

Keep training on small prey until you reach slightly higher levels. Then it would be safe to step up the animal chain a bit. At around 5 fightskill, black wolves and mountain lions should start becoming easy prey. Just keep fighting and gaining skill, you will find everything gets gradually easier and easier. At about 10 skill, you may risk fighting huge spiders if you wish; and about 15 or 20 skills you should start finding you have a good chance against brown bears and black bears. About 30 skill should be easy to overcome scorpions and lava spiders with, and 35 or 40 skill should mean crocodiles snap under your power, not just snap their jaws at you. This is a rough guide and may change; you may find that at 2 skill you manage to overpower a wolf or at 7 skill you find some difficulty. Sometimes it’s more luck and chance than skill.

Be wary that different animal ages and “characteristics” will mean they are easier or harder respectively. Animal ages go up as follows, youngest to oldest: Young, Adolescent, Mature, Aged, Old, Venerable. The youngest are the weakest and the oldest are the strongest. By animal “characteristics” I refer to their prefix in their name – this may include scared, greenish, raging, fierce, slow, diseased and so forth. These will all have different skill levels, movement speeds, sizes and different difficulties. “greenish” are fairly close to champion strength, so beware! Scared or slow tend to be easier than an animal without a prefix (Do bear in mind that some don’t always have a prefix). They will also have different colours – slow is a dark blue, greenish is a dark green, diseased is yellow etc. And this means that the animal will have a different colour to it’s counterparts with different characteristics.

In due time, you may want to try fighting players in PvP on wild (Note that fighting animals is called PvE)(PvP = Player vs Player, PvE = Player vs Enemy). You cannot put a finger on how easy it is to overcome another player – it depends on the other players’ weapons, armour, fightskill, weaponskill and so forth – plus the fact that most wild players hunt in town groups, which will make it alot easier for them to overcome a single person. You should only fight on wild if you are going as part of a group, have considerable fightskill (Recommended 60-70 +) and are determined to – or expect to find yourself on the bad end of a sword blade quickly.

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