Wurm Online Stone Age Guide

Wurm Online Stone Age Guide by arcas

Many Wurm players enjoy Wurm for the challenge.  They find it very satisfying to build something from nothing.  Even early on in my time here I thought the starter tools were kind of lame, in that they are craftable, but not without themselves in some combination, so if you didn’t have them, you be stuck, unable to interact with the world in most ways.

I was excited when the crude tools came out, and wanted to try them out, and saw the opportunity for a great challenge.

I created an alt on Golden Valley, and started out by dropping everything but my steel and flint.  I pretended like there was no one else in the world and tried to start from nothing.  Here’s my guide to what happened next…:

Sadly, you’ll need the steel and flint, as I understand they are still necessary for lighting ovens and forges, and cannot be crafted without acquiring flint, which comes from lava fiends, and Abstaining from forges until you’re able to kill one of those is just going too far.  You won’t use it often since you can start campfires by using kindling and a woodscrap.

First goal is to gain access to cooking.  You’ll need a pottery bowl.  Make your way to clay and craft some, discarding unfinished ones.  Make jars too, so you don’t have to visit water as frequently.  You’ll be making casseroles out of herbs and berries for awhile, so do them one pair at a time to skill up.

Find exposed rock, a lot of it.  On GV this isn’t hard, on Freedom it is.  Forage it and make a crude knife with an iron rock and a rock shards.  A crude shovel may help expose rock tiles, but on GV they’re easy to find and on Freedom even the area downhill from exposed rock tends to be too steep for newbie skill.  I didn’t use one (at least not for digging), but climbed a lot instead.

At this point you can wield a crude knife and kill little things you come across in hopes of getting a pelt.  The crude knife can be used to butcher.

(You cannot use a crude knife on a log to make a shaft, but you can make kindling this way, which can save you some time on the next goal.  This kind of skips to goal 3 partially.)

Second goal is to get an anvil and a carving knife.  Forage lots of iron rocks and branches.  Craft a mallet and then handles with branches and crude knife.  You’ll fail some get woodscraps.  Combine enough to make a kindling and use it on a (preferably small) scrap to make a campfire.  Smelt your iron rocks for 0.2kg lump per 3kg rock.  Craft a small anvil with your mallet on the lump, and then a carving knife.

Third goal is to get away from foraging for branches.  Craft a crude pickaxe with a foraged branch carved into a shaft with your crude knife.  Use the crude pickaxe to chop trees.  It cannot be used to chop up felled trees, so you only benefit from chopping <=mature wood trees and >=old fruit trees, which produce a single log.  Carving shafts from logs yields woodscraps, which you’ll need along with kindling from logs/woodscraps to start campfires.

The next goals are difficult but straightforward, and will bring you out of the stone age.
Fourth goal is to get a hammer for fewer unfinished items.
Fifth goal is to get wood in larger amounts by crafting a hatchet.
Sixth goal is to craft a real pickaxe so you can stop replacing crude ones.
Seventh goal is to get a actual iron vein.  Exposed rock and prospecting is ideal for this.
Eighth goal is to craft a large anvil and fill in your missing tools.

Grats, you’ve got your basic tools from nearly nothing (darn steel and flint, though we didn’t need it so far), which is a much more gratifying place to be than a freshly spawned noob.

Unfinished items are a real pain because if they require a tool you don’t have, you’d be better off be a scrap.  Wooden unfinisheds can be burned, but until we get a way to smelt down unfinished metal items, they may as well be discarded.  This was probably the most frustrating part of the whole experience, as well it is for regular noobs without pelts.