Wurm Online: Let me tell you about my deed!
I am getting enormous enjoyment out of Wurm Online at the moment. I've established myself on a nice spot on the West Coast of Deliverance, and I'm slowly building toward having a solid deed there.
There have, of course, been problems. The main problem in Wurm tends to be that if you want to do thing X, then you need to back up and do things A, B, C, and so forth before you can get back to X. And I made some mistakes as well.
The first mistake, oddly enough, was fencing. I didn't realise that you can't properly terraform a tile that has fencing at the edge. So the uneven surface of my deed (now slightly extended beyond the fence) is stuck there until I pull down the fences. But in the meantime, it did increase my carpentry skills by a considerable amount.
The second mistake was not looking for iron before I laid down the deed. That may yet be a longer term problem, but I'm not yet certain.
For nearly all the basic things that can be made in Wurm, you need wood and iron. Wood is not a problem for me; there's a "back lot" which is nothing but standing timber, and every now and then I go on a sprout-picking expedition to make sure it stays that way. This also gets me a fair number of fruit trees, which are planted around the deed.
It's the iron that's a problem. There are two mines reasonably near me which have iron in them, and which are not locked or gated. "Reasonably near", however, is a relative term. One of them has a convenient forge, in which I could smelt down ore into lumps, the pure form of iron, and those are lighter and easier to bring home. But that one is further away, and while that's alright in terms of travel time - it's not that far - it means I'm away from the protection of my deed guard. So if something attacks me, I have to run all the way back to my own deed - I'm just about able to take on a wildcat or a lion at this stage, but not a bear, and spiders are death on eight legs. And they seem to love mines.
The other mine has no forge, and is down a steep hill with no road. That makes it a very slow journey back with ore, which is 20 times heavier than the iron lumps. And in both cases, I feel a bit guilty about pilfering someone else's iron.
So really, I need to find an iron vein near my own deed. Ideally, under it, so that the guard will protect me right there. But my deed rests on deep soil. About forty units of depth, actually, before you hit rock. And if you want to find where there's iron easily, you need to uncover rock. Basically, this means digging through a minimum of 160 actions, all of which produces blocks of dirt, which need to be moved somewhere. I do not fancy doing that all over the deed.
Instead, I dug down to rock on six tiles - a little off the edge of the deed, in fact, where someone had dug a starting hole before I arrived - opened a tunnel, and mined back under the deed, essentially brute-forcing the finding of iron. Except that, thus far, I haven't found any. I've carefully calculated the amount of mining I need to do, and I'm halfway through, with no sign of any iron. In one spot, I've broken through into another mine, but that's via a long, long drop shaft that you can't get back up. That mine connects to two others, as well - one of which is the iron-containing one at the bottom of the steep hill. But that doesn't improve my logistics. Poking around the rest of the opened areas through that drop-shaft, I'm seeing a lot of copper and zinc - but not much iron.
My next thinking is that I'll finish out mining under my own deed, and then, if I haven't found anything, mine out toward the coast. That way, any beasts that arrive into the mine will have to pass through the deed, unless of course they spawn in tunnels - and even then, I'll have a straight run back to my own deed and safety.
Once I find a useful source of iron, I can get on with my other intentions - tearing down fences, levelling land, and putting in some walls. And then I'm intending to start to farm crops properly, and begin a road that runs down the hill to the coast. I'm not sure if that should go straight, or if it should zig-zag down; recent changes have made steep slopes a lot more navigable by horses, so straight down might be alright - it's certainly ok on foot as it is.
Posted by Drew Shiel at April 3, 2012 10:33 AM
