User:Ephemeral/Quickstart

Quick Start Guide

Before You Start

• Ensure your graphics card drivers are up to date. ATI drivers especially are known occasionally to be unstable with OpenGL games, while nVidia drivers function perfectly normally in most castes.

• Ensure you have the latest SDK (software development kit) version of Java - the base version (JRE) will work but the SDK is known to be more stable in various situations with older cards

• Don't overset the graphics options! Wurm is deceptively greedy when it comes to both video memory and GPU processing power - you can achieve 50 FPS or so on a 8800GT card with the base settings

First Steps

Find your way as you step into Wurm anew.

First Login

On the Jenn-Kellon Home server, you start in the middle of a town called New Town, or NT for short, and will be standing right beside a compass. Look at the orange dial on the compass and get your bearings immediately. Do not gauge your initial performance running Wurm from this - New Town is fabled for being the devourer of graphics performance Wurm-wide. The performance will increase substantially the further away you get.

Associate each direction on the compass with a relevant one on your screen. Try and use houses or landmarks to help you find your way before you get a compass. Use the roadmap to assist if you venture far from NT.

On the current map, West is up the hill.

The Guide

There is a an NPC called the Guide who will give you missions to complete to help introduce you to the game.

Doing this missions is ideal - you will gain 20 iron and a basic knowledge of the game from doing so. Remember - the further you venture from New Town the easier things will be. Resources are pretty scarce within 200 tiles of the town.

After you have gotten your first mission, you do not have to return to the guide. Use the command: /missions to see your missions from there on in.

Important skills

You'll be wanting to make a house, obviously - carpentry is the skill used to do this. You cannot make a small shed (1x1) until 6 carpentry. More often than not, you can obtain much of the required carpentry skill by making the planks for the house beforehand (4x20=80 planks needed).

If you do not get 6 crapentry before then, use a carving knife on your log and make a few spindles. Improve these with the same log to gain additional skill.

NB: Recent changes (Tritus 09:23, 1 October 2008 (CDT)) to decay rates me that low QL planks are rotting far too quickly. Make sure you have the required carpentry skill before you lay the plan for your buildin, and use your planks as soon as you can.

Mining, Woodcutting and Digging are all primary skills - you need them to supplement every crafting skill in the game. Keep these nice and high - on par with, if not above, your crafting skills. Fishing, Fighting and Farming will assist you in getting food early on, as will Botanizing and Foraging.

Try and join a village - if you can, as many of Wurm's residents are very helpful and will be more than glad to assist you and give you a home in their villages if you abide by their rules and be considerate of others. Some example towns can be seen on the Settlements page.

The Wiki

This wiki will be your 'bible' as far as Wurm goes. Everything that is known about the game is contained within these pages. Keep it handy - bookmarked in your browser or as your homepage. You can access the wiki ingame through using the console (f1) command: 'wiki <thing>' (where thing is what you wish to find information on), without the apostrophes of course.

The Other Players and Chat

The players in Wurm are generally extremely friendly and helpful and you should take advantage of that by feeling free to ask them questions, though you should also pay close attention to what the Guide teaches you.

When you first start, there will be a chat tab called Local. The chat you see or type in on this tab is only visible to players within 320 meters/80 tiles of you. Using Local chat is a quick and easy way to talk to someone standing nearby.

Kingdom chat, usually Jenn-Kellon when you first login, may not be visible at first.

You need to move and you may then talk to all players on the server you are on by using /shout. If the Kingdom chat tab is not visible, try typing /shout hi.

Private Message

If you receive a pm from another player their character's name will appear in red on a tab in the chat window. Click the tab to reply to them.

To send a pm type /tell <character name> <your message>

Free Food

There is a blue building right beside NT town center where you can get free food and drink in your first 24 hours of playing time.

Food is essential in Wurm so make sure you know where that building is. It is much better to use the Bartender for your first two fillups, then move on onto learning how to cook your own food. See Cooking for more information.

Stealing is Bad!

You start in NT, which has town guards. If you pick up anything in the streets of NT you will be stealing it and the guards will attack you.

So please, do not Steal.

Outside NT, almost anything you see that is not bolted down is more or less fair game, but try to respect other players.

If someone is working nearby and happens to have left their cart unattended its not polite to walk off with it.

Construction Areas

Large areas of bare dirt, possibly with walls or partial walls around them, are generally being worked upon by someone building something so it is polite to leave those areas untouched.

First Priorities

Getting Some Cash (Working)

Cash is not a necessity in Wurm, though it is useful.

You are unlikely to be able to make cash by selling stuff to a Trader so the best way to make cash is to find work.

There is often work to be found helping people to dig dirt or mine rock shards, with an average wage being about 2 Copper coins per cart load (40 dirt or 40 shards). That often includes food while you work, use of a cart and possibly also a place to store your gear when you log off.

In NT, a QL 15 meal of 1kg which lasts about 4 hours of continuous play costs about 1C (Copper); so mining and digging are quite lucrative.

Working is a great way to get cash, food or tools since you get to raise your own skills while you help whoever is paying you.

Temporary Mobile Home

A.k.a; Small Cart

Making one of these should be almost your first priority after completing the missions for the Guide.

As long as you are dragging your cart when you log out of the game, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to steal it or remove its contents.

Apart from being a nice mobile storage container, a Small Cart becomes invaluable later for carting stuff around. Some villages will also pay for newer players to make these or haul items with them.

A Home

As described earlier in the guide, you can create a small 1x1 hut with 6 Carpentry skill or better. This is fairly simple - cut down wood yielding trees, such as Pine or Cedar and use your Iron saw on them to create Planks.

You will need a Mallet or Iron hammer to plan the building - you can do this by activating the hammer and selecting the tile you wish to build on.

Ensure the tile is flat! You can do this with Digging (see flattening).

Each wall will take 20 planks and 1 nail, so a basic hut will take 80 planks and 4 nails. The Large nails can be made with Blacksmithing, which requires a fire source and iron ore obtained from Mining.

Try not to build within 50 tiles of a deeded village. This will only end up causing heartache for both parties involved - settle slightly further away to avoid land conflicts

---