Guides:Exploring For Newbies

A quick 'Exploring For Newbies' page, outlining some of the items which may help you survive your first off-path wilderness exploring.

The goals of this is to:

• Suggest some necessary items to carry
• Try to fit everything in under ~20kg to maximize movement speed, and minimize stamina loss.

Things You Need

All actions in Wurm revolve around stamina. If you've just started out, you'll actually have less than older, experienced players even though the bar will look the same.

You will need the following:

• Food Items, such as Casserole, which is easy for new players to make. Note that this does not provide a lot of nutrition.
• A container for water. Good Choices might be Water skin, Flask or a Jar. The latter two can be created by anyone with access to clay and fire. a water skin can be created with leather, which may be difficult to make at the start.

Things to Heal Yourself

Eventually, you WILL get attacked by something. And even if you get away, you'll probably get banged up. Some type of medical supplies would be good to carry around. Some suggestions:

• Cotton is probably the best. Derivatives also work, such as string, rags, and cloth tailoring items such as Cloth Gloves, sheet of cloth, even Sails. The important factor is the Quality Level, or QL of the item. Also cotton can now be botanized while exploring.
• Healing Covers - Components for HC's can also be botanized, which every character can do without tools.

Useful Tools

Most vets on Freedom carry a boatload of tools with them wherever they go. But they also have armor, weapons, and skills to defend themselves. For a new player, you won't have the strength to both carry lots of tools and escape spiders, etc. Here's a list of useful tools when traveling:

• Hatchet for cutting down trees, making kindling. Small axes work and double as a weapon, but for the most part, you should use your short sword.
• Steel and Flint for making fires to cook food, and seeing in the dark. Also useful for lighting torches if you happen to find some moss.
• Rope probably one of the most useful tools for newbies. With a rope, you can lead + eventually ride a horse (Assuming you have or can get the 21 Body Control )

Extraneous Useful Tools

If you find you can still move around with all the stuff above at about 15-17km/h on a flat run, AND want to carry some other useful things, here's some ideas:

• Fence parts - For making ladders, or impromptu enclosures to escape alligators and the like. (Remember to make a gate)
• Pickaxe - If you're going through heavily mountainous terrain, you may consider carrying one to mine rocks for stone wall ladders to climb the mountain (Link to pictures?).

• Butchering Knife - For gathering Healing Cover parts off of deer, pigs and such.

• Shovel - For flattening & digging very steep places that are mostly dirt. The idea is just to flatten it so you won't slip, not to flatten to flat. Also if you are close to the water table, but nowhere near water, you can dig down to water. Very useful.

• Carving Knife & Saw - With them you can fashion all the Wooden Fence parts (Excluding nails), and other tools such as mallets, carts, etc.

Survival Tips from a Seasoned Spelunker

• Always know which way is north. A compass is a very useful tool.
• Read up on the moons of wurm. Valrei and Jackal are handy if you can discern which way they're currently moving.
• The only dangerous animals to cross water are brown bears, crocodiles and anacondas. All other aggressive animals will stop at the shore. Use this to your advantage.
• Always try to maintain 1/2 stamina. Try for 3/4 until you learn how to 'lose' aggressive critters. When running you'll be surprised how quickly you can run out of stamina, and for a new player that often leads to death. You should also always run on cobblestone or slab, because doing so will cause you to run faster, thus increasing chances of escape.
• Water damage from drowning will fix itself once you rest for abit on land. Also, STOP MOVING when you take drowning damage - the damage applies randomly as you're moving, and you move slower when having the Hurt status. Wait a few for the status to vanish, you want to be moving as fast as possible in this state. Also: if you're near the edge of water but can't climb out to safety due to it being too steep last gasp will allow you to climb for a minute to safety.
• Learn the different ranges for that aggressive monsters will notice you at. Other modifiers such as 'alert', or 'slow' change this somewhat.
• If you are completely lost, do not panic. Walk until you reach water, and look for landmarks.
• The easiest way to find North or South is to type /weather, get the wind direction, and look at a grass tile. The way the grass is being blown will give the direction the wind is blowing. You should be able to work out the direction of North or South from this.

And the final tip:

• Be prepared to lose EVERYTHING you are carrying if you do this. Often finding the exact place you died is difficult, even for seasoned adventurers and can take hours. Don't carry anything you can't stand to lose.