Quick Start Guide

Note: This article is the opinion or suggestion of one or more players. Information in player-made guides are not maintained by the Wurmpedia staff. It is subject to player opinions, and information may not be factually accurate or up-to-date. For updated game mechanics information, check the main namespace articles.

The other guides are almost essential reading so this guide is not as thorough and not intended to be a replacement.

It should cover a few points that are omitted though and, I hope, will get you started in the game quickly and painlessly.

Before You Start

Lag: The town you will start in can be notoriously laggy. If you find that to be the case, talk to the Guide and then move some distance away from the town.

Clear View: Right click your desktop and select Properties. Find the part of your graphics card control panel that lets you change the Gamma level. For some cards, setting Gamma higher can improve ingame visibility.

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

ATI: At the login panel click Options. The generally recommended renderer is LWJGL.

Nvidia: At the login panel click Options. The generally recommended renderer is JOGL.

The ATI/NVidia recommendations may change or be inappropriate on your system. Try the other one if you get very bad lag when the game world is being drawn.

Ease of Play: I personally prefer to play Wurm in a 800x600 window with my web browser open in another window showing this wiki. That makes it very easy to look things up as you go along. Obviously this is a matter of personal preference.

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.

Actually get your bearings though. Do not just look at the compass. Look along each direction and find a house or other landmark that makes it easy for you to remember which way is which. 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 these missions is vital to your first character since each mission will teach you some very basic info about the game. At the end you will be rewarded with 20 iron coins.

Walk West to the guide and right click on her to talk to her. She is easy to spot in her brown guide's robes.

NOTE: You do not need to return to the Guide after each mission. Type: /mission to move on to the next one immediately . This will save you a lot of time.

Carpentry - an important skill

Get your carpentry to 10 asap.

After the guide asks you to make a Campfire is a good point to spend some time making wooden spindles in order to increase your carpentry skill.

The Wiki

The Wiki is your best friend. You will get lots of invaluable information here.

You should make sure to read the relevant pages before you decide to make any of the vast number of things you can choose to construct in the world or Wurm since they may save you a lot of time while playing the game.

You can read the wiki ingame by pressing F1 and typing "wiki <subject>".

EG F1 wiki quickstart.

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>

eg: /tell Tritus hello

GM Help

I you face some otherwise insoluble problem, for example getting stuck in a mine or cave, you can type something like /dev Please help me. I am stuck in a mine

Remember to make the nature of your problem clear and that the GM's may be busy. It can take only seconds or an hour or more for a GM to reply. However, they are generally as helpful as the game rules allow them to be.

GM's are not there to play the game for you or answer questions that you can look up on the wiki or ask of other players.

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.

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 use the menu option 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 it is 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.

Your First 24 Hours

Do the Guide Missions

It is important to do these as quickly as possible so that you make the most of the free food that you get during your first 24 hours of playing time.

However, the guide missions could take as much as one or two hours to complete so read each mission carefully and be prepared to work patiently through them one by one.

Don't Get Lost

For at least some of the missions you will have to leave NT and probably travel for ten minutes or more away from the town.

Make sure you look around you at landmarks so that you will not get lost and will be able to find your way back to NT. This is always very important and is part of playing the game.

Wurm is a vast world but the area near NT is relatively easy to find your way around if you make sure to take careful note of your surroundings as you walk around.

Getting lost can lose you valuable time that you do not want to waste in your first 24 hours.

First Priorities

Basic Survival

Being able to get food is an absolute must in Wurm.

You will not starve to death if you run out of food but, if your food bar drops to zero, doing anything will become unbearably slow -

Learning to Botanise, Cook, Farm, Fish and Forage is vital.

Ingame, see (note capital letters):

F1 wiki Botanizing
F1 wiki Cooking
F1 wiki Farming
F1 wiki Fishing
F1 wiki Foraging

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 digging is quite lucrative.

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

Some useful methods of being paid as a new player are:

Estimated fair pay for 1 hours of work would be:

roughly 3kg of QL 10 Meal
QL 15 or better Fishing Rod and Saucepan

Money is relatively worthless for a new player on a basic account - though it can be useful sometimes.

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 may also pay for newer players to make these or haul items with them.

Note: You may have problems getting Small nails. Other players may sometimes donate a few of these if you ask politely. Or you may want to look for the open mine and forge that are up the road to the southwest of NT. (^^^ Mine and forge access need verified)

A Home

Find a patch of ground to call your own.

Important criteria should be:

At least 4x4 tiles of land. The land needs to be fairly flat before you build, so learn about Flattening, packed ground.
A reasonable sized wood nearby (more than 20 trees).
Rock.
1. With luck, a mine shaft that someone else has dug and left open.
2. Failing that, exposed rock nearby.
Iron.
1. Again, preferably an existing mine.
2. Alternatively, nearby rock that you have prospected and found iron from.
Clay within 30 mins travel.
Not too much in the way of dangerous wildlife.

Ingame, see:

F1 wiki Digging
F1 wiki Flattening

Plan It

If you already raised your carpentry to 10 then making planks for a 1x1 wooden house should almost get your skill to 12 .. the required amount to plan your second house.

You will need to make 80 plank by sawing logs, small anvil from iron ore, 4 large nails and 2 door lock.

Then use a mallet to Plan Building your house and then Finalise it.

It is important to try to get a good run of time at doing this or to attach planks to each wall more or less as you make them. If you log out for a day or so any planks you have not attached to your walls may well have rotted away.

Ingame, see:

F1 wiki Build House
F1 wiki door lock
F1 wiki iron ore
F1 wiki mallet
F1 wiki Plank
F1 wiki small anvil

Build one complete wall at a time where you can.
Try not to build part of a wall and log off for a day.
Build two doors - one must be at the edge of your 4x4 plot - the other can be on any wall that faces the inside.
The other two walls can be blank wall or window.
Put your 1x1 wooden hut on one corner of your 4x4 flat land. It should be on the opposite corner from a later 2x2 house.
This hut will be your gate house and safe store for stuff while you work on your next house.

Building Notes

It is important to make sure you have room for growth around your home.
1. When you Flatten the land for your home, it is a good idea to plan for the future by flattening some extra space around it.
2. An overall area of 8x8 Flattened tiles is a better space for for a forward thinking new player to use as a general base.
3. Secure your land by fencing it off using only QL 1 planks and rods so that the fence will rot after one real month or so, thus allowing you to expand without having to rip the fence down.
4. Tip: To make your fence decay more quickly, use an old or duplicate tool to hit each fence section once or twice right after you start it. This will cause the fence to start rotting a bit faster.
Make sure that you leave gaps in your fence where your gatehouse and house walls will be. That way your gathouse will make two walls in one corner and your house will make 4 walls in another corner, thus saving you a little work.
4x4 tiles is the bare minimum, though you can get away with a 1x1 hut with no grounds if you think you will not stay long in the area. For settlers, a 8x8 plot of land is much better, giving you an initial plot to sow and farm any seeds you find.
Deeds. It is not wise to found a homestead deed on less than 10x10 tiles of land. Your 10x10 plot will center where you place the token. A deed right beside NT may be a waste of time if you have just started the game.
Do not build your home right beside NT. A few minutes walk from NT usually works well. Many new players make this mistake and soon find that they have no room around them to expand.

Following Up

Wurm is a game with huge possibilities. While you build your house it is always valuable to have a browser window open on the wiki and to read through articles about things you may need or want.

Many people seem to complete their house and then think "What now?"

There are several valuable things that you can o later whether you are on a basic account or a premium account.

Join A Village

Post on the forums asking for a village that would like to have you join.

Being in a village adds a lot of fun to the game and there is almost always a place for new characters whether they are premium or basic.

Villages are great for helping out with better tools and good advice on how to develop your skills.

Learning Fighting is often a lot easier in a village.

Set Some Goals

Playing Wurm without longer term goals can be an exercise in frustration.

As you made your own home you probably found that some kinds of thing appealed to you and that some did not. Aiming to become good in those things that you particularly enjoyed is a good way to continue into the game.

As you do that you will almost certainly find at least another couple of things that you enjoy as you learn about the game in more depth.

Playing on a basic account gives you ample time to explore Wurm but getting a premium account can and usually does make a vast difference to the game and is also extremely inexpensive.

How many games do you know that let you play fully for as little as 10E for two months? As a new player, you can get started out as a premium player with enough cash to buy some moderately good tools if you get the 1 month premium + 5s package for the first month and switch to the 2 months premium package thereafter.

Important Guides

Capitals are important when using the ingame wiki:

F1 wiki tutorial

F1 wiki tutorial2

F1 wiki Build House

User:Tritus/QS New

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