So lately my obsession has been Wurm Unlimited (Hereafter WU).
I wanted to take some time and write my own newbie guide, as someone who's maybe getting out of being a complete newb, but definitely hasn't left it all behind yet. Some of this is covered elsewhere, but either in insufficient depth, or they bury the lede, and you often miss the important parts.
(Hey! So apparently this is still getting a good amount of traffic, so I should probably try to update and finish it! Look for some changes in the next week or two!)
MOVEMENT
Wurm Unlimited is a purely first-person game, so we'll mention that first; There are client mods1 that get around this, but without modding, you're stuck in first person.
Movement is set up as your typical WASD setup, but mouselook is accomplished with the left mouse button; Otherwise, the mouse controls the cursor. There's a toggle you can set under keybinds, if you like.
There's also no jumping, nor can you sprint; Speed is governed purely by your carry weight and the surface you're walking on, whether it be paved, smooth, sloped, etc. Additionally, if you're low on stamina (or "Hurting"; see injury below) your speed can be further reduced.
Climbing is a thing. You can move up slopes up to about 25 "dirts" (more on that later), after which point, you'll need to turn on climbing via the icon on the quickbar. Climbing reduces your movement drastically, prevents stamina regen, and will probably break once stamina reaches zero. Climbing allows you to move up or down nearly(?) vertical slopes, and as long as you're not moving, you do not use up stamina. If climbing breaks while you're up a slope, you will fall, and take varying degrees of damage based on how far you fall, and how steep the slope is. Remember to turn climbing off whenever you don't need it.
Swimming is also a thing. You swim purely on the surface of the water; The tiles under the water can be "reached" if you're within horizontal distance of them, but being underwater limits what can be done. You do not regain stamina while swimming, but stamina loss is generally rather slow; Once you reach zero stamina, you will begin taking drowning injury to the torso if you continue moving. Like with climbing, you can stay still indefinitely with no adverse affects (though you might starve, eventually) If your injury reaches 100 (through any means; Swimming long distances while injured is a bad idea), then you die. The drowning injuries fade fairly quickly once you reach shore and begin regaining stamina.
If you are swimming near a steep slope that does not allow you to exit the water, you have an ability that will allow you to climb for 2 minutes, even with zero stamina, called the "Last Gasp". Open your character screen (C)2 and right click the silhouette icon in the lower left corner to activate this ability. Use this to get out of the water and onto level ground, then turn off climbing so you can recover; There will be a delay before you can use this ability again.
BASIC COMBAT
Normally I'd cover this a bit later, but considering the first thing I did in the game was get in over my head by attacking something I shouldn't have, I'll start with the basics now. Don't initiate combat with anything until you've gotten your bearings. Most things you encounter will kick your ass. First thing to do is to manage your equipment.
You're probably already wearing a full leather kit, but your sword and shield may not be equipped. Open your character menu (C) to see what you've got equipped along the outer edges of the window (minor bug: Worn equipment may not show on the paperdoll or your actual avatar immediately after starting; I'm not sure this matters for stats, but removing the equipment and replacing it will fix this). If you don't see your sword and shield, open your Inventory (I) and expand the menu. Locate your sword and shield, right click > equip (or drag to the paperdoll on your character menu)
If you must get your fight on, Don't go for anything more intimidating than a wolf; Dogs, pigs, and some wolves may be an approximately even fight, but boars, bears, giant spiders, and any group larger than one enemy should be avoided. You will get hurt, and injury takes more than a little time to recover, but as a newbie, you should be okay so long as you survive the fight3.
Running away should always be considered an option. Watch your stamina, and be aware that injuries to your legs (as well as the "Hurting" status effect, which lasts 30 seconds) can slow you down. Aside from being overburdened, injured or out of stamina, you can likely outrun almost anything you encounter, and many creatures will not follow you into the water; some will (like bears), so never assume you're safe until you've completely left behind the threat.
Once you've engaged combat, you can let it auto-attack, but there are more advanced considerations; I'll cover those a bit later. Injuries will heal on their own so long as they're light or very light; As a newbie, you will also heal from medium wounds too, if you even take any. First aid will also be covered in more depth a bit further down.
SELECTING TILES AND OBJECTS
For the purposes of this guide, it's important to realize that there are two types of things you can interact with in the world; Objects, and tiles. Objects include actual objects, like tools and vegetables, but it also includes walls and animals. Specifically, when I say object, I mean anything in the world that you can select by clicking on that is not a tile. Tiles are part of the actual world, and mostly includes the ground, but it also includes many plants and trees. So when you want to select a tree or a bush, you don't click on the visible plant, as though it were an object; You click on the tile that it inhabits. When you click on a tree tile, you're also selecting the dirt, grass, sand or whatever the tile is made of, so you can forage/botanize, clip grass, pick flowers, etc. as well as interact with the tree itself. To select an Object you click directly on the visible object itself, and you're interacting only with the object.
Containers are a special type of object, and can either be actual containers such as barrels, chest and crates, but it also mean stacks of objects, like wood piles, or the open crate graphic that indicates multiple types of objects are piled in the same tile. You'll know a container if there is an Open option either on the Selected Window, or in the right-click menu. Most of the time, your interactions with a container will be with the container itself, but if it's a pile and you select Take, it will attempt to take all (or as many as you can carry) of the items inside, whereas Take with any other kind of container will attempt to pick up the entire Container, with all objects inside.
Finally, I want to address the Selected Window. This is the Window that shows what object or tile you've most recently selected, and gives you several buttons to interact with it (up to 8) based on the type of object/tile, proximity, and whatever tool you've selected. Some options may not always be displayed, so it's important to realize that the right-click menu will give you a full listing of potential interactions, but this window will allow you to speed up a lot of common tasks; It's a lot quicker to click a button 2-3 times than to navigate through the Right-Click window repeatedly. Note that occasionally the buttons will not update when you've moved into range, so clicking off the desired object/tile then clicking back will update the buttons.
GATHERING MATERIALS
You will need to gather a lot of materials throughout the game for basically everything. I'm going to break this down into types of gathering, and discuss the materials you can get from each. The basic thing you'll need to know is that you'll need to activate a tool to do most of these (and many other actions in the game, for that matter). Activating a tool consists of double-clicking it. You'll know it worked if the name turns green, and the name of the activated item will show up at the bottom of the inventory window. If you're activating something that's part of a stack, you'll need to expand the stack to see which one of them has been activated.
Foraging/Botanizing/Rummaging: These are three different actions, but they all work essentially identically, so I'm going to cover them together. Foraging is the act of seeking items like vegetables, cotton, etc; Larger plant-matter. Botanizing is the action of seeking herbs and such. At lower skill levels you'll only be able to do these on grass tiles (or tree tiles that are in grass), and they can both be done on the same tile. A tile may need some hours to recharge before you can do either, so it's a good idea to forage and botanize as you're moving around, to gather food and materials you'll need later. Rummaging is exactly the same as foraging and botanizing, except that it's done on stone tiles, and typically returns iron rocks and occasionally other minerals. Iron rocks will be your earliest, easiest source of iron, and they're typically low quality.
Woodcutting: Activate your hatchet (or other bladed tool; I've seen advice telling you to use your sword for this, to get an early sword skill boost; I use my hatchet, though) and select a tree tile. As a rule, you'll want to stick to older trees, unless you're actively trying to clear space. Double-clicking, or right-click > examine will tell you the tree's age. Then use the right-click menu or Selected Window to choose Chop Down. It will likely take 2-5 tries, then the tree will change to a falling tree. You can then select the fallen tree and chop it into logs; Some activities later will actually use the whole tree, like boat building; For the most part, logs will be what you want. Some trees (fruit trees, commonly) do not have enough wood to become a fallen tree, and will simply leave a log. Logs will be a maximum of 24 kg, usually with a smaller remnant once the fallen tree is depleted.
Digging: Digging is useful for shaping the land, but also getting resources. Activate your shovel to dig; With the shovel activated, you can also mouse-over the tile borders to see the slope of each, which can be useful for planning when trying to shape the land to your needs. Unless you're leveling or flattening a tile, digging will always happen at the nearest corner to where you're standing, so if you're trying to shape the land, keep that in mind. Digging dirt or sand will reshape the land, and destroy nearby grass and other tile types. If you're digging up tar or clay, you will not reshape the land unless the nearest corner is either dirt or sand, in which case you will get these instead of the desired resource. A dirt or sand pile is 20 kg, so you'll normally max out at 5-6 piles before your inventory cannot hold anymore. You can dump dirt and sand on the ground to free up inventory space, but be aware that dropping on the ground (as opposed to a pile) will raise the land at the nearest corner. Drop it as a pile to leave an accessible resource, and not reshape the land. Keep in mind that you will not be able to dig on much of a slope at all until you've gained more skill in digging, so keep to more level ground, and use dirt piles to help level out larger slopes (by dropping at the bottom of the slope) until your skill is sufficient to do as you need.
Butchering: Butchering is what it sounds like; You get meat and materials (furs/pelts etc) from dead animals (or even humanoids; I've eaten goblin, don't judge me). You can use almost any bladed instrument, but seriously use a carving knife (or butcher knife, once you can make one), as you'll get more resources. A higher skill will also help get more resources. This one is may be a complicated one to raise, since it involves combat and injury a lot of the time, but fishing is also a good way to get meat without getting bit by anything. Filleting, once you have a butcher knife, is also a handy way to raise your butchering skill, and gain you more (smaller) pieces of meat to help raise your cooking skills as well. Finally, with a few exceptions (where the corpse can be cooked on a spit) you'll want to use your shovel to bury the corpse, once you're done butchering, as this keeps the place nice and tidy, and can discourage predators from taking an interest.
MINING
Although this is technically a gathering task, I'm breaking it out into its own heading because it is one of the more complex gathering jobs. Mining has a variety of possible rewards, including iron, silver, gold, salt gemstones, or different types of stone. You will activate a pickaxe to do mining or prospecting. Once you've got your pickaxe activated, you need to get to a stone tile. If you're lucky you can find some at ground level, but there's a good chance you're going to need to climb for it. Be careful, as moving, prospecting and mining all use up your stamina, so falling is a risk if you're not careful. If you begin mining into the rock half-way up a steep slope, you can stay there and continue mining without risk of falling so long as you do not move, but once your stamina is depleted, it will take considerably longer for each mining action.
Prospecting: I'm going to talk about this a little bit before getting into mining proper, because unless all you're looking for is stone shards, you're going to need to know how to find materials. Once you've found a stone tile, select the prospecting option from the context menu or selected window. Once done, it'll tell you if there is anything aside from rock nearby. "Nearby" means within 3 tiles in any direction; so a 7-tile square, centered on the one where you are. If you don't have surface rock tiles all around you, the materials you want may be obscured under some layers of dirt. This makes prospecting more difficult, as you need bare rock tiles to prospect on. Mining will also more difficult as you'd need to dig the dirt away first, which may not even be possible depending on the slope and your digging skill. If you have sufficient rock, moving around and prospecting can help pinpoint where the deposit of iron (or whatever; but seriously, you need iron) may be. Once you find a surface tile that mentions nearby resources that you need, you can either try to pinpoint the tile, or just start mining; An advanced usage of the prospecting skill, Analysing, can help you find the minerals once you're through the surface.
Tunneling: Once you've decided where to dig (either because it's the only way you're going to be able to regain stamina without falling down the mountain first, or because you actually found something) you have two options: Tunneling and mining. Mining on the surface is similar to digging, as it is useful for shaping rock surfaces, (or preparing the area for your future mine) but all adjacent surfaces must also be rock, and like digging, you may not have sufficient skill to dig on steeper slopes. For now, we're going to ignore surface mining, and just talk about tunneling. When you begin tunneling, you'll do a bunch of nothing at first ("you chip away at the stone") but eventually you'll start generating stone shards; These are useful resources for stone work or paving, but in this case, they also mean that you're starting to make progress. Eventually you'll open a tunnel into the mountain where you can rest your weary legs (if you happened to have been hanging off the side of a cliff) and get to work doing some more serious mining. You'll want to mine walls rather than the floor or ceiling; Doing either of these will not create a tunnel, but will raise/lower the ceiling/floor height, which can be useful if you want to build underground, but otherwise isn't especially helpful. You can mine, mine up, or mine down; All of these options will generate stone shards and make progress toward mining into the tile, but one will create a basically level tunnel, and the others will raise or lower your elevation. Elevation is completely irrelevant when seeking resources underground, but can be useful for other reasons (creating a tunnel, reaching the water table) so most of the time, just the Mine option will be sufficient. Additionally, only the option selected for the last mining action matters; If you Mine up 20 times, but the last action that breaks the stone is mine down, then you'll have a downward slope. The number of times you mine a tile before it breaks is essentially random, though it will start to warn you in the Event tab when you're getting close to breaking through. Finally, tunnels cannot go above or below another tunnel, nor can they break through to dirt; If you start getting error messages, you may need to choose a different direction, or do some work elsewhere to continue (like clearing dirt from a surface tile).
Mineral Veins: Aside from the rock shards (and random gemstones) you get from normal mining, you're going to be looking for veins of iron and other resources. Surface prospecting can get you close, but aside from that, you'll need to dig until you find something, or use Analysing (below) to find resources once you're underground; Prospecting underground will only tell you some details about the rock (or vein) you're prospecting, rather than tell you about nearby resources. Mineral veins come in a spectrum of qualities, which prospecting will reveal; Low quality is generally ideal until your Mining skill gets above 20, and you should try to conserve higher quality resources (especially "Utmost") until your mining is considerably higher. Veins give a lot more resources than you'll get out of a typical stone tile, but until your prospecting gets higher, you'll never know the exact quality or quantity of the vein. (Note also that QL is somewhat random, and based on your mining skill; the vein's quality only acts as an upper boundary)
Analysing: As mentioned above, surface prospecting will get you into the vicinity of resources, but Analysing will help you get right to it. Unfortunately, Analysing doesn't open up as an option until your Prospecting is at least 20, so you're going to need to practice a bit before getting there. Analysing requires some mineral resource be in your inventory; Most commonly you'll be using stone shards, but anything you get from mining (iron, sandstone, salt, etc.) should work. When you analyse, it will tell you about traces or faint traces, and give you a cardinal direction. Traces are 1-tile away from where you mined the resource from, faint traces are two tiles away. At higher skill levels, you'll be able to detect traces at further distances, but we'll just stick with these for now. I would recommend you mine one tile in the direction, then prospect again; East of North, for example, just pick either East or North. As mentioned above, elevation does not matter at all when finding underground resources, so just turn so that your compass indicates the desired direction, and mine that wall.
FOOD AND WATER
Like with injury, food isn't an urgent concern for a newbie, but it's better to get on top of food before your newbie benefits run out.
Water is pretty basic; You have a blue bar (up there immediately beneath your stamina/health bar) which depletes over time. As it depletes, your stamina regeneration slows down, so it's best to keep it above the 75% mark. If it ever reaches zero, your stamina will stop regenerating entirely. Refilling the bar is very easy; Select any water source (a well, fountain, jug of water, or tile partially or fully submerged in water), and select drink. If you're in deep water, aim your camera down and select one of the tiles directly beneath you. Without mods, all water is equal, and will fill your bar.
Food is really not simple, but it starts to make sense after you get the hang of it. Food is represented by 5 bars, also clustered with your stamina/health and water bars; The only one we're going to worry about now is the Food bar, located right next to the water bar, which represents how full you are of food. The color of the bar represents how nutritious the food you've eaten is; Mousing over the bars will bring up the exact values of all of the bars, and will show your actual nutrition value. Many foods can be eaten without any preparation, but this is generally a very bad idea (if still sometimes necessary), as most of the time you will get a very small boost to your food bar, and spike your nutrition down. Nutrition above 50% gives small bonuses to skill gain, and the overall level helps to determine how quickly your food bar drops. You can select Taste from the right-click menu of any edible item, and it will tell you how nutritious the food is (as well as if it provides any temporary bonuses), and the weight of the food is the primary factor in how much it will fill your food bar. The other 4 bars (Calories, Carbs, Fat, Proteins) all have different effects which you can read more about elsewhere, later, as they're not important to someone just starting out.
Preparing food seems really opaque at first, but at its most basic, it's actually fairly simple. You need a heat source (cooker, in game terms) a container, and some sort of food. It's likely you started with a ceramic bowl, which will be plenty to get you started. Cooking a single piece of meat or a vegetable is a good start, as it gives good food/nutrition gains, and isn't overly difficult. Adding other ingredients will create better meals, but will also increase the difficulty of the meal; You will always succeed in preparing a meal (assuming the ingredients/container even make any recipe) even if the difficulty is too high, but your skill gains will be minimal, and the QL of the meal will suffer.
So let's start with the cooker; The basic cooker is a campfire, but ovens can be found in most settlements (you can also use a forge or a kiln, but don't) Campfires will add a little difficulty, so if an oven is available, use that. To get a campfire, first get a source of wood that's at least 1.5 kg, and activate your carving knife, then right-click > create > kindling. Once you have kindling, you can activate your flint and steel, then select the kindling to right-click create > furnaces > campfire. If you have a oven (or even a forge; but don't use a forge to cook) you can use the flint and steel on the oven (so long as you have kindling in your inventory) to light it instead.
Open the lit cooker, and place your ceramic bowl inside. Then drag the meat, or other foods, into the bowl. Right click the bowl and select Lore; It will tell you if you have a complete recipe, if you need to add something, or if it doesn't make anything at all, as well as the difficulty. You want to keep the difficulty within 10 points of your Hot Food Cooking skill level in order to efficiently level up your cooking, though this may be hard to manage in the beginning. Each additional ingredient adds to the difficulty, so stick to simpler meals for a while. Meat or a veggie in a bowl will eventually become "Breakfast", which is a fairly efficient beginner's meal. Eat it while it's Hot (mouse-over the food for a tooltip with the temperature) for additional nutrition. If it's cooled down, you can place prepared food into a lit cooker, and it will eventually heat up again; Food will never burn, but given enough time, food will begin to decay, so don't try to stock up for too long, at least not at first. To see and search existing, known recipes, use the Cooking Recipes button on your quickbar (same bar as climbing). Many simpler items will not be in there, but experimentation and liberal use of the Lore option will help you discover new recipes.
Crafting and Building (new!)
So I covered cooking above, but I missed probably the most important part of the game: Crafting. Seriously, if Crafting isn't your thing, I'm not sure Wurm Unlimited is for you. Or maybe it is, I dunno. But crafting is a very central aspect of the game, nonetheless. For ease of explanation, I'm going to break this section down into two categories; Crafting and Building. First, however, I want to discuss the Crafting Window. Last, we'll talk about how to figure out what to build, and what's required to build it.
Crafting Window: This provides a GUI alternative to using the right-click Create menu, and can be used with objects that aren't selected by dragging them into the appropriate slots. Many things you'll build require a tool to be in one of the two slots, but some require two different objects or components, instead. Once two objects are in place, the right-hand menu will populate with potential things those two objects can be used to build. Make sure you select the correct one; I cannot count how many times I've created a Yoke instead of a Plank, because I was in a hurry and forgot to select the desired result. The right-hand menu will also display percentage chances of success; Tool quality, material quality and skill level can all contribute to the success chance. Once you've got everything set, click the Create button; You'll likely see 3 available bubbles above the Create button, which represent how many actions you can queue up at once. Higher Mind Logic(?) will eventually add more bubbles to the queue, but if you're going to fail a lot, or you need to make multiple copies, clicking Create repeatedly will fill the bubbles up (the left/right buttons below will allow you to customize how many actions a single click will queue) Be careful not to waste time or materials by making more than what you need, though. For more complex objects that require multiple components, the right-hand menu will display needed components. Keep in mind that some of these components are themselves complex objects with sub-components that will need to be built before they can be added to the main object.
Crafting: Here, I'm referring to Crafting as the process of creating Objects (see Selecting Tiles and Objects, above) that are not necessarily permanently planted. A lot of the time, Objects will be created in your inventory, at least initially; For larger Objects, such as carts and boats, an unfinished version of the object will drop to the ground, and you'll have the option to add it to the crafting window, either in the Selected Window, or the right-click menu. Mostly, the object, tools or materials will need to be in your inventory to be worked with. In this case, you work on these objects by dragging the item to the crafting window.
Building: Building refers to creating walls, floors, pavement, etc. that are permanent installations, associated with the tiles and borders you build them on. There are different systems, depending on what you want to build.
Foot notes:
- link to 3rd Person Mod
- keybinds mentioned during this guide will be defaults. Keep this in mind if you've played with any keybinds.
- New players have a healing bonus, food consumption bonus, enemy hostility range reduction, and magical light for 24 hours of gameplay. Note that these may not appear immediately on first login. Look for the icons in the upper left corner of the screen to check.
