Gaming

Cartography & Treasure Maps

I’ve been out of Wurm Online more than in for the past two years (OK, more like three) and a lot has been changed / added to the game. One of those things is a new skill called cartography! I haven’t looked into this yet, and I have no idea what it’s for or what the purpose is.

Another thing that has been added is treasure maps. Treasure maps are really neat, you can find them while doing random wurm things like digging, mining, and farming. They have a quality, and the treasure you find is based on that. So far I’ve found two novice treasure maps, and they have rewarded some random items at the end like a crab statue (only found through maps), some chess pieces, sleep powder, gems, etc. Not fantastic treasure, but since they were novice maps I still felt like they were worth my time. Novice maps have 2-3 clues associated with them, and – I am horrible at figuring them out. So horrible that both times I attempted to find my treasure, I got insanely lost, and for the final treasure map I passed it to my friend Moumix so he can have fun with those instead. He is MUCH better at treasure than I am, and has infinite patience. Hopefully he finds some awesome treasures with the maps I dig up – I’m glad that I tried it out, but especially being on the Independence server (a massive one) things just got too difficult.

Speaking of independence! I did finally create a second on-land deed, named Quail Landing. So now I have Quail Cove over on Hermit Island (I’ve lived there for over three years, the deed is basically completed) and now I have a mainland place to enjoy where I can use a wagoner and a place to safely park and explore. The deed doesn’t have much to it yet, but there’s a mine and a lot of bits and bobs. Also a large pen for animals, since they don’t swim and I’ve got no creature containers to bring them to Quail Cove.

That’s what I’m up to in Wurm Online these days – and I have to admit, I have missed it, a lot. The community is still robust and friendly, and the game every bit as enjoyable as I always find it. As far as video games go, this is my comfortable sweater that I keep putting back on year after year.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

All Things Wurm Online

I haven’t been very good at updating my blog lately – it is what it is.

I’ve been playing some world of warcraft and my other game of choice right now is none other than Wurm Online. Moumix recently returned (YAY) and he is one of the very few people I can share a deed with and not want to kill.

What have I been up to? Well, my deed ‘Quail Cove’ on Independence is still standing (three years strong) and I finally completed the main floor of the temple so that any priests who are standing around praying won’t get eaten by trolls. It even has a floor. The shipyard is completed (still needs a floor), and I actually deeded a second smaller deed called ‘Quail Landing’ which is on the mainland just across from the island I live on. For this deed I plan on getting a wagoneer, and I’ve joined up with the highway. There isn’t much to the place, but it’s meant as a landing spot and a place where I can explore the server on foot with a wagon.

There have been a LOT of changes to Wurm since I played last. Almost too many to mention. A new skill (cartography) was added, and I haven’t even looked into that yet. There’s a fairly steady player base of 600-700 players, and it’s just a comfort to be back in game. Hopefully this motivates me to keep up with the blog posts, and Moumix if you’re reading this, you were working on wagons.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Weekly Wrap Up [Mar6-Mar14]

I know, I’m behind in my weekly posts – but I’ve been having a difficult time with an MS relapse, so my I decided it was probably best if I just minimized the amount of extra ‘stuff’ I had to do – sadly one of the first things to go in that case is content creation. During that time I decided to also stop re-listing most of my items for sale, the exception being – pets. I kept listing my pets.

I’m currently selling around 1200 pets spread across 20 servers. It takes me less than 1h a day to re-post those, and I leave them up for 24h with no cancel scanning or anything like that.

It has been interesting to watch the trends – when it was pet battle week I had a significant number of sales vs. non pet battle weeks, and the types of pets I was selling also changed.

My most sold pet of all time is Rotten Little Helper, and it’s used in quite a few pet battle scenarios so it makes sense. This is the first year where I’ve branched into a multi-realm selling scenario, and I have to admit, I see why it’s so popular with larger goblins. You rely less on expecting huge sales from one place, and are still able to make some fairly significant gains with smaller sales spread across multiple servers. I personally don’t want to invest more than 1h a day listing items for sale and handling the basics – but I absolutely see how others could be drawn to this and why it’s appealing.

I’m also still making significant amounts of gold with craft orders which are not tracked by TSM. On the profession side of things I have JC/LW/INSC/ALCH/ENG/BS “completed” (ie: at 100 skill, but not yet completed their knowledge trees) and I tend to check all of the public craft orders a few times a day if I’m in game, and then have a steady number of people sending me personal orders on top of that. I’m using journalator to track these (which is amazing, I love this addon).

Overall? Things are going very well! I’m excited to see what 10.0.7 brings, and hopefully I’m able to continue on creating content now that my hands don’t feel like molten lumps of lava. As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

Dungeon Dive: 100 Runs of RFK (1-10)

Way back in July 2022 I started this challenge of 100 runs of RFK – and then for some reason I stopped. The purpose was to show the estimated amount of loot from each run vs. the actual gold per hour of items sold. Things have changed a bit since then, especially since I’m using a speed geared druid instead of just a random druid. My base speed in dungeons at 61 is somewhere around 240%-260% and that’s FAST (here is a link to a druid I followed when it came to gearing). My first post of RFK has me sitting at 57m to complete 10 runs. It now takes me about 2 minutes to run the entire dungeon. Since so much time has passed I decided to start over fresh, and these are the results for the first 10 runs.

You can see that the estimated gold (using TSM region market value avg) is just over 500k – and when I put them on the auction house (I’m using a profile from BilisOnyxia that I’ve tweaked and customized) it’s just over 300k if everything were to sell on my low population server.

Next week we’ll see how much (if any) of it actually sold, and I’ll use that to generate a more accurate idea of what GPH this dungeon rewards. As it stands now, the GPH is 712g – the amount I got from raw gold during the run. It also stands to note that it only takes me 26m to run this dungeon 10x. Ideally you’d want to optimize your time since you can’t run any more dungeons for the remaining hour, but you could always do overworld farms instead to fill that time up.

Addons used:

  • TradeSkillMaster
  • LootAppraiser
  • Faster Loot
  • Dejunk
  • MonkeySpeed
  • Nova Instance Tracker
  • WoWThing Collector

Another thing to note is that ALL of these types of runs are going to vary server by server. I happen to be on a low population server where things sell slow. Even pricing them low won’t guarantee a sale.

Weekly Wrap Up [Feb6-Feb13]

This week was a pretty good week, with 1.6 million gold in profit. The numbers are skewed a bit because I was shuffling some gold around, but overall, sales were up, with a number of larger sales. My process? I spend 1h a day working on active gold making, in this case it’s logging to 20+ different servers to put items back up for sale. Most of those items are pets, but on a handful of servers it also includes transmog and mounts. I don’t bother doing cancel scans or getting into AH pvp with anyone – I have tried in the past, and it’s just bad for my mental health.

I leave everything up for a 24h period, and rinse and repeat. If I can’t re-post, I’ll leave the items until the next day. In most cases it tends to work pretty well. If I need a break, I’ll post for 48h. Being on multiple servers means I can get smaller sales here and there and it simply adds up over time. Once I reach 100k on any realm, I tend to shuffle the gold back to my main servers. This can be through the AH, or through buying tokens, or maybe moving a character to shuffle goods around. It really depends on what I need at the time.

I did have a few other sales in there, the steelbound harness is crafted by a blacksmith, the ‘ol smoky recipe is engineering. Most of the sales continue to be pets since that’s the largest market that I’m in these days.

I’ve said this before but I think it should be repeated – the amount of effort you put into gold making is going to be directly related to the amount of gold you can potentially earn. I am content with my earnings considering I only spend 1h a day working on it. It leaves me with a lot of time to do other things, and some days especially during an MS relapse (like right now) doing even the mundane like looking at the computer screen, becomes a difficult task. I know if I wanted to push my gold making I’d have to devote more time to it. Then as you learn to optimize your method, you’ll shave time off. The amount of time devoted (in my specific case) tends to ebb and flow. When I add a new server, or restock my craft items, the time spent increases. Once those things are done, I optimize my time spent, and it reduces again.

I would absolutely love to spend more time learning markets and making mistakes and honing in on the parts of gold making that I really enjoy – but alas, I do only have so many hours in a day, and so for now it is what it is.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Nomadic Gamer