Upon successful character creation you will login for the first time in a tutorial setting. Upon reaching the end of the tutorial, the game will prompt you to right click and use a portal that will take you to one of sixteen total servers that are always online simultaneously regardless of whether or not anyone is online. There are two important "clusters" of servers, the Northern Freedom Isles (NFI) and, aptly named, the Southern Freedom Isles (SFI).

When choosing a server, BEWARE, if you pick the Northern isles or the Southern isles, you will be locked to that cluster forever. If all your friends are on the cluster you didn't pick, you will have to create a new character and pick the right cluster to play with them. Also, BEWARE, if you pick the same cluster but a different specific server, you will have to find transport which may be difficult or impossible. Creating even the smallest rowboat takes many days for most new players and inter-server travel can be maddening for a new player as the in-game map isn't very detailed and you start with a terrible compass.


format = <Server Name> (<Nickname>, <Year Launched>, <PvE or PvP>)

• Northern Freedom Isles
• Harmony (Harm, 2020, PvE)
  
• Melody (Mel, 2020, PvE)
  
• Defiance (Def, 2020, PvP)
  
• Cadence (Cad, 2020, PvE)

All Southern Freedom Isles are connected by portal to the "Epic" islands which launched in 2011. These "Epic" servers are all PvP, but you can travel freely to other Southern Freedom Isles PvE servers with ease.
format = <Server Name> (<Nickname>, <Year Launched>, <PvE or PvP>)

• Southern Freedom Isles
• Chaos (Chaos, 2007, PvP)
  
• Independence (Indy, 2009, PvE)
  
• Deliverance (Deli, 2011, PvE)
  
• Exodus (Exo, 2011, PvE)
  
• Celebration (Cele, 2012, PvE)
  
• Pristine (Pris, 2012, PvE)
  
• Release (Rel, 2012, PvE)
  
• Xanadu (Xan, 2014, PvE)
  
  
  
  
• Epic Isles
• Elevation (Ele, 2011, PvP)
  
• Desertion (Des, 2011, PvP)
  
• Serenity (Sere, 2011, PvP)
  
• Affliction (Aff, 2011, PvP)

I would suggest all new players play one of the most populated servers.
For PvE these include Independence, Deliverance, Xanadu (BEWARE: Xan is the largest server and can be a pain to traverse), Harmony, Melody, Cadence.
For PvP these include Defiance and Chaos.

*Optional:* Find a group of players on the online forum who are actively recruiting villagers. PvE groups will often openly accept any recruits including brand new players, whereas PvP groups are often much stricter, requiring you to actively play for days and pay for a subscription to prove you are not a cross-kingdom spy.

You have picked your server! Congrats and welcome to your new home. Your journey has only just begun...

First off, I would take a look around. Every server has starter towns which are the only non-player built structures in the entire game and they are eternal, they will never disappear and cannot be raided or destroyed. This starter town will always serve as a spawn point, should you die.
Within these walls you can craft, drop things, and pick up things you dropped, but generally you will be unallowed to pick up anything anyone else dropped unless it's a PvP server. Outside these walls, it's a different situation.

I would find the "token" of the starter deed which allows you to access your bank account which allows you to store 5 items for free, forever, and withdraw/deposit in-game currency. The token also has a sundial on top of it which points out the cardinal directions.



New players start with temporary buffs which last 24 hours of real game time. Note: This only includes the time you are logged in and when you log off, the buffs will stop counting down, until you login again.
These buffs reduce enemy aggro range, or the range at which monsters will chase you down and murder you. These buffs reduce the amount of food/water you need, making early exploration easier.
You will also be able to utilize the "bartender" which can be found in each starter deed, easily identified by his deranged costume.


This non-player character or NPC will refill your food and water as much as you want for as long as your temporary buffs persist. Every time you leave this starter deed, make sure to use this bartender to always set out on your journeys with your belly full of... whatever this guy offers. \/(0.0)7

Next up, open your inventory by pressing "i" or F3, or by pressing O then mousing over the left-most dropdown menu "Interface" and selecting the Inventory button at the top of the screen.This window includes everything you have on your character, besides what you are wearing. If you equip something, it will be moved to your "paper doll" which is game developer mumbo jumbo for "the place all your equipment is!" Double click your name/stamina+health bar to open your "paper doll."


Right click and equip all your leather armor, your sword and shield. It is ill-advised to use this equipment to fight anything at all besides hens and pheasants, but the armor will protect you better than your birthday suit!

Note the five columns within your inventory. There is the Name, QL or Quality, DMG or Damage, Weight, and a little one that has an "i" which tells you which tool you need to improve the item, but you likely don't see anything in it most of the time.
The QL or Quality and DMG or Damage are both on a scale from 0.01 to 100.00.
The higher the QL, the more effective the item, be it food, a pickaxe, a large cart, or freshly chopped thyme (an herb).
DMG or Damage determines... well... how much damage the item has withstood. More damage effectively lowers the QL of the item and you want to right click the item to repair it whenever you can, but repairing will actively reduce the QL. Using a hatchet to cut down many trees will damage your hatchet, and by repairing it, it will last longer but become lower QL over time. Makes sense, it's just like real life!

*Optional:* Right click the "inventory" listing inside your Inventory window (inventoryception) and select Add Group to more easily organize your sack of s***. I generally make at least 3 groups: Tools, Misc Items, and Improving Tools. Add your gathering tools like the pickaxe, hatchet, rake for farming, etc to the standard Tools group. Add your tools which are mainly used to improve other objects such as a pelt for polishing, a file for filing wooden items, a stone chisel for chipping stone items, etc to the Improving group. In your Misc group, you can add things you know you will never use or things you never want to look at, like a lit lantern, a compass, spare bowstrings, etc. This is all totally unnecessary but can be helpful down the line!

The game does not tell you where to go or what to kill. It simply abandons you and expects you to wander the wilderness or die trying. Wurm Online is not for everyone and has a very steep learning curve, but can be one of the most satisfying sandbox games ever.

Will you be an animal tamer and breeder, who will create the fastest, healthiest, highest material yielding animals the world has ever seen?
Will you supply your fellow islanders with the greatest longswords, sickles, mauls, and axes?
Will you create strong armor to bolster yourself and your allies?
Will you dig all day long just to sell dirt to others, helping them quickly create their own monuments to whatever while you become filthy rich?

There's a ton of skills and each are easy to learn but hard to master. If you don't really like doing something, chances are you can just find someone else to do it for you.

But before any of this, you need the means to create tools that will allow you start raising a profession.

You have gathering tools but not many crafting tools. The first step is to activate your hatchet by double clicking it inside your inventory, right click the tile under a tree, and chop it down. It will take multiple attempts. When the tree falls and becomes parallel to the ground, right click the felled tree and chop it into logs. These logs are pretty frickin' heavy and will slow you down, so just pick one up for now. As you can tell, trees are frickin' everywhere so you aren't going to miss the logs you leave behind.

Activate your carving knife by double clicking it in your inventory and right click the log you picked up, create two shafts. Use your carving knife on one shaft to create a mallet head. It may take several attempts before you are successful. Upon success, activate the mallet head and right click the 2nd shaft you made to create a mallet, which again may require several attempts.

Congratulations! You have a mallet! You use these to plan structures on flat land and bonk other wooden things together to improve them. Now drop that log! You don't need it anymore and it's just slowing you down!

Now we need to find ore to smelt into useable metal. Look for dark tiles on cliff faces to find a cave someone else already mined out. Generally there are public mines nearby starter deeds where you can find easy access to ore.

You will want to wander ALONG THE ROADS. Try to make note of which direction you are traveling in. Make note of landmarks you find that may help you back if you start to feel lost. The world is huge and you WILL get lost, even when prepared.

Guard towers can be found along roads. When you find a monster that is chasing you, lead it to a guard tower then target the monster and say "help" or "guards!" in Local chat to summon NPC guards to kill the creature. It must be within about 50 tiles to the tower and you must be targeting it, or right clicking the creature and selecting "Call guards."
Monsters who are chasing you will attack you until a guard meets them. They will continue to attack you only until you move away! So get the heck out of combat range, let them attack the guards at least once, then you can safely move back into range and they will only attack that guard. Kind of confusing but you'll get the hang of it! :p

Once you have traveled around and found a cave with an ore vein (preferably NOT lead or copper or zinc), you can start to mine. Each action will generate one mass of ore, each ore weighs 20 kg and your starting weight capacity is about 120 kg. All your equipment so far, the leather armor, the tools you start with, will probably amount to about 40 kg of your total 120, so you can only carry about 80 kg worth of things, granted carrying any amount will slow you the heck down. As a new player, you don't want to think about taking this ore some long distance away... noooo... you want to build a forge or at the very least, a campfire, right against the ore vein to start smelting metal.
If there's already a forge, you need to find a log, use carving knife/hatchet/saw to create kindling, activate your steel and flint + right click forge/oven to "Light" and activate the log + right click forge/oven to "Burn" and fuel the fire.
If there's no forge, you need to find a log, use carving knife/hatchet/saw to create multiple kindlings, activate your steel and flint + right click kindling to try to create a campfire. Activate the log + right click campfire to "Burn" and fuel the fire.
Now... open the pile of ore on the ground and drag as many as will fit into the container which will heat the ore. Over time, it will "glow with heat" and liquify into manageable metal. This may take several minutes as your campfire will likely be only 1 QL or Quality, meaning it's the least effective campfire possible. Higher QL campfires/forges/ovens will heat things much, much faster.

Each 20 kg ore item will generally liquify into a 1 kg lump of metal. Most tools require less than 1 kg of metal so you don't need more than 20 or 30 kg of lumps or 20 or 30 mining actions to get started. With 2+ kg of lumps, you can activate one lump and right click another lump to combine into a heavier lump. With a lump that's at least 2 kg or heavier, you can activate the mallet + right click lump to create a small anvil. Each attempt to smith something will use a portion of the metal so you may need more than 2 kg of lumps if you fail to create an anvil the first few attempts.

Now we're cooking with fire! From now on, activate lumps and right click your small anvil to create new things directly out of metal. You might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you can create, so open the crafting menu by selecting the button on the quickbar that resembles two tools.

This guide assumes that you are a new-ish player who doesn't know a lot about the game or just someone looking for advice on how to live alone. If you are looking to join a group of friends or manage to find a spot in a deed that welcomes new players, feel free to disregard this guide entirely as learning to play by playing is a much more valid guide.

Assuming you're going to be living alone and only able to rely on yourself consistently, this guide will instruct you on what to do first to become self-sufficient and what might be useful early on your adventure.

You have gathering tools but not many crafting tools. The first step is to activate your hatchet by double clicking it inside your inventory, right click the tile under a tree, and chop it down. It will take multiple attempts. When the tree falls and becomes parallel to the ground, right click the felled tree and chop it into logs. These logs are pretty frickin' heavy and will slow you down, so just pick one up for now. As you can tell, trees are frickin' everywhere so you aren't going to miss the logs you leave behind.

Activate your carving knife by double clicking it in your inventory and right click the log you picked up, create two shafts. Use your carving knife on one shaft to create a mallet head. It may take several attempts before you are successful. Upon success, activate the mallet head and right click the 2nd shaft you made to create a mallet, which again may require several attempts.

You have a mallet! You use these to plan structures on flat land and bonk other wooden things together to improve them. Now drop that log! You don't need it anymore and it's just slowing you down!

Now we need to find ore to smelt into useable metal. Look for dark tiles on cliff faces to find a cave someone else already mined out. Generally there are public mines nearby starter deeds where you can find easy access to ore.

You will want to wander ALONG THE ROADS. Try to make note of which direction you are traveling in. Make note of landmarks you find that may help you back if you start to feel lost. The world is huge and you WILL get lost, even when prepared.

Guard towers can be found along roads. When you find a monster that is chasing you, lead it to a guard tower then target the monster and say "help" or "guards!" in Local chat to summon NPC guards to kill the creature. It must be within about 50 tiles to the tower and you must be targeting it, or right clicking the creature and selecting "Call guards."
Monsters who are chasing you will attack you until a guard meets them. They will continue to attack you only until you move away! So get the heck out of combat range, let them attack the guards at least once, then you can safely move back into range and they will only attack that guard. Kind of confusing but you'll get the hang of it! :p

Once you have traveled around and found a cave with an ore vein (preferably NOT lead or copper or zinc), you can start to mine. Each action will generate one mass of ore, each ore weighs 20 kg and your starting weight capacity is about 120 kg. All your equipment so far, the leather armor, the tools you start with, will probably amount to about 40 kg of your total 120, so you can only carry about 80 kg worth of things, granted carrying any amount will slow you the heck down. As a new player, you don't want to think about taking this ore some long distance away... noooo... you want to build a forge or at the very least, a campfire, right against the ore vein to start smelting metal.
If there's already a forge, you need to find a log, use carving knife/hatchet/saw to create kindling, activate your steel and flint + right click forge/oven to "Light" and activate the log + right click forge/oven to "Burn" and fuel the fire.
If there's no forge, you need to find a log, use carving knife/hatchet/saw to create multiple kindlings, activate your steel and flint + right click kindling to try to create a campfire. Activate the log + right click campfire to "Burn" and fuel the fire.
Now... open the pile of ore on the ground and drag as many as will fit into the container which will heat the ore. Over time, it will "glow with heat" and liquify into manageable metal. This may take several minutes as your campfire will likely be only 1 QL or Quality, meaning it's the least effective campfire possible. Higher QL campfires/forges/ovens will heat things much, much faster.

Each 20 kg ore item will generally liquify into a 1 kg lump of metal. Most tools require less than 1 kg of metal so you don't need more than 20 or 30 kg of lumps or 20 or 30 mining actions to get started. With 2+ kg of lumps, you can activate one lump and right click another lump to combine into a heavier lump. With a lump that's at least 2 kg or heavier, you can activate the mallet + right click lump to create a small anvil. Each attempt to smith something will use a portion of the metal so you may need more than 2 kg of lumps if you fail to create an anvil the first few attempts.

Now we're cooking with fire! From now on, activate lumps and right click your small anvil to create new things directly out of metal. You might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you can create, so open the crafting menu by selecting the button on the quickbar that resembles two tools.


By dragging one item into the left space and one other item into the right space, a list will generate allowing you to easily view all the things you could possibly create using these two items. Drag the small anvil into one space and the glowing lump into another to view all the things you could make along with the percent chance to successfully craft them.

I would suggest creating at least 4 large nails, a file blade, sickle blade, butchering knife, lantern, hammer head, and like 10 small nails to make a bucket/small barrel with.


Well now you can, and you have the materials to start.

Each standard wooden wall requires 20 wooden planks and 1 "set" of large nails. The smallest house is created by finding a flat piece of land, activating a mallet/hammer/trowel + right clicking the flat tile and selecting "Plan building." Right click the frame that appears and select "Finalize building plan" to officially "plan" the structure. You can rename it as many times as you want, instantly, for free, so try to think of something witty.

Select a mallet/hammer for wooden houses (1 Carpentry required) or a trowel for stone houses (30+ Masonry required) and right click a frame wall to start building your chosen wall. Remember to build a door! The doors, windows, balconies, walls, all require the exact same number of building materials, 20 planks + 1 large nail or 20 stone bricks + 20 mortar.



Activate your saw + right click log and select plank. Now... Who in their right mind wants to right click a log 20 times to create 20 planks? No way!



Pick up 3 logs for maximum efficiency, drag the stack of three into the crafting window, and the saw into the other side of the crafting window, select "Plank" from the list, push the "action queue" arrows until it says "3/3" and hit the "Craft" button to start!

• Protection from monsters, other players
  
• To Create and Use a Bed
  
• To Store Our Things in a Large Chest or Bulk Storage Bin

If we lock the building with a door lock, other players won't have access inside.

If we create a bed, we can "sleep" in it when we log off to generate a resource that provides us with DOUBLE SKILLGAIN called "sleep bonus." I think the idea is that not everyone has the time to play this game nonstop, so to even the playing field, sleeping in a bed allows you to get as much skillgain as someone who plays twice as much as you.



Double click a wall or right click + select "Examine" to see the QL or Quality of the wall and total damage the wall has accumulated by decaying in the natural world. Lower QL items will decay much faster, so you want your walls to be as high QL as you can get them. Getting your Carpentry skill higher will allow you to more easily raise the QL.

To improve a wooden house wall, activate a wooden plank + right click the wall and select "Improve." The higher QL the plank is, the more the wall's QL will increase.
If the wall is damaged, activate a plank + right click the wall and select "Repair." The higher QL the plank is, the more the wall's DMG or Damage will decrease. When the DMG reaches 100 from lack of repairing, it will literally crumble into dust.



Those small nails you made in Day One? Those are going to come in handy!
Combine small nails and planks to create a bucket (holds about 12 kg) or small barrel (holds about 44 kg). These containers allow you to carry substantial amounts of water (or any liquid) with you. Water is used to keep your stamina high and to improve blacksmithing items by way of "tempering". Water is important.

*Protip:* But what if you don't like water? You can activate a bucket + right click any female domestic animal (bison, sheep, cow) to milk it and you can just drink the milk like water!

• Chairs and tables are a little useless but they sure do look nice! Tables can act as surfaces for you to place items on for easy organization. You can place a number of items on a table like a lantern or your favorite weapon, whatever you want.
  
• Large chests can hold a ton of stuff and can be locked with a small/large padlock for security.
  
• Armor, weapon, shield, saddle, fishing poles all have their own dedicated racks
  
• Create a lantern to put on your new table or a lamp post which stands on its own. They require olive oil or more commonly tar and activate your steel and flint + right click lantern to "Light" after activating the tar + right click lantern to "Fill."

By this point, I would start creating crafting stations based around what skills you'd like to improve first. There are plenty and in the end, you might be interested in all of them!
While you don't need a "crafting station" to make things per se, having a separate bulk storage bin for the related skill and containers to keep related tools can make things easier in the long run.

For example, I like to keep an area dedicated to tailoring. For this purpose, I keep a loom, a large chest for both cloth tailoring (needle, scissors) and leather working tools (needle, leather knife, awl, wooden mallet), and a bulk storage bin or two for keeping cotton, wool, and leather.

An example for a smith's work station could be at least two forges, a large chest filled with a few leather backpacks and smithing tools, as well as either a well/fountain of refilling water or a large barrel full of water to reduce the necessary trips to a water source to temper smithing items.

You could build a 2x2 tile house for each major skill like tailoring/smithing/cooking/etc.

At lower Farming skill levels, you may only double the material you plant, but at higher levels you can get over 10x as much from the harvest. So it's better to start early to maximize your harvests later on. Planting crops can also feed domestic animals (horse, bison, hell horse, sheep, cows/bulls).

You can only plant on flat tiles, or tiles that are less than 4 slope in a direction, so you could plant on a field that's slightly inclined but it's recommended to keep a farm on a large flat area. It can also be beneficial to fence in the farming plot to keep wild animals and players from destroying/stealing your crops.

To be as efficient as possible, try to get a mouse with multiple bind-able keys so you can bind "Improve" and "Repair" to your mouse keys, allowing you to craft without using your keyboard. Additionally, seek a tool belt of at least 50 QL allowing you to create tool loadouts with up to 5 slots. Most skills require the use of 5 improving tools or less, so a 50 QL tool belt is all that's required.
Tool belts offer 1 slot per 10 QL to which you can drag an item. Using CTRL + num keys, you can quickly activate slotted tools. 10+ QL tool belts let you create, save, and load loadouts so you can have sets of slotted tools for the situation.
For example, when smithing items I keep water from inside a small barrel on the tool belt along with a hammer, pelt, the metal lump I'm using, and a whetstone. When I'm out hunting animals and traveling, I keep a butchering knife on the tool belt, a shovel to bury corpses, tar to fill lamps on roads and in caves, and a steel and flint to re-light them. In the future you can click the little arrows to navigate loadouts or right click the outsides of the tool belt GUI to access navigate options.
Without a tool belt, remember to group your improving tools together in your inventory so you aren't constantly searching for a misplaced tool.




Creating items offers the lowest skill gain that you will receive. To efficiently gain skill, you must improve items. Therefore, skills that allow you to create but not improve items will take longer to raise.
*Protip:* When using sleep bonus to double skill gain, don't activate it until you stop creating items and are fully improving them. You should always save sleep bonus for when you are going to be getting the most skill gain possible.

Longer action timers contribute to greatly increased skill gain where lower action timers offer greatly decreased skill gain.
Example: 4 second actions using a 90 QL iron pickaxe might grant 0.006 skill per success whereas 20 second actions using a 1 QL iron pickaxe might grant 0.012 skill per success.
This is just a rough example and it's not taking into consideration the real equation behind this mechanic, but like much of this game, the "real equation" is never formally given and the developers are extremely secretive about the functions hidden inside the code.

• Higher QL tools perform actions faster, reduce skill gain
  
• Higher QL tools have a higher success rate
  
• Lower QL tools perform actions slower, increase skill gain
  
• Lower QL tools have a lower success rate

You want to be improving and failing to improve items about 10 QL higher than your skill. Successfully improving items grants more skill gain than crafting a new item, but failing to improve items grants the most skill gain. Stamina % also has an effect on skill gain. The lower your stamina, the higher skill gain per action, down to around 10%. Therefore, if you can create a stable wound that will not heal naturally, it can actually increase your skill gain by lowering your maximum stamina.

Some would argue that you can efficiently raise a skill by improving one single item forever, but this can easily become maddening and I don't think it's 100% true. It's better to improve items that you'll use often so you are directly helping yourself become more effective. If you want to gain skill and do not need any of your own items improved and aren't trying to sell your products to others and are explicitly grinding a skill for the sake of raising it, I would create 5-15 items depending on the skill and imp each as far as you can or about 15-20 QL higher than your skill, then create more and improve them 15-20 QL higher, and so on.

In about 6 hours with 50 QL tools, I raised my bowyery from 1-40 making 5 short, 5 medium, and 5 long bows and improving only these the entire time.



Other skills which do not allow creating or improving items have differing skill gain based on actions performed.
For example, Forestry only offers about four actions possibly performed to raise the skill including cutting sprouts from trees/bushes, pruning trees/bushes to reduce their age, harvesting trees/bushes for their fruit/nuts, or studying a harvestable tree/bush to later create reports in turn making almanacs to track the seasons of the game and when things are harvestable in the future.
The game doesn't tell you this anywhere, but by looking at how long the action timers are, we can distinguish which actions should provide the most skill. Studying can only be performed once per harvestable plant and it removes our ability to harvest the same plant during that season; since we can only study/harvest during the plants' dedicated season, we can't reliably train the skill for long periods of time. Cutting sprouts is a quick action that creates a sprout you can use to plant another tree/bush of the same variety. However, pruning takes the most time of all Forestry action timers and provides the greatest skill per action.

In about 12 hours, I raised my fishing from 1-52 using a 50 QL medium fishing pole with a ~50 QL medium line and a ~50 QL iron hook, 20 QL iron tacklebox. No lines had snapped. I was fishing in the same spot without moving, about 40 dirts deep inland lake, right from the shoreline.