Lair of the Wolf Dragon

Growing by leaps and bounds

As the saying goes, “People who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw horses.” Or something like that. The guy who said it the other day was mostly grumbling to himself and stumbling down the road with a jug of sour-smelling wine in his hand.

Anyways, despite us finally starting to build our stone house, we won’t be throwing around our horses. In fact, the white breeding pair that was gifted to us by a neighbour will be greatly treasured and completely spoiled rotten by yours truly.

HORSIES!!!!11111oneoneone

Their names are Honeyally (male) and Warriormolly (female). It’s unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be a way to rename them because they were totally destined to be named Wesley and Buttercup. (+10 internetz if you know where that reference comes from.)

Vahkt brought them into our paddock early in the morning when I was already at work so unfortunately I couldn’t log on to see them until the evening. The first thing that I did when I was online though is quickly craft a grooming brush and rush down to give them a good brushing. Between my lack of animal husbandry skill and their being rather skittish of their new owner, it took me several tries. But soon their coats were gleaming and they were pleased to have such a good grooming.

There’s been talk of how it will be harder to breed animals in captivity soon due to a recent change in the game mechanics. So I decided to give it a try before this came into effect and was surprised to see that it worked on my first try! Given that you can only try once per hour and my husbandry was so low, I hadn’t expected to succeed for a long time. So hopefully now we will have a little foal coming our way. 😀

One of the things horses can do is you can hitch them to large carts which can haul huge loads, as well as a driver and one passenger. So Vahkt and I went out for a ride around town before he had to leave for work. Unfortunately a thick fog rolled in and made it extremely hard to see, and it only went away after Vahkt had left for work. Figures.

A space to live in

The stone house was something that had been in the works almost since we first established Terhenetar. The major roadblock in its creation was the fact that 30 masonry is needed to create it. So Vahkt had been working hard on raising it by making stone walls and statues.

When we changed the location for the house, we decided on an area where we had planted several tiles of crops. If you harvest the crops before they’re ready, you get nothing. So we waited for the crops to mature. And waited. And waited. One tile in particular seemed resistant to growth and Vahkt said that it would definitely have the troll face on it.

Finally the crop was harvestable and we quickly got it out of the way so Vahkt could lay down stone slabs for the flooring. One interesting thing in Wurm is that any item you have active and are using appears in your hand or somewhere around it. Which made it hilarious to watch as Vahkt laid down the giant stone slabs.

The way building a house works is you must first activate your mallet and begin planning it on the ground tiles. Your carpentry skill affects how large of a house you can make, where the equation is (total number of floor tiles) + (total number of wall sections) = carpentry skill required. This is regardless of whether the walls will be made out of wood or stone. Since I had the higher carpentry, I laid out the plans for a 2 x 4 house. (I apologize for the dark screenshots, it was night in-game when we were working on this.)

My part of the job was then complete and it was up to Vahkt, mason extraordinaire, to put together the walls. He decided to first go around and choose what he wanted for each section of wall: a door, a window, or a solid wall. Doing this completed the roof (thank god we don’t have to build that ourselves >.>).

It was then time for him to begin finishing each wall. One complete wall requires 20 stone bricks and 20 mortar, both of which Vahkt had prepared beforehand. There’s 12 walls and he estimates that it takes about 10 minutes each…so this will take him a little while to complete.

The inside of the house will be quite large once it’s finished. To help put it in perspective, I placed beds in two corners that are about the same length of our characters. They cover maybe half of a single tile.

I’ll probably end up creating some tables and chairs for furnishings and maybe one day we’ll have enough cotton and tailoring skill to make some rugs for the floor. Maybe I should also drag the oven into it so we could have a nice warm fire going inside…

With any luck, Vahkt will be able to finish the walls tonight and then our house, christened Terhenetar Hold, will be complete.