Terhenetar, our virtual home
In the Finnish epic the ‘Kalevala’ Terhenetär is a sprite associated with mist and forests.
Names mean a lot to me and Vahkt, so it should be no surprise that it took us a few days to decide what to call our new home in Wurm Online. We went through places in fantasy novels, lists of Germanic castles, and combinations of Polish words before I had mentioned the name Terhenetar, something I had come across while browsing one of my favorite name sites. Vahkt had been leaning more towards Polish names so I had thought that a Finnish word wouldn’t have been as interesting to him. Little did I know that he absolutely adored the ‘Kalevala‘ and its influence on Lord of the Rings. (Heck, I had never even heard of the thing before. >.>) Since I thought it was a beautiful name and described the foggy, wooded area we had settled in well, there was no further need for discussion. Terhenetar was now the name of our new home.
Let me describe how exactly our plot is situated before I give the screenshots I promised. The “base” of our plot sits up on a small plateau on the side of a hill, surrounded by stone walls that Vahkt has crafted. In there is our forge, oven, and multitude of storage containers. It is also the future site of our house, which I will talk about in a moment.
To the north, you first encounter the beginnings of our orchard located on a downward incline. We decided to place it there because fields need to be on relatively level land, whereas you can plant trees and bushes on any angle of slope. Beyond that, where the ground becomes level, we have our newly created paddock for animals on the western side, and our fields of grains and vegetables on the eastern side. Standing in front of those two, in about the center is the workshop building that I built over the weekend. It was the site of an old abandoned settlement, where the walls of the house had decayed completely and left the contents inside out in the open. I managed to drag all of the items (including another forge, an oven, a loom, and even more storage containers) into a 2 by 2 area and raised the wooden walls around it all. Beyond the workshop, there is enough space for a road before you come up to the foot of a huge, steep mountain. Here there are about 4 mines that have been dug into the side of it and provide quite a good amount of iron and stone shards for us.
To the east, the settlement of Willowsprings was built starting right up against the mountain and extending to the south. The owner Miloch has been a wonderful neighbor, letting us join his town for a close respawn point in case we die, as well as giving us many many logs and access to his mine for stone shards and the like.
To the south the land slopes up in a way that can’t be described as gentle or steep, and it is heavily wooded with mostly tall pine trees. We will certainly never be at a loss for wood around here.
And finally, directly west of the workshop and north-west of the base is the lake, which provides us with precious water and the majority of our food, which is fish.
Now that you hopefully have some sense of context, let’s bring on the pictures!
As for the stone house, I had originally said that we were going to build it under the old willow. we’ve since decided that there’s just not enough room there so we’re going to place it where the couple of garden patches are now within our base. Because I really really wanted some willows around the house, I went out to cut a bunch of willow sprouts, three of which ended up surviving the planting. Now I’ll get to have three willows shading our house. 😀