Terraforming in Wurm Online: Rainbow Crow Harbour

One of the more intriguing features of Wurm Online is the ability to terraform and sculpt just about any portion of land. Usually it is used to create flat land to sow or build upon, but players have done amazing things with it as well. Entire mountainsides have been carved through or leveled, vast craters have been created, and tall earthen spires have been built to tower over the landscape.

Now I’ve never really done anything like that myself, as I prefer for things to look more natural. However, I did give myself a terraforming project: creating the harbour for Ravenstone.

It was the first large terraforming project I had ever done. While I am very pleased with the results, I discovered that I just don’t like digging all that much. And there was a lot of digging. πŸ˜›

As usual, Wurm has a bunch of “rules” associated with terraforming and it can be hard to wrap your head around. Things like how you don’t just dig on one tile but on the corner of 4 tiles, slopes and how many dirts high something is, flat-raising, how steep a slope can be based on your digging skill, and so on. But no one ever said Wurm was easy. πŸ˜‰

When I first deeded Ravenstone, the to-be harbour was…something that left much to be desired. I can only guess that it previously operated as a sort of dry dock that was lined with stone slabs. Damn, was it an eyesore though.

Before: An ugly dry dock

I left it for a long time as is and it was only after I finished all the other major projects at Ravenstone before I finally gave in and began work on it. The picture above was taken from the road going through my deed, and it was quite a steep slope down. So one of the first things I did was to lessen the slope, smooth out some of the strange bumps sticking out, and begin making the outline for the harbour.

Work in progress

I was very lucky at the time to have my kind neighbour Journeya and one of my villagers who wanted to help me out so I didn’t have to do all the digging on my own. They also helped me make the wooden floor boards I wanted to line the edge of the harbour (because it wouldn’t seem right to not have a wooden dock. My villager Rag really wanted to try his hand at building something on deed, so I gave him free reign to design and build the harbourmaster building (also where boats get built). I planted a bunch of maple hedges along the east side to be a kind of privacy fence and to also mark where the edge of my deed was. With some creative use of crude wooden fences and planting some birch trees and shrubs, I made an ornamental sloped garden leading from the road to the harbour.

The piles of dirt that you see in some of the pictures were leftovers from dredging. In Wurm, you can only dig to about 8 dirts below the waterline with a shovel. Anything deeper than that needs to be done with a dredge tool from a boat. When you dig with a shovel, the dirt goes into your inventory and your body strength determines how much you can hold. My character can usually carry 8-10 dirts at a time. A dredge however can only hold 2 dirts maximum. Needless to say, dredging is a little tedious. I enjoy it even less than regular digging. But I wanted it to be deep enough to allow larger boats to travel to without getting stuck.

The copper street lamps that line the harbour were dyed in rainbow colours, which look quite pretty at night. In keeping with the corvidae theme of the deed, it was named Rainbow Crow Harbour in the spirit of the Lenape lengend.

The harbour at night
The harbour at night

Once bridges are finally implemented, I hope to create an impressive entrance for it as well. For now though, I am quite happy with how it turned out despite all the work. And I am very thankful for the help I got from my friends. πŸ™‚

August 17, 2013 No comments

0 comments

  1. Fantastic blog and a great post. I feel totally at home here and you make Wurm Online sound very enticing. I will be returning to the game after a bit of a hiatus. I especially like the storytelling aspect of this post and the others I have perused.

    1. Thank you for your kind words! I’m glad that you’re enjoying reading my posts. Wurm definitely has its own sort of appeal if you like slower paced games with bigger rewards…and the building/terraforming of course. If you happen to be on the Independence server, swing by and I’ll give you the grand tour. πŸ™‚

  2. Looks good! What are the slopes at for the dock area (going underwater)? We were working on a similar project, but ran into issues because we couldn’t dig the slopes past 20 steep. Did they finally fix it, or are those at 20?

    1. Thanks. πŸ™‚ Those are actually 40 slopes, but I dug them months ago. I’m just catching up on posting about the harbour now. So I don’t know if it’s glitched now or not.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.