A journey through Xanadu (and a new deed)
I haven’t mentioned Wurm Online since March, mostly because I haven’t done terribly much in it. I don’t really feel like doing much until they add bridges (yep, still waiting) and I imagine there will be a flurry of activity at Ravenstone once they do come out.
However, something interesting happened in the meantime. On June 3, they released a new Freedom server called Xanadu, one that’s 4 times the size of Independence, making it the largest server ever in Wurm at 32km x 32km. Originally they had wanted it to be 16 times larger than Indy (64km x 64km) but after they performed a couple stress tests, they must have found out that it was too hard on the server.
But anyways, for the first week after Xanadu went live, only new accounts could enter it. Then on June 11, they opened up the borders to allow cross server travel. Wurm servers are different from most other MMOs’ due to the fact that each server has its own unique map, and that you can cross to other servers by sailing over the server borders. To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a really cool map that the Wurm team created:
Prior to opening up Xanadu’s borders, there had been two Freedom server clusters. Freedom 1 contained the older servers on the left (Independence, Chaos, Deliverance, Exodus, Celebration), and Freedom 2 contained the newer servers (Pristine and Release). It was not possible to cross from one cluster to another. Once Xanadu’s borders opened however, they connected the two clusters and players were finally able to travel freely among all the Freedom servers.
At first, I was only interested in this because it allowed The Boyfriend and I to bring our Pristine alts over to Indy finally. So on Thursday night, we hopped in the little rowboat I had made months ago and began the long journey through Xanadu. Traveling in Wurm is no small task. In a sailboat with favorable winds, it could take maybe 2 hours to sail from one corner of Indy to another. If you factor in the fact that Xanadu’s 4 times larger, we were in a slower rowboat going against the wind for half the trip, and somehow I got turned around and we ended up traveling further than we needed to…it took a whole evening and a couple hours of the next day to get to Ravenstone.
So during those hours, we chatted on Skype and admired this new server we were passing through. And the more we saw of it…the more we liked what we saw. Here was a shiny new server that was huge and unterraformed in a lot of places. After a few hours, we reluctantly admitted that moving to Xanadu sounded like a great idea. One of the things I had never liked about creating my Pristine alt Yardleaf was that it felt like a waste to be improving the skills of a character that was not my main. I also missed having the really nice tools I had on Faeldray. And really, Faeldray had never lived anywhere other than Indy before. I had never started anew with an experienced character yet.
The decision was made before we arrived on Indy. I wanted to keep Ravenstone because I had put so much work into it and I still loved it, so our Pristine alts would remain on Indy as its caretakers. So shortly after our Pristine characters arrived at Raventstone, we switched to our mains and packed up a sailboat with a small amount of supplies, then began sailing back the way we had just come. The following day and a half involved sailing down the west coast of Xanadu, then across the south (against the wind again -.-), and finally up the eastern side in search of the perfect spot to settle. It wasn’t terribly interesting although we did see a forest giant that almost clobbered us when I went in for a closer look. We had our eye on a plateau covered in fir trees before, but then we discovered a spot in a huge lake connecting to the ocean that was even better.
Rather than attempt to describe it here, I did one better and made a short little video of the area we chose. I don’t make videos terribly often and this was the first time I’ve used something other than Windows Movie Maker to put one together, so bare with me if it kind of sucks. I hope you enjoy it though, and consider this the “before” view of our new deed. So without further ado, I give you Caer Blaidd, our new deed on Xanadu.