Malena

Alrighty folks, thanks to the deal we did with Baeowolf (thanks again Bae!), I've now transferred all the money I was intending to (for now). So no more trades "for now". However, Malena tends to consistenly make more money with her horse market on Xanadu than Saphireena does on Melody, so I'm pretty sure I'll be in the same situation again some day. So if you happen to stumble upon this thread in the far future, (for instance late 2024 or after that), feel free to ask if you're interested in a trade.

Great! I'll send you a PM and we can work out the details

Another successful trade done. Thank you to the person I traded with! The trades have so far been smaller amounts of silver, which means I still have several gold on SFI that I need to move over. So if anyone else wants to do a trade, just let me know!

One small successful trade done so far (thank you again to the person I traded with) but if there is anyone else out there wanting to trade, I've still got more gold I need to move to NFI. BTW it was my first currency trade ever and I was really nervous about how it will go, but it was effortless and painless and went beautifully! We used the C.O.D. system which was recommended to me by some helpful folks that I had asked advice from, and it seems to be a good system for this sort of thing. So one person sends a C.O.D. item on one side for the required amount, then the other person sends one on the other side. Nice and handy since you don't have to meet up or arrange any times etc.

I've got 4 gold on Southern Freedom Isles that I'd like to trade for an equivalent amount on Northern Freedom Isles. Can swap the full 4 gold, or also smaller chunks like 1, 2 or 3 gold. If you're someone who started playing Wurm on the Northern Freedom Isles (Cadence, Harmony, Melody etc) and have always wanted to give the "old world" a try, this is the perfect opportunity to get some money to get started with on the legendary old servers. Please send me a PM here on the forums if you're interested.

Oh yes Muse, believe me - I'm in the same exact boat as you! Maybe my posts weren't very clear, but I feel like you do. (just felt I needed to say that because your message makes it sound like I'm in the opposing boat)

Shimmering Sands Stables is still alive and well! (although I rarely advertise it!) Our mares have been busy plopping out foals and I've just restocked our stalls. The best way to check the status of the new stock is on the google doc listing. It will always have a date when things have last been updated just above where the horse chart starts. Check out the full listing of horses + prices

Yeah see, a lot of times I don't read the patch notes and just start up the game, do something else while it's patching and press play. Your first assumption may be: "Malena, you lazy fool! Read the notes! Be in the know! Keep yourself educated about the games you play dammit!" But hear me out :-). There are several reasons why I often don't read them: 1) As a player I relish the delight in discovering new things in the world intuitively and spontaneously. For instance, when I start a brand new game (especially if it's an MMO) - I absolutely refuse to read or watch anything about it (except it's trailer) because I want to DISCOVER stuff. I know there are a lot of players out there like this. 2) As a game developer, I'm curious about how other developers solve things. So I don't want explanations beforehand, instead I want to experience a new feature "purely" to see whether I understand it like a new player would - whether it's intuitive to me. And if it's not intuitive, I give feedback. I don't agree with "everybody who plays should read those". I feel like Wurm should be a game that more casual players who simply want to log on and have fun should be able to enjoy. If a game requires players to read patch notes to be playable, that to me is a flawed system. Especially for the types of players you listed - such as people who will start the game in the future / come back at a later time. Who can expect them to go digging around old patch notes? By the way, as a just a general note not directed to anyone in particular, I'm really like the new resource nodes so far otherwise. They're super cute and add new visuals to the world, and best of all make exploration more interesting. Great job team! ❤️

Really happy to hear that the spirit templar feature will be removed (great post Muse, only just saw it now!), especially seeing as I sell hellies at my market as well. I'm not one to frequent the forums or Discord all that often, and only usually do it when there's something big going on. So I guess you can say that I represent the type of Wurm player who just merrily plays the game, ignorant of all the debates and dramas going on elsewhere - enjoying my own little magical world. I would assume that a very large portion of Wurm players are like this. So actually, I only just found out about the spirit templar thingie last night. For players like me, my question is: How would they have ever even known that they can "solve" their weed problem with a templar to begin with? Like what logical path would have taken them to discover this fact? For instance the nodes didn't have anything in their examine descriptions - such as: "Rumor has it that spirit templars will clean out weeds from settlements". And even if you DID manage to find the checkmark in the bottom of the Settlement settings from stumbling across it by pure luck, even that checkmark would not have explained anything - it just says: "Mark this if you want to prevent resource nodes from spawning within this settlement". With a tool tip saying "Cannot be enabled without at least one guard hired". If you had absolutely no idea that guards whack weeds, none of this would make sense to you and you would not be able to understand what weeds have to do with guards. I literally had to have someone explain this to me last night. Only after that, was I like "Oooohhh RIGHT!" And I did manage to see the idea behind it and the charm of guards taking care of little duties on your deed. A cute idea, but again, I would have never in a million years discovered or realized that this feature exists without someone telling me about it. The game needs to be intuitive and not rely on people learning things from word of mouth. This could have easily been solved with another type of text next to the checkmark, such as: "Enable if you want hired spirit templars to destroy resource nodes on your settlement". Not the perfect alternative, but it would at least make me go "Ohhh right! So if I don't want to clean out nodes myself, I can just hire a spirit templar. Cool to know!" This feature is going to be removed, so you might be wondering why I'm still fussing over this. But I just wanted to describe my simple-minded dummy experience as a reminder for future things added to the game: Keep things intuitive and think carefully about the descriptions and opportunities to give hints to players. (like adding the "rumor has it" text in the node examine descriptions would have made me understand that there's such a possibility to begin with.

My own personal feedback: As a horse breeder, I don't like how the nodes spawn on enchanted grass. Now my horse stable stalls are full of nodes I feel like I need to "clean away" so my stables will look presentable to customers. Since enchanted grass is something that is a change that is intentionally and manually done to a tile to process it into a "finer" version of the grass, it should be safe from "weeds". Same goes for lawn tiles. (not sure how nodes behave on those) An even bigger issue is that with bad luck, the baby horses will be inside the node and the hitbox will be the only thing you can target. So someone might have bought a horse but now they can't grab it. Again, making it so that enchanted grass would be "safe" from "weeds" would be best.

Army let me start off by saying that I have the utmost respect for anyone that has the bravery, courage and tenacity for taking on the role of being a Community Manager for Wurm. I can't even imagine how stressful and how hard the job must be! Unfortunately, part of the job is also dealing with negative feedback, not only towards the game itself, but also feedback directed towards yourself. This is one of those moments where I'd like to offer some food for thought. I'd like you to try and imagine how your words may "sound" to old VEN members who spent countless hours over many years creating content and streaming Wurm. To spell it out, some people might read your words as old VEN members being just random creators carelessly picked up from the streets without any screening process and who went on to create content without quality in mind. And that they were lacking in having unique personalities. Of course, none of the above is true. First of all, the creator of VEN: Archaed aka Retrograde definitely had a process in ensuring we had quality creators in VEN. And even after the whole team was gathered, he had to make some REALLY tough calls to ensure that the program continued in a positive and helpful light and to make sure everyone feels safe and comfortable being part of VEN. Everyone had very unique personalities and their own flair in how they created content for Wurm. The amazing tutorials and newbie help that Factional Fight offered, the hilarious antics and humor of Fabricant, Kichi's amazing timelapses, Michio's wonderful love of the game, Gaffer's amazing rift streams, Josuha Calvert's serene and relaxing exploration streams, Macoofer's inspirational crafting and building streams and his many interesting experiments, Dracaa's legendary impalong streams, Drongo's Wurm Wednesdays, Undead Dan's PvP streams, Nacciwa's wonderful underground city streams and I'm sure there are so many names I'm forgetting since it's been a while. It was a wonderful collection of many different types of players! I fully know and understand that you probably never meant your choice of words to sound that way and never meant any harm or ill intent towards old VEN members - that it was merely a thoughtless moment. I can understand that it must be extremely challenging and exhausting to have to think about every word you say to the community and that sometimes things can slip through. But as much as I can empathize and sympathize, these words still left a bad taste in my mouth as a person who streamed with VEN from the early days on. Archaed aka Retrograde did all these things for the VEN program. We had dev streams with sneak peaks, we had key giveaways, we were featured on social media etc etc. It's absolutely fantastic that the goal is to get "bigger and better". But please let's do it in a way that doesn't unintentionally devalue the efforts Retro and all the streamers put in for all those years. PS: I for one am really excited about the resource nodes and I'm SO RELIEVED to hear it's not going to be "Wurm TV" after all. For me personally, the very core of why I love Wurm is because it's MEDIEVAL. There is nothing at all medieval about the word "tv".

Love to see something like this happen! Good luck to all the participants!

This beautiful horse is now at riding age (Adolescent adult) and is still available on our merchant. I've lowered the price from 50s to 40s.

Just a few things to point out: But we can make arched walls: using bridges. Look at the before and after: https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/46.html The weapon isn't on his back, that's a leather strap that happens to sit at the same angle: The landscape isn't any more "vague" than in the original Wurm shot. And there is nothing stopping players from technically having a fight like that eh? https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/33.html The lighting is pretty much exactly the same in the original screenshots, so not sure what you mean: https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/44.html https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/16.html From a gameplay perspective, mines do fill up with piles of rocks and ore eh? And if if you wanted to achieve a similar atmosphere in Wurm, you could do that in Wurm Unlimited by spawning in boulders. That's what I did for the original shot. https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/21.html We've got plenty of items in game that are much more detailed, so technically it's completely feasible. Has it been done in this particular case of the foods? No - but that doesn't mean the foods couldn't be improved further down the line. The point is, that as it currently stands, highly detailed stuff CAN be technically implemented in the game. For instance the dragon skin for the staff is mega detailed:

Lots of people here have a problem with using footage or material that doesn't 100% represent the game. For me personally, I've never had a problem with game companies promoting their games with beautiful cinematic trailers and concept images. AS LONG AS there were actual true screenshots/videos available as well. Currently we have the trailer that does that. Hopefully a screenshot gallery in the future. For instance, when Blizzard first released it's WoW trailer, I fully understood that this is not what the game is going to look like and was fine with it. That this is a fantasy - a dream. Upon installing WoW for the first time and entering the game, I didn't have an overwhelming sense of disappointment that it didn't look the same. Instead when I embarked on my journey with my low poly character, I could imagine being in that world I saw in the trailer and it enhanced the imagination and immersion I had in my experience.

Thank you to everyone sharing your views and critique of the AI versions. While I might not agree with everything being said and considering that people do have different tastes in what they feel looks good, it's always helpful and good to hear views of all kinds.

I thought it would be interesting for you guys to see the original Wurm screenshots versus the AI enhanced ones. I checked with Samool and was given permission to show these. Here is the (nearly) full set of AI enhanced images as I originally delivered them to the team. Any changes (such as zooming in and cropping etc) you see on the website have been done at their end (my guess is that the external web development company has done those changes, not sure). My guess is that they wanted to remove the characters which I can understand since the AI enhanced versions are a big leap from what we currently see in Wurm. When I did the AI version, I gave a prompt for the AI to make them look like concept art and more painty because I intentionally wanted that sort of rough look that you see in concept art most of the time. Some of you see that aspect as "flaws", but I guess it's just one of those things that is a matter of personal taste. Each slide provides both the original Wurm shot (move your mouse off the image) then the AI enhanced one (move mouse onto the image). By clicking the images you can proceed to the next page. https://www.andrea.net/wurm/screenshots/ai_enhanced/01.html

First and foremost: Congratulations on your new role Army and the very best of luck with this new adventure! Thank you for bringing us your first Valrei International! Also thank you to the Wurm team for all their hard work! Also very cool news about wurm node Drogos! I know how much you love the game and have wanted to contribute! Since there are some comments on the updated artwork for the website, I just wanted to chime in, since I was the one that made the new "ai images". I also want to make it clear that I am not in the wurm team, but was merely contracted to make some artwork. So everything I say comes from my own personal opinions and do not represent the wurm team in any official way. Going back to how this website fuss started: As we well remember, when the website was completely updated months ago, it had those placeholder AI images that had zero to do with the game and didn't represent or resemble Wurm in any way. (For the record, I didn't have anything to do with those btw) People here in the forums were upset about the images and for good reason! As a fellow player, I also found myself bothered by them, so I started to wonder how it might look if one were to take Wurm screenshots and then pass them through Stable Diffusion's img2img tool to give the screenshots a more concept-feely look. I gave it a try and thought the results were pretty cool, so I posted them in this thread. New Branding and a New Website -Video - Page 8 - City Hall - Wurm Online Forum The community seemed to react quite positively and I don't really remember there being much - if any criticism of them. I think this positive reaction planted the seed in the devs minds that this approach might be a viable choice for getting nice new images for the website. So soon after, I was approached and they asked me to make images like that for the website to replace the original non-related placeholders. To not leave things to chance and make decisions merely based on the reception in that thread, we still passed them through the entire wurm team and upper management to see how everyone felt. The reaction was positive, but we also had shared concerns that if we use those images, there should also be pure untouched screenshots available on the website somewhere. (there are a few on the current front page, but I hope that some day there will also be a screenshot gallery of player submitted screenies and I know the team would like to see that as well) So I got to work and a couple of months ago I delivered my "ai-beautified" wurm screenshots to the team. Today - along with the rest of you - I saw the website had been updated with the new images. Although some of them are as I originally delievered them, a lot of them have also been modified and altered quite a bit. Some of the modifications are cool, some are not what I would have done personally. I don't have any qualms with the wurm team or the external web developers changing them, as they've been paid for and purchased by the wurm team and they are naturally free to modify and make use of the images in whatever way they see fit. However I also would feel uncomfortable with the community being left with the perception that the images are exactly as I delivered them as I know many of you have been anticipating seeing them for some time now and I'd hate to be left with the feeling of letting you all down. As Pandalet already mentioned, all of the images I made for the wurm team were original wurm screenshots that were passed through AI to give them a more concept-arty look. However, not all of the images on the website are submitted by me, there are others as well that I don't know the origin of. Using concept art stylized artwork to promote a game is commonplace and most players understand that. That said, at the same time I feel it's urgent to get a "real screenshot" gallery up on the website ASAP so that the website will not be deceptive. I know the team want to see that as well, so I really hope something like that is being worked on. Madnath so many questions and concerns! Let me see if I can answer some of them :-). Bread cheese: I never saw the bread being filled with cream cheese, rather parts of the crust that didn't brown as much as the outer layer because it's been snipped before being put into the oven. So worry not! I did not have a prompt with the words: "Create a loaf of bread with cream cheese oozing out - it will be hilarious!" Planter rack height, table legs and other questions related to perspective and angle: In this GIF animation you can see the original Wurm screenshot vs the AI pass one and the same problem exists in the original. Any perspective issues you see in any of the images is only because that's how the perspective was in the original wurm screenshot. In the case of the table however, I do see your point! Ya know, I never noticed this "missing legs" issue myself when I first took the screenshot, but now looking at it, I should have gotten an angle where the legs showed at least a little bit. Blame the screenshot taker (aka me!) not the AI :-D. At least AI tried to add "some" depth by adding a shadow underneath! Pheasant eyes: I don't think they're that bad. Eyes aside: I really wish we could place animal corpses on tables. That's where I would have wanted to put them! Goblet: This one AI struggled with quite a bit - for some reason it just couldn't fathom an upside down skull as a goblet and made very weird and disturbing objects instead. Eventually I opted for telling it to make a gold version instead and then it was fine! What I should have done was just leave the original wurm goblet. My bad! Knife: C'moon now, it ain't that bad! Pottery flask: That ain't no hole. It's a really bad stain! Like a really really bad one! On whether or not Wurmians would prefer the originals to the AI-passed ones, like I was saying above - folks seemed to dig it. Why Madnath... looking at the people who liked my post, even YOU showed your blessing! ❤️ I know I'm giving you a bit of a hard time, but it's all very much tongue and cheek and with much love and appreciation for you as a beloved Wurmian and for the deep care you have for the game. ❤️

Shimmering Sands Stables (M9 on Melody) has been blessed with a new baby horse with the rare "Unbelievably Fast" trait in addition to the other speed traits. Available on our merchant for 50s 40s for whoever is fast enough to grab this little treasure! (stall number 102.) For more information on our location and other horse listings, check out our Google Doc.

Thank ye kindly for the purchase! Glad to see the little guy finally found a home! I wish you many enjoyable moments speeding across the meadows together!

Price has been lowered from 70s to 50s. The horse is now at the adolescent adult stage.

To be exact, what I said on stream (last Friday) was that I have completed and delivered my part of the work (images). And that they (those involved in working on the website) will take it from there. I also said that I don't know what all other changes they will be doing (whether those be changes to layout, structure, texts etc) and that since they work with an external company it may take some time yet before we see the new version published. On the topic of "back and forth and discussions", you're probably remembering what I mentioned in Discord when the work was still ongoing, but that was already a couple of weeks ago. So yeah, stuff has been approved, finalized and delivered since then.

Price has been lowered from 80s -> 70s and the horse is now of riding age.

Price has been lowered from 1 gold to 80 silver.

Our stables have been blessed with an adorable little Skewbald Pinto male foal called "Huntingblood" and he's up for sale on the server of Xanadu at Misty Rock horse market at T12. To check our maps etc, see here: Traits: It has fleeter movement than normal. (speed) It has lightning movement. (speed) It has very strong leg muscles. (speed) It seems accustomed to water. (speed) It is unbelievably fast. (speed) It looks stationary. (misc) Price on our self serve merchant: 50 silver First come, first serve. No reservations or special arrangements. Whoever gets there first. PS: We also have a mare for sale who will produce twins for 2s. For our full listing, check this google doc link.