mrcrowz

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    55

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by mrcrowz

  4. Posted · Edited by mrcrowz

    they are completely separate, correct.

     

    There are no official WU muliplayer servers, those are only WO official servers. There are playermade public servers which currently seem to range from 5-50 players online.  Some require you to ask for a password in advance and some do not. WU comes with two premade maps, "Adventure" with NPC + missions and a PvP slant (though with singleplayer it may be a non issue) and Creative. There are also player made maps and a map generator made by player-devs so you can invent your own maps.  You cannot port characters from server to server however SOME private servers will allow you to import your player stats. Otherwise, you have a create a different character for each world. 

     

    Thank for your reply!

     

    Are these Adventure and Creative maps multiplayer? Also, will the private servers be absolutely separate, for example they keep track of their own time, economy, players, etc?

  5. Posted

    I was a WO player a few years back but stopped due to lack of interest, but now WU came out with a one-time payment model and I thought it might be interesting since I dont play often enough to justify a monthly fee.


     


    Correct me if i'm wrong, the FAQ says that WU and WO characters are completely separate and cannot interact is that right?


     


    If so, I have a few questions:


     


    1) What are the official worlds currently available to WU players?


     


    2) How active are the official worlds ATM?


     


    3) How are characters managed in WU? If I create a character in the official servers, will its skills and traits be transferred over to private servers when I join them, or will I have to create a separate character for them?


     


    Thanks for your help!


  7. Posted

    I was taming my cow today when it tried to attack me. I noticed instead of retaliating my combat was stuck perpetually in "You try to cut an old fat brown cow". I couldn't retaliate, the message just kept looping every second while the animal could continue to hit me.

    Pic:

    wurm201301241430.jpg

    While I noticed this only for my cow, i'm not sure if combat with other animals will go the same way.

  9. Posted

    I am thinking buying some silver to get myself a trader. But before that, I have a few burning questions about traders:

    1) How often do traders restock cash?

    2) Are traders only available to villages? If not, are there any disadvantages of planting traders outside of villages? (in terms of money gain, etc)

    3) Is buying a trader as a sustainable money maker worth it?

    I'm intending to get the trader solely for personal use, so I would appreciate any answers. Thanks!

  10. Posted

    I really don't want to have a more complex system of cooking. All I want is to be able to throw a few ingredients into a pan, into the oven then a boom, i get a meal that will bring my food and nutrition up. No need to make it complex, I don't want to have to spend 20 minutes working out a meal to eat that will last me an hour.

    -1

    Cooking shouldn't be complex if you don't want it to be. If you're contented with mediocre food, it should be simple to throw a few things in a pot and let it cook.

    However, those who prefer to invest time in cooking skill shouldn't be restricted to an overly simplified and unrewarding cooking system. It becomes more of a chore than a challenge to practice cooking as it is now.

  11. Posted

    While I agree that foodstuffs need balancing in Wurm I disagree with most of the rest of the OP's statements.

    Cooking isn't one of the most important skills in the game, its middling at best and its better catered for (sorry....) than many other aspects of Wurm.

    I would also not want the complexity of cooking ramped up and high nutrition made either more difficult or some sort of balancing act.

    At best I'd see improving cooking as a nice to have feature but little more.

    Cooking is hardly important right now, I agree, simply because its a flat, dumbed down version of the intricacies of actual cooking. With an overhaul of the cooking mechanics, I hope that can improve.

    I don't see what's so bad about giving a skill more depth, especially when the status quo is nothing more than putting food in an oven and waiting. Its boring, tedious, and an afterthought, precisely the reasons why you would find it unimportant.

  12. Posted · Edited by mrcrowz

    That is what QL and DMG is for, you do not need a recipe database to do this. The QL and DMG can also go into the auto naming system, and actually call it Supreme or Spoiled.

    You misunderstand, I'm in agreement that at recipe DB might not be such a great idea. My point is that player-made recipes should have a system to determine how delicious a particular combination of foodstuffs is. Otherwise, throwing together any few items into a bowl and giving it a fancy name still won't make a dish any more tasty.

    And this is a problem because novelty alone doesn't make a feature people will use often. Even if you throw away "meals", "casseroles" and "stew" and add a lot more kinds of food, people will make and eat it for a while, then go back to the food with the least hassle. There needs to be a unique incentive to each combination of food that you prepare. There must be a reason why you choose one kind of food over another, for example deciding between enjoyment and nutrition. A trade-off system needs to be in place, otherwise people will just find the most efficient food and stick to that.

    I do wonder however, should QL represent nutrition, or tastiness?

  13. Posted

    Want a very simple fix without a lot of complexity? Make nutrition a rolling average to smooth out the highs and lows. We already have a lot of different ingredients to make, they just never get eaten because you would take too much off a nutrition hit. (exception to rolling average should be refreshes and starving).

    There does not need to be complex recipe databases, simply allow the cook to rename the dish away from the autoname.

    The occasional handful of berries is good for you not bad for you, it is a diet of berries that is bad for you. Nutrition should not be about your last meal it should be about your diet. Its like your power bill that is smoothed out every month. You don't feel the monthly bill of the AC in summer nor the heat in winter because it is balanced with spring and fall where it is unused.

    I understand why you guys aren't so hot for preset recipes. Allowing the chef to name his own dish would be great, but there needs to be a system to decide what dish is better than than which, otherwise there's no difference between a common fish stew and "seafood ala supreme".

  14. Posted · Edited by mrcrowz

    since its still pretty recent I figure linking this closely related suggestion might provide some more info on the subject http://forum.wurmonl...trition-system/ certainly a -1 from me to the additional NPCs part though, rather see food as a possible player economy option rather than more npcs taking our jobs

    I would be inclined to agree with you if there are actually people trading in meals, but the reality is that hardly anyone does, due to the lack of incentive to buy something they can cook themselves. Since the idea of recipes make skilled cooks much more in demand, they need a medium they can trade through, much like a merchant. Plus, a player can't be playing shopkeeper the whole time, and with the short expiry date of their dishes, I believe an NPC is necessary in this context.

    I understand that an NPC may not appeal to everyone, so please do critique my other ideas as well. :)

    Aye NPCs should be limited in Wurm imho so things are more player-driven. On the other hand to encourage such player interaction some NPCs are needed, after all not everyone can be awake 24/7. If merchants could sell filled containers, it would enable them to function as bartenders, among other possibilities. However, it introduces a problem of them being used as cheap nondecay food storage, decay rates would need adjusting to not be too fast while also not too slow. On a partially related note, Ive always felt the bartender NPC should be able to feed more experienced players in exchange for coin (If Rolf needs another moneysink, there ya go). In addition such a version could be player-placeable like a trader, perhaps even around the same price.

    Took the words from my mouth.

    Food should last about as long as they do in barrels as they do on bartenders. Since food is a consumable, I believe they'll sell faster than other goods like tools etc and as such decay shouldn't pose too much trouble.

    :) Great ideas .... for creating another game ... but sorry, it all looks like terrible disturbance from main goals ... Let's say I want to build house, but I will spend few hours in kitchen to cook ideal food, to feel happy, to build best house Or I can ride half hour there and half back home to eat meal in best restaurant on server, to be well feeded and happy to build best house? NO, I'm absolutelly sure I do not want this but as motive for new game, nice ideas, sure

    Sorry, I don't quite understand your point. Purchasing food from another's business serves 2 purposes, for those who don't want to cook, and those who don't have the skill to do it well. Like I mentioned, good food will impart +ve bonuses, so they will be highly sought after. Its much like tools and weapons, you either smith them yourself or buy them from someone who can do it much better + enchants.

    May I know what your "main goals" refer to?

  15. Posted

    I'm sure I don't have to tell you, cooking is somewhat of a joke, as it had been since the beginning of wurm. It has completely no depth, no challenge, no fun, and most importantly, no incentive beyond keeping yourself fed. There are quite a few different foodstuffs available, but most of the time cooking is limited to stew, casserole, and meal, simply because the rest have no point. What's the point of tea, porridge, bread, cheese, soup and goulash, beyond making more meals and being relegated to low nutrition, novelty, ignored foods? Right now it seems cooking is nothing more than a grinding skill, one that is as brainless as it is boring. It doesn't do justice to one of the most important of skills.

    With the recent release of 1.0, i'm hoping Rolf and team will have time to look beyond the big picture (multi-stories, animations, combat, etc) and add flavour to existing skills and make them more rewarding and more fun to use and not just "grind for the sake of grinding"

    I've listed a few possible changes to the cooking system below:

    1) Recipes

    Beyond the generic "meal", dishes actually have names attached to them. Do away with the terms "meal", "casserole" and "stew", and give specific combinations of foodstuffs a name. The more complex the recipe, the higher its difficulty, which encourages experimenting with recipes to maximize skill gain with higher HFC. It also takes away the impossibility that a sprig of oregano and parsley as a dish can actually feed you.

    For example, a fish cooked in a pan with a potato could become "fish and chips". Putting cheese, dough, a cooked meat and probably an onion in a pan would produce "lasagna". Putting an unbutchered chicken corpse in a sauce pan with maybe oregano (or another herb) should make "whole spring chicken".

    Not every single dish cooked must be a unique recipe. Cooking beef would produce a steak, but adding a vegetable or herb would create "steak with <vegetable/herb>". Cooking water, milk and something else in a cauldron will produce a "cream of chicken/onion/mushroom/catfish/whatever". Its a small gesture, but its still a lot more descriptive than just "meal".

    Of course, the variety of recipes is completely up to the dev team. But if there is ever a way to have player-created recipes, that will be epic. Perhaps each ingredient can be assigned a certain "luxury" value which in turn determines the difficulty and quality of the resultant dish. And with the possibility of publishing recipes on papyrus, the possibilities are endless.

    2) Cooking overhaul and portions

    Cooking shouldn't be a game of watching the kettle boil. Neither should it be overly complex such that it becomes tedious instead. A simple solution is to give different recipes a "sweet spot" during cooking, before and after which food will be of lower quality. This will be a simulation of under-cooking and over-cooking/burning food. Food which is perfectly cooked may give additional bonuses including greatly increased QL.

    And this is where HFC skill (and in fact all other cooking subskills as explained later) can come into play. A higher HFC not only determines the base QL (Ql should be be determined by a range of factors not excluding ingredient quality and chef skill), but also when the game will inform you when food is cooked, as well as the window of time when the sweet spot can be attained.

    For example, below 10 HFC, one will only be able to tell a dish's readiness when the ingredients turn into the dish in question.

    From 10-20 HFC, an overlay will appear on a cooking dish telling you whether is it undercooked, acceptably cooked or overcooked.

    From 30 HFC onwards, the overlay becomes more specific until about 50 skill when it will tell you when the dish has hit its sweet spot, something along the lines of: "This dish is now perfectly cooked."

    Higher difficulty dishes will have a smaller window for cooking it well and the "sweet spot", so those with lower skill still can try cooking them, but they won't be as successful.

    Due to the difficulty of simultaneously cooking many dishes, this encourages chefs to focus their attention on one dish, rather than the current cramming of meals in an oven to cook. More skilled chefs might be able to handle slightly more dishes since their window is larger and can afford a bit more error.

    There should also be an option for portioning meals, especially larger ones. Lower skilled chefs can't pump out as many meals, but they can focus on cooking one well done, larger meal (think whole roasted meats) then portioning it out into similarly well done meals. Cooking time should be directly proportional to the size of the dish being prepared so as to prevent churning out of large quantities of food in a short time.

    Do note that this system of "sweet spot" should still be possible to reach for lower skilled chefs. They just don't have the guide of an accurate overlay, but with experience and timing they can still produce a perfectly cooked meal.

    3) Don't ignore the subskills!

    I don't believe medieval baking consists of just bread. Even the wurmian cake is just bread with milk. If that's the case, then I bake "cakes" for breakfast everyday

    :D

    Pastry is common in medieval times, commonly seen in pies and other confectioneries. Even the basic cake (read, real cake) is a common treat. I feel baking should have the same cooking system as HFC, so I won't elaborate too much beyond the fact that I would love some pie in my wurm.

    Moving on, beverages should be an vital part of wurm cooking as well not just because there are so many (useless) types at the moment, but also that they they are so important to roleplay in wurm (what's medieval without wine, women and song?) I appreciate the addition of wine as a means of adding variety, but its still not enough. Learning from wine, beverages are also another way to impart bonuses and other effects on players.

    4) Bartenders

    We have NPC traders and merchants, so why not NPC bartenders? Rather than having just the "inns" we see that are completely devoid of life, give them a bartender, someone who can sell your dishes and drinks. What's the point of cooking good food if you can't share your creations? Give inns a niche by providing all bartender-sold food a bonus to happiness (see suggestion No.5).

    They should be hire-able in the same way a merchant is, and maybe costing a bit less due to the reduced profit margin of food. This is not to say all food should be cheap, magnificently cooked food which imparts many bonuses should be priced as such to give good chefs a way to make a profit.

    5) Nutrition and happiness

    In my opinion, the current nutrition bonus system is flawed in that it doesn't represent the psychological effects that food has on us. I'm not going into that spiritual "experience your food" ######, just trying to drive across a simple point: good food makes people happy, eating the same thing over and over does not.

    I'm still not very sure how nutrition can be revamped at this point, but a simple idea I have is a happiness bar. 0% represents a neutral mood, while +/- 100% will represent euphoria and suicidal tendencies respectively. Since a happy person is more productive, +ve happiness can net increased skill gain, and maybe some other benefits, inverse is true for -ve happiness. Eating high QL, high difficulty (lets assume difficulty corresponds to luxury) food increases happiness. While eating modest food will neither increase nor decrease happiness too much, eating the same dish multiple times will drive it down greatly (less so for higher QL meals). Perhaps happiness can be made to work in conjunction with other non-food factors. (Maybe an environment score?)

    Condiments such as salt, sugar and herbs could have a positive effect on happiness when dishes that contain them are eaten. Eating food together with certain beverages (preferably alcoholic) should also increase happiness.

    Even with a happiness system, I still feel the nutrition bar is insufficient and unrealistic. Do share your suggestions on how it can be improved.

    Sorry for the TL;DR, but I just feel that there's so much leashed potential in wurmian cooking. I don't want to look at an onion and think, "good for a meal". I want to pick up any vegetable and think of how it synergises with other ingredients, of all the possible dishes I can prepare and share.

    I don't want cooking to be just another grinding skill, we already have smithing and carpentry for that. :)

  17. Posted

    I did consider the circumstances.

    1) It was being planned and consider for years.

    2) It was tested for weeks.

    3) The 1.0 release was advertised as a real breakthrough.

    4) It ended up as usual: bugged and not thought through.

    So yeah, I'm criticizing Wurm at this point, because it's badly managed.

    I hate to be the one jumping off the bandwagon, but Devean kinda has a point here. It was cool for a moment, all that new cosmetic toys like multi stories, animations and stuff, but then you try your hand at some of this new stuff and realize how inaccessible they are, until you grind more. Not the fun, rewarding kind of grinding, mind you, but the "I spent 3 hours failing at making concrete and now I still need slate shingles to make slabs arrggh" kinda grind. It doesn't help when you realize a couple hours later that you don't have enough skill for that anyway.

    Not to say that 1.0 was an abject failure, but it definitely could have attained a way higher state of polish for the amount of time it was in development, as well as more documentation on the features available. I just hope the next few updates roll in soon to patch this up.

  20. Posted · Edited by mrcrowz

    Alright, the first thing I notice when I try logging in is, there's completely no documentation whatsoever on one of the major (and coolest) features in 1.0, and thats, yep, you guessed it...

    ...House building.

    Understandably, wiki hasn't been updated yet, so i hope this thread can help consolidate all your current knowledge regarding houses and their new features so as to avoid confusion when building your dream home. (probably good copypasta too when someone decides to edit the wiki)

    Floors

    Wooden plank floor

    -Hammer/mallet, uses carpentry

    -1 plank to start, 10 additional planks

    -1 small nails to start, 2 additional small nails

    Pottery brick floor

    -Trowel, uses paving (successful at 22.8 skill)

    -1 pottery brick to start, 10 additional bricks

    -1 mortar to start, 10 additional mortar (contrib. by ianrose)

    Stone slab floor

    -Trowel, uses paving (successful at 22.8 skill)

    -1 slab to start, 2 additional slabs

    -1 mortar to start, 10 additional mortar (contrib. by KyleBooze)

    Marble slab floor

    -Trowel, uses paving

    Stone brick floor

    -Trowel, uses masonry

    -1 stone brick to start, 10 additional bricks

    -1 mortar to start, 2 additional mortar

    Slate slab floor

    -Trowel, uses paving

    -1 slate slab to start, 2 additional slab

    -1 mortar to start, 10 additional mortar (contrib. by Karellean)

    Floor comparisons

    Stone brick vs. pottery brick

    Left is stone brick floor, right is pottery floor

    http://i.imgur.com/ZxGjR.jpg

    Stone brick vs. Slate slab

    Completed Floors

    Slate (The brick Like Floor Below)

    Stone Slab Floor (The shiny pattern Above)

    For 3 Slabs and 11 Mortar vs what the slate cost... You can guess what Ill be using...

    NewFloors.JPG

    Full comparison

    wurm201212150106.jpg

    Roofs

    Wooden shingle roof

    -Hammer/mallet

    -1 wooden shingle to start, 20 additional shingles

    -1 small nails to start, 2 additional small nails

    Slate shingle roof

    Trowel, uses paving

    Pottery shingle roof

    Trowel, uses masonry

    Thatched roof

    Hammer/mallet, uses thatching

    Fences

    Indoors

    -Very little info at the moment. It would seem indoor fences can only be built outside an actual building (irony) so imho they can currently only be built on upper levels as balconies.

    Wooden fence

    Wooden parapet

    Low wall

    Stone parapet

    Stone and iron parapet

    Tall wall

    Iron fence

    Outdoors

    Crude wooden fence

    -Appears to be bugged at the moment, simply planning the fence with 1 shaft creates an impenetrable fence called "unknown wall type -13"

    Stone and iron parapet left, Stone parapet right. Both take 15 stone bricks but no iron, strangely enough.

    stone_parapets.jpg

    Building materials

    Concrete

    -1.5kg Lye + 1.5kg Mortar = 3kg Concrete

    Slate shards

    -Mine from slate vein.

    Slate shingle

    -Use chisel on slate shards, nets 15kg Slate shingle.

    Slate Slab

    -3kg Concrete + 20x 15kg Slate shingles = 80kg Slate slab

    Pottery Brick

    -Use hand on clay(>15kg), nets 15kg Clay brick.

    -Place Clay brick in a fire.

    Pottery Shingle

    -Use hand on clay, nets Clay shingle

    -Place Clay shingle in a fire.

    Wooden Shingle

    -Use saw on plank(>0.3kg), nets 0.3kg Wooden shingle.

    Notes:

    -No more building on slanted tiles. All buildings MUST be on flat ground.

    -Note that you have to create a floor plan below you before you can build a roof. Do this by using a hammer/mallet on a floor and Plan>Floor below, then Plan>Floor above/Roof.

    -The new floor plans are different from floor tiles, which will be overridden once you complete building on that plan.

    -There are NO action timers for destroying incomplete floors or roofs, so be careful where you click!

    -Ladders are generated from open floor plans as soon as you finish building them.

    -There is currently no way to shift completed furniture up and down floors. They can only be hauled up in their incomplete forms.

    These are my observations from the first hour in 1.0, so the knowledge I have is pretty sparse atm. If you have any new knowledge on multi-storied housing, do share, and I'll add them to the OP. Thanks!

  21. Posted

    That's an offer. People are free to ignore or accept that offer as they please.

    This. You guys have to remember that the player does not have to accept the offer. I can go and sell 25ql compasses at FM for 2s each, but that doesn't mean i'm ripping people off, it means i'm overpriced and probably not going to get any takers.

    Othob and Scribbles said everything else I had to say.

    You may get no veteran customers, but a fool/newbie who actually has 2s will buy one since he has no idea of market prices and probably wouldn't have the patience to browse.

    I agree, buying planks from newbies at 1i each is a shameless exploitation, free market or not. Its like throwing someone into a foreign land where he has no idea of the exchange rate then handing him a shovel to work at daylight robbery rates. Granted, there will be newbies who wanna make a quick buck and sell planks low, but the buyer should always inform green labourers of the prevailing rates before buying. Newbies increase supply and drive down prices, but should not NOT be treated like children with candy.

    Runescape has a market, why not use that idea  ::)

    I've always liked Runescape's Grand Exchange. It gave both the buyer and seller the price they're willing to pay or accept, and individuals can never manipulate the market for their own gain.

    Ah, perfect information...

  22. Posted

    Sorry, but any newbie who see's those prices will immediately be put off. I would not want to start wurm for the first time and realize that I'll have to put in so much effort just for a basic commodity. You get only one crop for every seed you plant until about 15 farming, so its ridiculous to expect a newbie will make much from one seed, let alone make exorbitant trades for it.

    Anyone who is looking for free cotton to start out with can come to the coffin just south of FL. We won't expect you to pay an arm and a leg for it.

  23. Posted

    Wait, if I read correctly, you're offering just ONE crop for SIX small barrels/FIFTEEN small nails/TEN backpacks/support beam/coffin?

    I don't remember crops/seeds being that exorbitant, people even give those out for free.  :-\