A while back, while on my blogging hiatus, I decided to change some things up as far as Wurm goes. My old deed, Cherryglade Farm, was in the NE of the Independence server, and while it was a lovely area (and still is, to my knowledge), I wanted a bit of a change. My husband and I both had separate deeds, which made no sense, as we enjoy opposite things in game, but the setup of our deeds weren’t very conducive to us just sharing a single deed. Plus, we were feeling landlocked, and wanted to find a nice oceanside place.
When the Exodus server opened back in September we rolled alts down there to explore and check it out. Exodus is very different from Independence. The server itself is full of rivers, bays, waterways, and canals, which makes it very conducive to boat travel. There’s not as many trees, it’s not as mountainous, and the rock layer isn’t as deep so it’s easier to get mines started. Of course, when the server first opened there were no maps, player-made or otherwise, so when you never knew what you were going to find around a particular bend.
I finally found a place with promise. After crossing the scorpion and crocodile-infested desert to the SE of the spawn point, making a run for the lake to get away from a trail of angry critters, and swimming across a bay and around a mountain, I came upon a nice green area next to the mountain, with a small natural inlet, tons of trees, a tar pit nearby, and (my favorite) a ton of lava spiders in the area. Really, I love lava spiders, because they light the night up like a ton of little bonfires. Bonfires that will chase you down and violently eat you.
So, Cherryglade Farm was disbanded (sadness) and Avonlea Bay was born! Hurray! I packed up my two characters, my husband’s two characters, and all of our valuables into my sailboat, The Chumley, and started the trek down to Exodus. Of course, I wasn’t exactly sure how to get to my chosen area, but after about a 3 hour sailing trip, plus another hour & a half of combing the Exodus coastline for the landmarks that I had noted in my earlier explorations, we were finally at the new place.
First order of business: Terraforming. Remember I said it was relatively flattish? It is, but I still had to cut quite a bit into the back section of the deed in order to flatten it completely to set up my horse pens. I easily dug at least 2k dirt during the terraforming process, and most of that went into building up a small dock area next to the mountain, pulling the tiles directly out of the water. I added grass and trees, and, in the process, created love and knowledge meditation path tiles, which was a VERY happy surprise!
I have 8 eighteen-tile horse pens, which also doubles as 144 tiles of farmland right at the ocean’s edge. Our mine at the front of the property is silver, and the back mine is iron – eventually we’d like to connect the two mines, if possible. The back of the property is as of yet mostly unused, we use it as a tree farm (for boat/carpentery materials) for the moment. We built an inn (The Wild Boar Inn) with 4 beds along the waterside, which is free for anyone to use, as well as a small building for my husband’s shipyard.
Through a series of expansions, Avonlea Bay ended up a whopping 51 x 57 tiles of deeded property, plus 10 tiles perimeter on all sides, which costs us about 9 silver a month for maintenance. We don’t have many neighbors – as a matter of fact, there is an entire forest behind us that is still undeeded and mostly untouched. We did pick up two really great villagers from an abandoned deed in the area, and just yesterday a new player set up a small deed just to the east of us on the coast – and it turns out that it’s one of our old neighbors from Independence!
We are considering reducing Avonlea Bay’s size back down to something more reasonable, as we we really don’t use THAT much land. Future plans include a kitchen (The Pig and Pheasant), guard towers at both the front and back of the property, more farm space and separate housing for the villagers, which I’m pretty sure we can still squeeze into a reduced deed size. I would also love to somehow set up a road to Esert (the spawn point) to make travel easier, but after looking at the map of Exodus, that might be tricky.
My favorite thing to do in Wurm is Animal Husbandry – it’s a great little mini-game and a ton of fun. I started with eight wild horses with no traits, and now (in the 3rd generation) have 5 stud males and 10 females, all with 2-3 good traits each. I just got my first 4th generation foal the other day, and my goal with the 4th generation is to save only those foals with 3 or more good traits and no bad traits. My AH skill is almost to 39, once it gets to 41 I’ll be able to start selling foals, which should help bring some income in and start Avonlea Bay on the path to self-sufficiency.
