Wurm Online News

The release date is set! A big update with the previously announced features is coming on Monday, June 24th, 2024.

As it includes multiple new features and the launch of the new tutorial server, the update process might take longer than usual. The servers will go down at around 16:00 CET on that day and will be unavailable for a few hours.

While the update will ship all new features onto the live servers at once, not all of them will be available instantly. We need some time to set up and verify the new portals and the new tutorial server, and might even have to delay their launch a bit if something unexpected happens during testing.
Everything else will be available right after the servers come back up however. We are doing it this way to keep the server downtime for you as low as possible.

Below you can find a preview of some of the biggest changes. The linked topics are test server announcements or feedback threads, so don't take them as final. We are still tweaking things according to your feedback, and will continue to do so after release. The full patch notes will only be available on launch day.

[h3]New tutorial server: "Guidance"[/h3]
We are launching a new server aimed at new players together with this update. It has some special features and restrictions, and should make learning how to play Wurm a lot easier.
It will feature a new quest system and some other special changes such as no deeds, a skill limit of 30, no strong dangerous creatures, and infinite newbie buffs.
Please check out its announcement post for more details: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/5998312279131303318

[h3]New portal system[/h3]
We are finally linking Southern Freedom Isles and Norther Freedom Isles together through a portal system, allowing you to play with any of your characters on any server, including the new tutorial server.
While there are some restrictions for item transfers and such between some clusters, you'll finally be able to move your character to any server.
Please check out its announcement post for more details: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/5998312279131231252

[h3]Rework of the action system[/h3]
The whole action system has been reworked, and a few changes to existing features were made.
Your action queue will be visible in the user interface now, the way toolbelts work was changed and a quick bar was added to the UI. You'll also be able to set default action behaviours for specific item combinations and keybinds for almost any action. For more details about these changes, please check out the public testing announcement of this feature: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/4196868529812485777

[h3]Client renderer improvements[/h3]
The client received some major rendering changes, which are available on the test server for a while already.
New features include a new terrain renderer with terrain tessellation, better lighting and environment reflections, eye adaptation, improved compatibility for MacOS and a better rendering performance in general.
Fore more details about these changes, please check out the public testing announcement of this feature: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/4156338308018336474

Guidance is a new 2048x2048 server, aimed to host more of a controlled learning experience for people first starting to play Wurm.

Playing on Guidance will differ significantly from the regular Wurm experience.
Here is a list of the more important differences:

• No deeds - players will instead use the new enclosure mechanics, which will allow them to protect a fenced area around their house, where the building’s permissions will be enforced. This will also prevent the fences that make the enclosure from being bashed by other players. To prevent abuse, the maximum size of the enclosure will depend on both the Carpentry skill and the size of the building
  
• Players will only be able to own a single house on the entire server
  
• House packing - players will be able to move their house to a regular server of their choice, packing it into an inventory item.
  
• Skill limit - players will only be able to reach 30 skill, and accounts that transfer there will be capped to 30 skill (non-premium accounts are still limited to 20 skill)
  
• No priests - players cannot become priests, and current priests will not have their priest abilities on this server
  
• Limited creature type spawns - more dangerous creatures will not spawn on Guidance, so there’ll be no trolls or hell hounds chasing newbies there
  
• No rifts, holy sites, uniques
  
• Quests - inside the starter village, you will be able to find an NPC giving introductory tasks to anyone that wishes to do it. These will touch on multiple subjects that you need to learn to get started in the game, with new, more complex quests unlocking when you finish the simpler ones. Players can get some small rewards by finishing the quests, to help them on their way and motivate them further
  
• Newbie buffs will not run out while the player is on Guidance
  

Some smaller QoL changes will make their way into the game when this releases as well, including:

• New players that still have the newbie buff will no longer drop items on death - so on Guidance, new players will never lose items when dying
  
• Scavenged iron rocks will give more iron
  
• Players will be able to bash their own structures without 21 Body Strength (so also without premium)
  
• Bashing bonus normally applied only while bashing structures on deeds, will now apply to all situations where an owner is bashing a structure, both on or off deed
  
• Many actions will have their duration reduced, and low stamina will increase the action time less than before. This will affect low skill action timers the most.
  

More details of the changes will be in the changelog released on update day.

We’re also planning to launch a staff led village, as an exception to the no deed rule, to further assist newbies in learning the game. Having staff members around new players should also help us learn more about the pain points they encounter so that we may tweak the experience further.

Players will be able to use a portal to exit or come back to Guidance at any time. Items will only leave that server, but may not be brought back there.

We don’t want to prevent people from playing with their friends if they want to learn the game on Guidance, so we allow everyone to use the portal to get there. However, it is not a regular playing server, so we do not recommend anyone to move there full-time. You can also expect moderation to be much more strict on the new server, so any intentional disruption to the actual new player learning experience won't be accepted there.

Since it’s a lot of fresh concepts that’ll make their way into the game with this, we will likely tweak it significantly after release according to feedback and how player retention looks after it goes live.

Here are some pictures of the new quest UI and the new journal window (work in progress), which should become even more of a guide for the early game experience.



We're also ready to unveil the details of the new portal system. For more information, see the separate post here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/5998312279131231252

We're not ready to give you a release date for Guidance and the other projects, but we intend to post a separate announcement with the release date in the upcoming days

Hey everyone!
The release of the previously announced server portals is just around the corner. Therefor we'd like to give you an overview of the details, so you can prepare yourself accordingly. (We will reveal the release date of this and other already shown off projects in the upcoming days)
In short: you will be able to play with any character on any server, as the portals will allow you to travel between Northern Freedom Isles (NFI) and Southern Freedom Isles (SFI), making them no longer separated.

How will it work?

• A blue portal crystal will appear in every starter town on PvE servers and on Chaos
  
• Using it allows you to teleport to any starter town that has a portal in place
  
• This also includes Guidance, the new starter/tutorial server
  
• The portals allow you to teleport between SFI and NFI servers/starter towns, no more separation
  
• You can use any Epic portal on SFI to play on Epic
  
• You can use any PvP portal on NFI to play on Defiance
  
• Skills, affinities and tome effects will transfer between NFI/SFI
  
• Your bank money and premium time will transfer between all servers
  
• Item transfer restrictions may apply
  

Item transfer restrictions

• Items won't transfer through the portals, unless it's on the same cluster and already transferable by boat (NFI/SFI)
  
• On Guidance (the new tutorial server) items will transfer, but only into one direction: off the server when leaving it
  
• No-drop items or other special items on the same cluster will transfer the same way they would when crossing the server border with a boat
  
• The master cape will always transfer between all servers
  

Epic

• Epic transfer mechanics stay unchanged
  
• You can use any epic portal on SFI servers to get there as usual
  
• If you are on NFI, teleport to SFI first using the new portal system, then use any Epic portal
  
• The current Home ServerElevation portal mechanic for starter towns stays in place
  

Defiance

• Defiance transfer mechanics stay unchanged
  
• You can use any PvP portal on NFI servers to get there as usual
  
• If you are on SFI, teleport to NFI first using the new portal system, then use any PvP portal
  

Chaos

• Freedom starter towns are connected to the portal network
  
• Player made kingdoms will receive a special mechanic which won't make it into initial release
  

Selection UI Preview
To make everything clear and easy to understand for (new) players, the server transfer portals will receive their own user interface. Below is a work-in-progress preview from the test server.

It lets you cycle through all available destination servers and shows some basic information about them, with an option to hide PvP servers.

After selecting a server, more details will appear. It shows all available portals on the destination server and lets you select one.

The UI clearly states what's tranferred and what's left behind, so there should be no surprises.

The portals will launch together with the new tutorial server (Guidance), which is explained in detail in a separate announcement:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1179680/view/5998312279131303318

The previously announced client changes are now on the test client, and we’d like to invite all of you to check it out and help us iron out the quirks.
All features and most optimization work mentioned here is limited to the modern (default) renderer, as that’s where we focus our efforts with most of the improvements.

[h3]New terrain renderer[/h3]
The terrain renderer was completely rewritten, mainly in order to make it use significantly less graphics card memory and to allow us to add more features there easily.
You should encounter less pop-in as terrain gets less detailed in the distance, as that’s handled in a way that should do it further away from you, and with some transition animations

Terrain tile textures have been remastered to double the resolution, and we have added dynamic mesh tessellation, which adds small geometric details on every tile near you. This is currently limited to the high Terrain Detail setting, but so far, it didn’t seem to affect performance that much, for how large of a visual improvement it is.

For future improvements, this will also allow us to make distant terrain more detailed quite easily, but it isn’t in scope for the initial release.



[h3]Eye adaptation[/h3]
Right now, the level of light that’s received by the player’s eyes remains a sum of the light in the scene, similar to having a real world camera set to a constant exposure, so at some point if the lighting is too intensive, it completely washes out the details as the intensity of the colors to be rendered goes beyond what your monitor can show you.

In situations where there’s a lot of light in the scene, white objects get washed out completely and turn into a white, blinding blob. You’ve definitely seen this happen with snow, marble items and other bright colored objects, as those will reflect most light.

Test client has a new feature that automatically adjusts the exposure, it's always enabled on the modern renderer. In simple terms, this reduces the overall brightness of the scene if it detects too much light, and increases it slightly if it’s too dark, just as your eyes do. This has a bottom limit so you will still need lamps and lanterns at night or in caves.



[h3]Lighting and environment reflections[/h3]
Shaders that apply lighting to the world have been changed to use some more modern formulas, to a bit more closely resemble reality. It's now much closer to how most newer games do lighting.

This mostly affected metallic objects, which will now show more complex specular highlights and reflect the environment around them. Those reflections include only terrain and the sky, to avoid impacting the client performance negatively, but that’s enough for things to actually start looking like metal.

Intensity of reflections may have to be tweaked on a case by case basis, as retrofitting such changes to existing assets means it won’t look immediately perfect on everything. Expect some things looking too shiny, or too dull - please report it on the forum (here) so we’ll know to tweak it.



[h3]World Lighting changes[/h3]
You may have noticed sunlight still affecting the world during the Wurm night, hitting the objects from odd angles without casting any shadows, often giving everything around you a yellow hue at certain times of night.

This was fixed, and in the phantom sunlight’s place, moons now emit light and cast shadows just like the sun does.

Multiple moons cannot cast shadows simultaneously, as that would be very bad for performance, so the game decides which of the currently visible moons is active based on their size and how high up in the sky they currently are.



[h3]MacOS compatibility[/h3]
Modern renderer will now finally be available on MacOS, along with all of the improvements mentioned here. So far, there’s only one feature that isn’t working the same as on other systems, and might not make it there any time soon - MacOS cannot use an OpenGL version higher than 4.1, and that blocks us from being able to enable our rendering depth precision improvements.

That normally reduces or even completely removes Z-fighting in the distance, the issue where objects flicker as if unsure which one should be rendered first, due to computers not being great with large floating point numbers.

We’re unclear at this point about the performance of the modern renderer on newer Mac devices - it shouldn’t differ much from Windows, but older Macbooks with weaker GPUs may struggle. I was only able to test it on a 2015 Macbook Pro so far, but it’s a rather slow machine by today's standards so the performance was poor as well.

I’d like to hear from any of you that play on Macs about the performance and whether you encounter any graphical glitches or crashes.

[h3]General performance[/h3]
Other than the terrain changes improving the performance, the client update includes many smaller optimizations that should lead to overall better performance, and even less VRAM (graphics card memory) being used. We hope that allows you to either run the game with better settings, or just to run more clients at once without having to resort to the legacy renderer.

Our ambient occlusion effect, generally a very demanding setting, should now have improved performance everywhere, but especially when combined with a high display resolution, where it used to kill the framerate the most.

[h3]Testing feedback[/h3]
All of the changes mentioned above are now on the test server, and will soon also arrive on live servers. If you get a chance to test it, please let us know here if you encounter any issues, client crashes or poor performance compared to the regular client.
The screenshots here are only a limited overview of the changes. When you post feedback, please base it on what you encounter on the test client.

With any issues, the console.log file generated during the same client session is key to us working on fixing those. That means you have to copy it over before running the client the next time. You can find it in your Wurm data directory, named console.Username.log

Don't only post the error part of the log, if you find one in there, as the log file also contains your client settings which are usually needed for us to reproduce the issue to be able to fix it sooner.

If the reported issue is only regarding materials of certain items becoming too shiny, or too bland, please post it in the following thread: https://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/202062-material-issues-after-client-rendering-update/


[h3]Coming soon after[/h3]
There are certain things that won’t make it to the launch of this client update, but will follow soon as a part of smaller updates.

• Java runtime upgrade - we aren’t able to proceed with this until we get a new code signing certificate, to sign an updated version of the launcher with, which we have had some issues with acquiring as the process for that has become more complicated in the last couple of years. We are in the middle of getting that certificate, but it may still take some time as a lot of verification is involved.
  
• Lamp shadows - this is something we’ve shown off a few months ago. Lamps and other small light sources will finally cast shadows, rather than lighting up areas behind obstacles like walls, however it needs more optimization work to limit the performance impact in scenarios where there are a lot of light sources around a small area.
  

You can find a guide for joining the test server here.
For direct test related feedback, please use the forum thread: https://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/202063-client-upgrade-overview/

Say hello to the "Regal Bed", the cozy answer to unrestful sleep! It is rumored that it helps against back pain too...

This bed skin is now available in the Marks Shop at any settlement token through May/June.


"Regal Bed - Snoozing the night away in this comfy bed - absolute bliss"