The web site of chicchicboom

JAN 23 2024

Some days its just all sorts of peaceful in Wurm.

JAN 4 2024

New year, old projects!

NEED TO MAKE

another pottery bowl
fork
spoon
"knife" - not "carving" knife or "butchery" knife, but... "knife" knife apparently
upgrade the marble baking slab

I've been plinking away on the left side of the back hill, deciding to try and carve out my "amphitheatre" idea to see how it looks/functions. The original idea was to have the middle squares flat and then do a series of risers/tiers like a rice paddy farm (so incline / flat space / incline / flat space) but I'm not sure that will work now that I'm actually digging out the area. Since you can't get an actual 90 degree angle and i don't want to make the inclines too steep to be traversed easily, that means a maximum slope on the risers at 24, and since the "rings" only have three actual rising sections, that means a maximum height of only 72 across a width of 6 tiles which kind of doesn't seem like enough?

For the moment, I've chipped down the top flat section to a 90 slope from the base level, and this weekend will chip it down to 24 slope on the risers and 9 slope on what would have been the flats (leaving the top flat alone). If I don't like that, then the other option would be a 20 slope on the risers and 10 slope on the 'flats' but that might not be enough differential visually?

Don't know til you try, as usual. As this is a fifteen tile wide project, I don't want to add more rings to this until I see what slope options are pleasing to me.

Also, the Yule mod worked great, changing everything to the winter tilesets for the week of Christmas which was quite lovely as there was no snow in real life. Santa showed up along with the julboard and the pretty holiday lights!

Some other shots around the deed, paved out a front walk aong the little inlet where the lavender farm currently is, and haphazardly planting oleander above it to start getting sprouts happening for those eventual hedges as well. That area will, I think, eventually be tiered risers as well for horse breeding, but we'll see.

DEC 12 2023

Progess-ish. I stumbled across that there are flowerpots in the game now and also pottery pots for growing herbs, so that was another mod later to allow me to grow things in the pots that Wurm Online can do, but wasn't patched into Wurm Unlimited. You can just put them in this large planter rack but then you don't see all the invidivual pots which I thought was a bit of a shame, so I pulled most of them out to litter on the ground. Then I put some flowers around the little house and I do very much like these! I believe (hope?) you can dye the pots so whenever I get around to start working on the How To Make Dye Project, I'll have things handy to experiement on.

Also, further work on the back road currently heading nowhere.

DEC 4 2023

Okay children, finally cooking with gas again.

Bit the bullet about a week, week and a half ago and installed a fresh (most recent) clean install of Wurm Unlimited. Carefully and painstakingly ran Ago's modlaunch/patch code for both server and client. Copied over my map file. Copied over my character file(s). Then went through and installed a whole pile of mods, one at a time.

It's... working? It's working! I cannot seem to get the NoDecay mod to function as it ought to, and I have a literal stray element in the master menu that says "Test Entry" for some reason and induces a five second countdown when pressed but everything else seems to be doing as it ought, my game loads and even the Creature Mod is back to populating zebras across the landscape. Huzzah as they say! Huzzah!

Started dredging out the middle pond to rock
Started digging to rock on the left hand side of the road to the back lake, trying to get a three lane path through there. Half a small hill in the way. This is gonna take a bit but at least it's started.
Got around to fixing the top deck slide to the sea, so that's all nice and flat and can start taking fencing if I want to start moving animals.

MAR 19 2023

So turns out the reason my games started loading is that I was using an un-patched launcher, so all the mods were... well, not loading.

This is a problem. Oh, god is this a problem. I want those mods, or as many of them as are still working. After thirty seconds of thought, I think loading through the patched launcher but with mods removed from the mod folder is likely the way to start - if it works, then I can add the mods back in one by one and see what breaks.

MAR 3 2023

So the problem with Wurm Unlimited is that its so incredibly well not-maintained. It breaks constantly if you have any sort of custom mod installed and even if you don't. Step away for any amount of time and you come back to your game and nothing loads, everything's jammed, nothing works. Then you have to spelunk through forums for any shred of a clue as to what you need update, install, uninstall, reinstall and what magic number of beads and threads you have to shake over it to make it function again.

The last few times I've tried to load my game, I cannot open any gates. As I happened to log out inside a horse paddock, this is a problem. I've logged in, wondering to myself if somehow the problem has automagically fixed itself in the interim I was away, only to find out that nope, the gate refuses to budge, I'm trapped and my only options are to 1) bash down the gate with whatever tool I might happen to have in inventory (which is probably an awl or something equally helpful) or 2) do the aforementioned spelunking through the number of years of updates, trying to figure out which particular thing broke the functionality of doors that are able to swing open.

I do not envy me at all.

UPDATE:Server launches for about five seconds, enough to open your inventory and then crashes. I can see a dead horse on the ground and a live one in the next paddock over so at least some of the data is still available. Is it just an update that's needed? Let's find out!

UPDATE: Okay, not sure what I did, but got the server to load and let me out of the gate (Hurrah! I've only been trapped there for about four years). Wandered around the deed a little bit, tended my crops, groomed my animals, buried the one that died (rest in piece, Venerable Horse). It looks like my horses have reverted to basic brown so I presume the fancy Creature Mod is no longer working. I will next attempt to spelunk its issue, because that one mod was the reason for living.

MAR 1 2019

Okay, I feel like I'm really on a roll here with the decision making and the flattening and the reshaping and generally actually getting my deed to look like somebody lives there instead of just squatting on a hillside.

FIRST OFF BEST NEWS - I finally managed to somehow stumble on the magic combination of files that got the CreatureMod working and now suddenly this morning half my horses turned to "regular bay", one is a "skewbald" and saw a zebra! I didn't have a chance to take pictures since I was just there to groom and do some raking before work but that's okay, squeeing project for this weekend. My god, this is so great!

In less exciting news, my trash heap doesn't seem to be functioning properly, things aren't decaying inside it. I checked and its on the blacklist in my NoDecay mod so it should be working but... yeah. Head scratching time on that one.

Built a temporary house on the top left my intended homestead so I could finally justify having an oven for cooking. Made a larder (wow, serious carpentry requirements on that, I barely had 8% chance of creation and had to brute force my way through it) and a new food bin. Time to figure out cooking!

Spent a day shuffling debris from all over the deed into bins so now my extra dirt, rock shards and logs have a place to live that isn't literally everywhere. It's super tidy! I'm sure it won't last.

Since I still haven't relocated my mine and gone spelunking for quality veins of fun things to build with but needed new fencing, I opted to go with sandstone for the shiny new horse enclosure and I'm really liking it! The color is so understated and warm, I might have to rethink my slate-everything plan.

Finally, Winter Arrived. I fucking love winter, it's my favorite season. Took a crap ton of screenshots but I'll be nice and only post a couple of them.

FEB 22 2019

So. Yeah.

TWO YEARS LATER: THE RETURN

Okay, not exactly two years but just work with me here. After the last entry below, I decided I was emotionally exhausted from trying to get myself another horse and figured I'd take a week off, let my brain rest and coincidentally avoid all that surface mining I had yet to do. Fired down the server and... forgot to turn it back on. For MONTHS.

But I'm back, bay-bee. The good thing about firing down the server is that everything is exactly where I left it, magically unaged or decomposed. The bad thing is that in the intervening time Wurm Unlimited has been updated quite a few times and a bunch of mods which were working suddenly.. well, aren't. So I had to go back, re-read how to install things, uninstall both client and server software and set everything up again with mixed success. I did finally get the No Decay mod working properly again which honestly was the big one.

I started to read up on all the updates I missed out on and pretty quickly got overwhelmed so that's a future project for a weekend when I have a bunch of time and the urge to learn things.

On the plus side the mega break left me pretty excited to get started again. After wandering around for some hours and staring at things, I figured out what my original thinking was and finally spent some time setting up a proper spreadsheet layout for the deed so I had something concrete to work from. The original 5x5 central area just really wasn't going to be big enough to accommodate a big ass oak tree in the middle so I expanded to 7x7 and then got to work on the surface mining needed. That took a couple of days of very steady chipping but woot, we're there!

Sadly, I realized late last night as I was pacing the perimeter and figuring out what needed to happen next and in what order, that I'd forgotten to account for the "landing" tiles at the front of the house area and had left those as included in the 7x7 so now my front entrance will look ... well, not exactly wonky, but not exactly as I was envisioning it either. So either I extend my front by those three tiles or I back-chip another row out and shift everything that direction by one tile.

While I was at it, I counted the height from base ground to central courtyard height and the magic number was 109 dirts which is a stupid ass number honestly. If I ramp down over 5 tiles which is what I originally thought I was going to do, the height will be too high for unimpeded travel speed but going 6 tiles gets it to a nice comfortable 18 slope with one at 19 slope and nobody is going to notice that differential (least of all me). But that ends up closer to the circular pond than I wanted but whatever, I guess. I knew this was going to be tight fit, right? Right.

So figure out the ramp (option: bridge? can I do up a bridge instead? what would that look like?) and then figure out the height I want the little stable area at and chip that down. Once THAT'S done, open a new mine and start digging. I've decided to do the outer buildings in the black stone with inner pieces and paving in white marble with accent pieces in warm sandstone.

Wurm is never ending, yah.

SEP 17 2017

Took a tiny risk, grabbed a horse and went travelling back to where my crappy memory was pretty sure there was a bunch of horses on a hillside. It actually wasn't TOO scary, mostly because I hugged the coastline so at the very least I knew I could get home. Ran into an old brown bear and saw a bunch of scorpions up on the mountain but the only thing that actually attacked me was a mountain lion and I was able to dispatch it without too much effort.

Brought another horse home and then ran into TWO avatars hanging out by the water, Fo and Magranon. They both seemed sort of sad, hanging out, gazing across the lake.

AUG 24 2017

It's funny. It doesn't seem like much is happening in Wurm day to day. You log in, seems like you spend forever doing whatever and then you log out and go jeez - didn't get much done, this is soooo slooooooow.

Then you look at a couple of random screenshots and go... woah. Shit actually is going down, bro.

Decided to just go with my house plan as is, because trying to come up with something more spectacular is just beyond me at the moment. Decided to line up the ramp to the widest edge of my pond because I have to stick it somewhere and just... started. Some days later, there is dirt everywhere, the area is roughed out and sure enough, there's a whole bunch of rock in the way so I'll have to dig out further and chip it down.

It's a mess. On the plus side, the view should be pretty good!

With the new material changes (my GOD, Wurm is actually being updated on a frequent basis lately, its like a whole new world out there!), I'm thinking of going slate for the walkways/ramps because I think the dark stone ought to look spectacular, especially if I can do tasteful borders and fences in a lighter.. something. Sandstone slab? Pottery? Dunno. Now I just need to find a slate vein, I guess.

Also while I was up there digging out the eventual house, I took a wander down in that direction and there's another lake right behind me which is super pretty. Thinking I can build a nice cut-through road down to it and do my orchards on that side perhaps instead of on the other side of the pond ridge, could even possibly even locate the horse farm there.

AUG 19 2017

Havin' us a good time! Baby horses and trees and, like, food.

AUG 17 2017

Okay, small steps as always.

Leveled the entire path around the water, digging up where necessary, chipping down the rock and putting the dirt back down. Then spent some quality time in front of a forge:

Making and improving forty needles to raise Blacksmithing skill from 24 to 30.
Making 12 copper lamps (35% chance! oooh) and improving them to 25ish, which is the quality of my Poor copper vein.
Planting said lamps equidistant around the water.
Standing back to admire the effect.

Various random screenshots: One of my spirit templars making his rounds in the dark, freaking out the deed owner at times. Jackal rising. What happens when you leave stumps around and Wurm really, really thinks you need more trees. This morning after what appears to be a night of storms.