Wurm Online has been featured as one of the must play MMOs in the April Edition of the US PC Gamer Magazine. In an article that reports on the state of the top eleven MMOs, Wurm Online is reckoned against titles like Eve, Aion, Everquest, Fallen Earth and other top names.

"Leave Your Mark," the title says on page 67. It warns the reader that "if you are the kind of gamer that needs constant instruction or a constant stream of side quests to keep you moving, this game is not your friend - it's your vicious new arch-nemesis." All of us involved with the game, from player to developer, moderator to musician know the truth in this - Wurm is a not a game for the feint of heart, but neither is it a game limited to hard core gamers - it is for people who are not afraid of rolling up their sleeves and getting dirty while enjoying the best community on the net - whether they have ever played an online game before or not!

"What is the endgame? Colborate or go solo. Found a city and rasie an army. Become a nomad hunber, or just make fish stew and juice for a living." Who needs an end game when you are wrapped so tightly in a world that isn't going to end?

So, to all those who have come looking for us having read the magazine, welcome! Come on in, pull up a log, sit down and chat to the people around you. It can be a hard life in Wurm, but an incredibly satisfying one, and at all levels from beginner to old die-hards like BaldEAgleOG featured below. Stay a while, roll your sleeves up and get digging - trust me, you will love it (the PC Gamer crew certainly do!)

Wurm music is now worldwide on iTunes!

Our sound artist Joss told me he got some of the Wurm songs published on iTunes as part of his new record "Oohs, Ahhs and Nice Guitars".

Joss told me 'there are three Wurm songs on there: "Johnny" which is about griefing by chopping trees, "Little Miss Jane" which tells of spiders attacking a farm and a self-proclaimed hero getting cooked by lava and "Travelling", about a trader travelling round Wurm and always just staying out of trouble, "all those little crocs snapping at my heels..."'

You find it by clicking Here (you will need iTunes installed, obviously!)

Go get!

Yep, the Lords of Wurm have confirmed that BaldEagleOG has become the first player to reach 99.99 skill in any of the crafts. It is not particularly surprising that he has reached it in Digging, the action in Wurm that separates our game from all others.

Skills are an integral part of Wurm in the same way as they are in real life; you want to do something, not only do you have to learn how to do it, but you have to practice to get it better. But although there is some friendly competition over skills, many players just gain them as part of getting on with life and don’t worry too much about needing to be the best; they just build what they need to make life easier.

I tracked down BaldEagleOG earlier. He has been playing Wurm since just before Gold 1, and has played on Wild since it started.  He is pretty typical of many of the players of our game, just enjoys it for what it is and has neatly slipped into the fiction that the game is almost the real thing. "I help friends and allies when I they need," he points out when I asked him if he uses his super digging for anyone else. He lives in Valhalla on the Wild server, one of the more established towns.

"It took a long time to get from 99 to 99.99; not sure exactly, but probably six to ten months. Most of my skills are just built playing and building what we have."  When you first start Wurm skills seem to rise very quickly. You dig for a few minutes and you move from 1.00 skill to 2.00 and you think, "well, that was easy!" But it doesn’t take long to find out that the higher your skill, the slower the gain and the greater the pain!

"I have been checking my digging skill every time I log in and randomly while in game." BaldEagleOG rests on his shovel. "Recently the biggest gain I would see was 0.000008 a day; never seen it get more than that since I don’t know when."

At 37, Bald Eagle sits about in the middle of the Wurm community. We have some who are young teens, a few of us who are, well, at the other end of the scale, and a great mix of male and female and people from all round the world. But what defines this game better than anything else is that all the players will be equally pleased for BaldEagleOG; Wurm does not seem the sort of game where players get upset that other’s have higher skills than they do. They are far more likely to ask the master of the skill to come and dig a road for them (Be warned, BaldEagleOG!).

Of course, he is not the only player at these giddy levels. Look out for Tukster, Dadd, Pryath, Tich, Spage, Vorg, Ecrir and Pentaxpilot, all of whom have over 98 digging and one or two are right on BaldEagleOG’s heels.

So, what’s next? "I want to get mining, masonry and woodcutting up to 99.99," BaldEagleOG tells me. "By the way, my digging is at 99.991531 at this second, is it possible to get to 100?"

I don’t know. I suppose he will find out in 1060 days, give or take!

Forget Second Life, Twinity or even Facebook! If you want a proper online community, then you should be building a village on Wurm.

Wurm has always been about community. From the very earliest days Wurm Online has offered the functionality of creating and managing villages where a group of players could band together, deed some land, recruit citizens and work and have fun together. Land on Wurm has never been the ridiculous extravagance it is on other games. For a start, you don't actually need a deed to build your own place, but owning a deed means you get guards to help keep it secure, decay of buildings and walls is very much reduced, you get an exclusive village chat, and everyone else knows exactly what belongs to you.

And on the Wild server, players take their villages to extremes - building huge earth walls, employing lots of guards and making their home as impregnable as possible.

At Wurm Online, we know these communities are incredibly important to the game. Players organise them selves to make sure that between them they have all the skills needed for the village - blacksmith, carpenter, weapons smith, priest, boat builder (if they are coastal), forester, and so on. This is so much more than many of the social networks can come up with. On wurm you can chat, share ideas, talk about last night's soap, make new friends, and all while you are building your house, farming your fields, fighting a huge scorpion or, on Wild, building your defences and training your fighters.

A Brand New Deed System

To go along with all this, we have just launched a new and improved deed system. We have lowered the price of land so that you can build larger villages, we have made the system much more variable so that you are no longer fixed to just a few sizes, but customise to your own specs. And we have made the hiring and firing of guards more versatile so you can really just employ the guards you need depending on your situation.

It all goes towards making Wurm Online a more detailed and interesting place to spend your online time. And we will keep making developments, bring out new ideas, make things better or closer to reality, and offer more and more ways for people to interact with each other while they are playing their favourite game. At Wurm, we don't believe that gaming and networking are different things - and Wurm Online intends to prove it!