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!