Starting out in Wurm is a bit over and underwhelming. There is no direction that you are told to go, no quests that you have to complete, and no level that you have to push to attain. Everything you do, is your choice. I suppose that is the basic point of a sandbox game – chose your own adventure.

Well, part of any adventure in Wurm is feeding yourself.

Getting Hungry

During the first 24 hours of game time, you are fortunate to have the butlers around to replenish food, water, and nutrition, but after that, you are on your own. So far, I haven't seen any meals offered for sale at any of the traders – not to say that none can be sold – but they do sell some of the ingredients if you need to buy them. For the most part, though, you should be able to feed yourself without resorting to shelling out copper.

Foraging and Botanizing

The basic food ingredients can be obtained from any grass or steppe tile. Foraging grass tiles can result in finding berries, herbs, vegetables or nuts. Botanizing grass or steppe tiles can produce herbs, veggies, and seeds, among other things. Most of these can be eaten raw to provide some basic increase in you food bar, but raw items tend to push down your nutrition and it is not really worth it if you can make a fire of some sort.

Hot food is really what you want, and that uses the Cooking and Hot Food Cooking skills.

Basic Cooking

Cooking can be as simple as combining a botanised item with a foraged one in a bowl to create a casserole or mixing 2 different berries in a bowl to create a stew. Put these into a fire and be sure to eat them while they are hot for best value. These simple recipes provide better nutrition and fill up your food bar faster than raw food. I haven't found any definitive cook book out on the web, but looking at the wiki provides some decent ideas for combinations that produce stew, casseroles, or meals. Meals are the best as far as I know – they combine some form of meat or fish with a veggie in a frying pan – and give the highest nutrition value I have been able to attain so far.

Meat and Fish

Now you'll notice, I mentioned meat or fish in that last sentence. These require the use of other skills which can take a bit of refining and some tools. The easiest way I have found to get meat is to butcher creatures that the guards have killed. Don't bother doing this on someone's deed as you will only hack up the corpse and not be able to pick any of the meat up. If you are lucky to find a dead creature off deed, you can use a carving knife or a butcher knife to butcher them. You might even find other useful items after you butcher something – furs are used in making beds and pelts are used to polish things.

Fishing takes a more involved tool – a fishing rod. To make a fishing rod, you need a shaft and a fishing line… which requires a string of cloth and a fishing hook… which requires a wooden spindle, cotton, and a log. As you can see, it's a bit more complicated to obtain, but you really need one to eat well. The log, shaft, spindle and hook are fairly straight forward to procure and make, its the cotton that is more difficult to find. It took me a few hours of botanizing to finally get the cotton I needed to make the string of cloth and then the fishing line. Down the road, you can farm cotton, but when you start out, you don't really have that option.

Starvation and Nutrition

Meat and fish form the foundation of meals, and meals are the best thing I've found so far to keep from starving. While any food can increase your food bar, meals tend to provide higher nutrition values, and nutrition slows the rate of food bar decline. I just recently learned that high nutrition can also provide a bonus to skill gain when greater than 60%. When nutrition is greater than 84% you add fat layers which are used whenever you start to starve. When you get low on food (6-8%), you lose a layer of fat, 20% nutrition, and your food bar fills back up. This starvation is good since when you are real low on food, you stop being able to perform some actions like digging. As far as I know, you can not die from starvation, but low nutrition and low food are not enjoyable.

With the basics of food and the previous post on water, you should be set to start your exploration in the lands of Wurm Online. Next time, I'll take a look at building your first house.