Wurm Online dished out a new patch to players this past week, with changes for the Jackal server, updates crafter signatures, new hitching posts for critter, and quality-of-life tweaks for building and cultivation. Code Club also teases better ship control with sail furling, underground farming, UI scaling, the loyalty system, animal husbandry improvements, combat updates, and more on the way.
But that was Wurm Online itself. If you play or own Wurm Unlimited, you should probably pay close attention to this section of the forum post, which specifies that the company is trimming back its support of Wurm Unlimited, which is the standalone version of the game on Steam that allows players to host their own server of the game.
“Our focus for Wurm Unlimited is shifting from content updates from WO to bug fixes and more modding support,” the studio writes. “We’ll be adding the client modloader to the vanilla WU client which will allow for easier control of mods as well as many other features. We’ll be working closely with server admins and modders via the Discord server in providing as much support as we can. While this does mean the end of content updates from us, our goal is to provide as much freedom as possible to the modders to continue to push what is possible in Wurm.”
In other words, if you want the Wurm Online content, you’ll have to play Wurm Online itself, not one of the player-hosted servers, unless those servers do the content porting themselves. As we type this, an official notice doesn’t seem to have been given on Steam itself.
The move is especially interesting since just a few weeks ago, Code Club announced that it had appointed a new product manager for the game and was roadmapping the path to putting Wurm Online itself on Steam.
“This should not disrupt development too much, but the direction of our work will change for the months leading to the Steam release – there’ll be more focus on some of the long requested QoL changes (good time to put some more in the suggestions forum!), new UI, combat changes and early game improvements. The majority of mentioned QoL and UI changes is aimed at improving the new player experience and retention, but it should also make for a much less frustrating experience for everyone while playing the game. There’s still some new content features going out soon for you to look ahead to, but that might slow down a bit for a short while. One of the features we’re planning to introduce soon is a new premium loyalty system, which is our way of saying thank you in a better form than yellow potions :) All of those changes will of course go to both current Wurm Online and the Steam version. Right now we aim to keep the differences between the two to a minimum, but that might still change. We’re open to the possibility of a server merge in the future, joining the new servers to the Freedom cluster, but only if it makes sense and doesn’t impact any of the servers negatively. Whatever happens, the original Wurm Online servers will get the same attention and features the Steam ones will. As previously mentioned, the Epic overhaul update that was scheduled to launch late this year is no longer on our radar, due to the work direction shift the Steam launch requires. Instead we’ll be working on incorporating those ideas into a PvP server we intend to launch alongside the Steam PvE server.”
