'I'm bleeding to death:' In 2009, Wurm Online was still the wild frontier of online gaming

I'm bleeding to death. I've got six minutes before I'll be too exhausted to do anything but lie down and die. I wish it was the worst of my problems. But it's not. The real problem is that… gamers are bastards.

Lost. In the middle of a dense forest, crowded with ravenous mountain lions. I'm kind of ravenous myself, since Egg and I had all our belongings taken away. Egg's my only friend in the world, and right now he's staring death in the face over a mile away. I just don't know in which direction.

This is Wurm Online. It is a very good game for redefining your concept of a bad day.

Slitted sunlight shines down on me from the treetops as I tear up grass for plants I could try and make a bandage out of, or herbs for a poultice. There's nothing here. My health bar ticks lower as blood trickles from the wound in my arm. Probably only five minutes left now.

Egg's messages are still coming up in my local chat, censored by the game. "You know I figured you guys might do this," he says. "But I also figured you might not be ?%?!s."

"egg do you like karma?" asks Darkdragoon.

"dark your too slick," says Cndo.

"i think and anilize the situation," says Darkdragoon. "i quickly see wats going on. and i dont rest til thiefs lose everything."

Egg disappears from my local chat, and I'm not kidding myself that he managed to get away from this place. The man is dead.

Two hours ago I was a little yeoman with prospects and dreams, working in the fields around Glitterdale, one of Wurm's starting towns for new players and their talentless peasants. I was chopping trees, foraging, whittling, and watching my skills tick up. Just how bad things went in that time is a testament to Wurm's goal: to make a realistic fantasy MMO. Reality, let's not forget, is a bitch.

"OK," my flatmate announced from the other side of our living room, gazing at the map on his laptop. His name is Egg, but don't judge him for it. "West of Zion, south of Emerald Coast. There's a lake for water, clay, and it's in the middle of a forest." That was an hour and a half ago. The two of us decided to march out into virgin wilderness and build a homestead.

The chance to play pioneer is the most exciting aspect of Wurm Online. In a game in which you're reliant on raw materials, everything from herbs to trees to mineral veins gets very thin on the ground. Since you can build anything anywhere it makes sense to go off and find somewhere lush to painstakingly put together your own shed, farm, village, inn, whatever. There's no such thing as a proper border. The nearest you get is a rough estimate of where you can walk without catching an arrow with your thigh. Welcome to the Dark Ages.

Setting up in a forest has a second advantage. Egg isn't a good enough blacksmith to make a lock. We're terrified some jerk will stumble across our shack when we're logged out, and make off with our meagre possessions.

"OK," I say. "But what are we going to do? Drag our carts over that mountain?" I point at my monitor and the grey expanse of rock between us and our new home.

"Yep. Man up!" Egg says. And that's exactly what we do.

We drag the two carts, laden with everything from pottery to anvils, up a mountain. We make progress. Dragging the cart might be an almighty pain in the ass, but it only makes my excitement more potent. Soon we'll be armpit deep in Wurm proper. We'll be clearing a space for ourselves in the forest, discovering local landmarks, finding the best fishing spots. We'll be throwing up walls and planting barley for bread. And then…

"There's someone here!" Egg almost shouts. There's enough tension in his voice to make me think he's talking about our flat, but he's referring to a figure emerging from a cliffside cabin we're about to pass. We keep moving. No sudden movements now. It pays to be careful when the single toughest animal you can safely slay is a cat.

The guy says hi. Turns out we've got nothing to worry about. He's just minding his own business putting up the support beams for a house extension. The soil around his cabin has been turned and packed, and the brown, dry earth looks hungry for development.

We press on, reaching a plateau. As the sun sets on our backs we get our first look at our new home.

"Look at all this shit!" I tell Egg as he pulls his cart up beside mine. The virginal landscape below is packed with treetops that only occasionally break to show a lake or stony hilltop. Maybe we weren't being ambitious enough. We could build a farm out here, with an archery range. Then if we got really good at skinning cats we could make leather armour, and before we knew it we'd be warriors worth a damn.

Farm life

Wurm does have players in dragonscale armour, but it's that much more impressive because absolutely everyone starts off as a mouthbreathing yokel. It's funny reading MMO developers' claims that their game "doesn't start with any kill-20-rats quest... It drops you straight into the action!" The first thing you do in Wurm is find some clay, cut some kindling, build a campfire and make a pottery bowl to eat out of. You don't mess with rats. Those bastards will chew the veins from your legs in the time it'll take for you to look up from your farming.

We decide to leave the heavy carts where we'll be able to find them again and check out the surrounding area quickly. What we find is Emerald Coast.

The player-drawn maps you find on the Wurm wiki are charmingly shit. It turns out Emerald Coast is a few eras up from the lonely guard tower it was labelled as. We stroll out of the woods into an opulent albeit unfinished village. Abandoned stone carvings of children and demons line the lifeless paved streets, which link huge wooden townhouses with gaping holes in their sides. The place seems proud and cold.

Something turns in my stomach as I notice that the local chat box, which lists all players within a mile and is currently listing way too many people, contains chatter about myself and Egg. Someone called Darkdragoon is bitching that "thouse nubs quin and egglet wont go away from this area." Something's changed in the atmosphere of the game, as if the water I'm in is now too deep to stand up in. I look around but can't see a damn soul.

"Look, everyone is a nub once," Egg says.

"mayby looking 4 a home to rob," says Dragoon.

"we shouldnt be mean to new players," says a guy with the name Cndo. He asks why we're here and whether we're thieves, though by that point Egg and I are hightailing it back to the carts.

"hold on now," says Cndo. "we do need slave labor."

By the time we get back to the carts it's the dead of night. In Wurm that means not being able to see a damn thing.

"We can keep moving if we go to the shore," I realise. "We go around Emerald Coast to the shore and walk along it until sunrise." It's a brilliant plan. The best bit of thinking I've done all day. So off we go, and after just five minutes tramping down the coast, tugging stuck carts out of the sand, a coastal village looms at us out of the moonlight. Bayview has problems.

The human element

Everything in Wurm takes damage and breaks over time, so this abandoned settlement has become a warren of fences, locked and unlocked gates, and building materials seemingly dropped by the builders at precisely the location they lost interest. We have to find a way through.

There's something organic about Wurm. Instead of creating goals or quests or NPCs the developers spent all their time creating a rich selection of player actions. The whole world, from the settlements to the industry to the pitched battles, has been put together by players. It's like EVE, but with more narrowing your eyes at passing strangers and slowly equipping your axe.

Twenty steps into Bayview I realise I'm taking ludicrous damage. I turn to find the biggest black bear I've ever seen, swinging at me with its paw. I scream out loud under a hail of bone-crushing swipes, drop the cart, sprint away from the thing and finally drop off a ledge into the sea. After Egg's stopped laughing he goads the bear further down the shore then swims back to me. I'm not going to be climbing anything anytime soon, but I'll live. We're poking through the darkness for my cart when our local chat starts buzzing again. It's Cndo.

"may i help you boys," he asks. He slides out from behind a dilapidated building, a shortsword in each hand. It's a weapon choice that sets my nerves on edge. The man's flashy, which means he's more likely to be an idiot, which means this is more likely to come to a fight. The permanent skill loss that comes with dying makes this scary enough, but we're in the middle of nowhere and I'd wake up back at Glitterdale. No way I'd make it back here before someone looted my corpse.

Egg senses the hostility too. "He is looking for his cart and trying to avoid a large bear," he types. Cndo replies with a flurry of short messages.

"hold on there. those arent yours. the cart. and stuff in it. not yours. you stole it." My sinking feeling gets worse as I examine Egg's cart and see what Cndo's seen. It has BAYVIEW carved onto it. Once upon a time someone living right here made it. I look around for my own cart and make out Darkdragoon in the distant darkness, stock still, staring at us from the forest's edge.

"we dont take too kindly to thieves," says Cndo. "as you can see. you are busted."

I start thinking to myself that maybe if we're only accused of thieving that's not so bad. These guys aren't bushwhackers. Maybe with a little diplomacy we'll—

"We've seen you gimping about guys," types Egg. "It's not like you're a crack squad of heroes. Seriously do you think you're Professor Layton or something. What of it is yours, exactly? What did we take? Do tell. Since you have SPIES and EYES and all that good stuff."

"What are you DOING?" I ask Egg in real life.

"It's fine," he says. "They can't prove we've broken any laws so if they attack us now they'll be tagged as outlaws."

"Dude that stuff came from nowhere near here," Egg goes on. "All you are is thieves pretending to be heroic heroes. So how about you just turn about and go back home to wherever the hell your home is.'

"This is my home," says Cndo.

"Nice bear," I type.

"ty" says Cndo. "He's the mascot."

The rising sun begins to cast faint light all across Bayview. The town's less scary and more sad in the day.

Darkdragoon starts typing from his now less-shady vantage point. "they have all teh missing stuff in the cart. 5 gold ore 10 clay 11 flasks 10 iron lumps. small anvil. iron cauldron. small barrell. practice dummy."

"figures," says Cndo.

"You STOLE MY CART?" I first shout it, then type it. They must have dragged it away during the bear attack. I start to feel angry, then queasy. I don't know which way is up anymore. The stuff really isn't ours. We found it all in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere that was so old the fence had crumpled, and that makes it fair game.

I'm pretty sure Dragoon is using Cndo, and working his zeal for justice to get his hands on our loot.

This is one more reason why Wurm distinguishes itself from other fantasy games. There is no good and bad here. There's just humans.

In the events ticker I notice Darkdragoon is, apparently, now being mauled by a mountain lion. This is my chance. I run off from Cndo's bullshit, through the town toward the forest where Dragoon was. If I can find my cart I can grab it and Egg and I can walk out of here and there's nothing these two jerks can do about it, unless they have the balls to stick blades in our backs.

I'm just realising finding the cart is going to be a nightmare when I come face to face with my very own scrawny lion. I got lucky with the bear. Not this time. Two claw swipes on the same arm turn a medium wound into a severe wound, and it's all I can do to turn off autofight and keep running.

It's only when I stop that I notice how badly I'm bleeding. I have no idea where I am. How did everything go so wrong?

I look over at Egg's screen and see he's looking at a second cart. My cart. Dragoon must have dragged it back to Bayview.

Cndo is still talking. "admit you stole and you can keep stuff."

"Here is our deal," Egg barks. "You keep the cart you actually stole from us, and you just plain $@!% off and go back to your paranoid ways." I watch as he approaches the cart. From behind a building another lion leaps out and starts savaging him.

"Oh, God," I say out loud. Dragoon must have deliberately dragged it here. As long as he's still lugging his cart, Egg can't run.

"You know I figured you guys might do this," Egg types, slowly dragging himself away to no effect. He has seconds to live. "But I also figured you might not be ?%?!s."

And then he dies.

Far off in the forest I find lovage, and combine that with some rosemary, moss and mud to create a poultice. It stops the bleeding. I'm going to live. I look over at Egg, the real Egg, in our front room.

"I'm going to kill them," he says. I have no idea how serious he is. "I'll build a fucking catapult. I'll create cave-ins when they're mining. I'll come back with fire and friends and burn their town to the ground."

I have none of his anger inside me. I just feel hollow.

Back in the forest, Cndo is sending me private messages.

"meet me somewhere. i have your cart. dragoon has gone crazy." I wonder if he's noticed it's not their stuff or if it's just a trap. I tell him to "?%*! off" anyway.

Cndo's final messages arrive as I take my best guess which way Glitterdale is and start hiking. "tell egg to be careful. if he comes back. dragoon is unpredictable."

Life goes on

A week has passed. Egg and I have moved into an abandoned hovel called Cliffside Cottage. We're renovating it with a couple of friends. I'm the group's carpenter and lumberjack. It's a nice life. I thoughtlessly cut down some of the young oak trees a neighbour planted around his house yesterday, but he was good enough to accept my apology. I'm borrowing his scythe today. The fields of wheat and rye I planted are only tiny, but they're a start.

We don't talk about what happened on the other side of the mountain. There's no way Egg's forgotten about it, but he might have let it go. I really hope so.

Egg's the group's blacksmith. You see him working his forge all night, churning out butchering knives, iron files and nails. One day he'll be able to make weapons and armour, and he's already talking about making chainmail for our group. He says he wants it as a uniform of sorts.

It's not something I want to think about. My cotton plants need weeding. I take my rake and smile as I sink into the soil.