After careful consideration, DustBowl Games has ended public development of
WurmAssistant and its companion tools.
We set out to give the Wurm community a modern, secure, and genuinely capable
companion platform — something many of the existing tools, hampered by limited
functionality, narrow feature sets, and long-known internal and external security
vulnerabilities, have never fully delivered.
We are stepping away because of the Wurm Online team's continued overreach
into community-built tools.
The Wurm Online team recently removed our community forum posts — posts that were
simply gathering feedback on WurmAssistant+ and a potential
companion phone app. They did so without contacting us, and
without verifying the most basic facts: the page they objected to was a
staging environment with no pricing and no means of collecting payment of
any kind.
Meanwhile, tools that take real money for features carry on
untouched. A free feedback page that collected nothing was removed without a word,
while tools that genuinely take players' money never draw a second look.
We believe the Wurm moderation teams are directly responsible for the
volatility that Wurm Online's tooling has suffered for years. That churn —
tools repeatedly pushed out, abandoned, and replaced in an endless rotation — has
directly erased large portions of Wurm Online's history, as the
records each tool held disappeared with it.
Actions like these hurt and fragment the very community they are meant to protect,
and we wish the Wurm moderation teams would stop.
Going forward — invite-only & private
We have a fully modernized, fully working local Wurm API, companion tools, and
live maps — all built, tested, and ready. We even built secure, opt-in
syncing APIs designed to improve the accuracy of other community tools,
not just our own — something no other Wurm tool has ever done. Going forward,
they will remain invite-only and private.
For a community tool, this is close to the worst possible outcome: it keeps the
work from the players who would benefit most. We have accepted that trade-off
deliberately — a closed, invite-only project is the only way we can guarantee
that Code Club AB cannot influence the security, integrity, or
direction of what we have built.
To everyone who tested, shared feedback, and supported this project: thank you.
It genuinely mattered.
— DustBowl Games
June 2026
The double standard
Every Wurm tool breaks these terms — including the ones left untouched.
"You may not use any third party software that adds functionality or mines data
from the servers or client."
— Wurm Online Terms of Service
Read that literally, and every community tool ever made for Wurm Online is
in violation — WurmNode included, along with every map
site, every skill tracker, and every helper that has ever read a log file or
touched the game's data. The rule is written so broadly that simply building for
the game is a breach.
WurmAssistant is no different. We built it on the same raw, community-shared
code, data sources, and techniques that every other Wurm tool is built on —
the same approach the entire ecosystem has relied on for well over a decade.
So this was never about the rules. If it were, the rule would be enforced evenly.
It is not. It is applied selectively — to whoever the moderation
team decides to target — while identical tools, and tools that take players' real
money, operate in the open.
A system built to be unaccountable
Rules you never agreed to. Changed at will. Applied to the past.
Code Club AB is a European company, and a large share of its players sit inside the
EU — and both deserve far better than the terms they are governed by.
"These terms may be revised from time to time and applied retrospectively to all
accounts."
— Wurm Online Terms of Service
The rules used to remove tools and posts do not even live in the agreement you
accept. They sit on a forum, as separate "Game, Forum and Chat rules" that can be
rewritten at any moment — and, in Code Club's own words, applied
backwards to things you have already done.
Read that plainly: you are bound to rules that did not exist when you
acted, that you were never shown, and that you can
never finally agree to — because they can change tomorrow and reach
into yesterday.
For a European company serving a largely European audience, that should not fly. EU
consumer law — the Unfair Contract Terms Directive (93/13/EEC) — treats a clause
that lets a company change the deal unilaterally, without a valid reason and
without notice, as a textbook example of an unfair term.
Terms are also meant to be in plain language and genuinely accessible. In our view,
this system meets none of that.
A platform cannot be fair when its terms are designed to be a moving target.
"We can change the rules whenever we like, including for what you already did" is
not governance — it is a blank cheque.
We are developers, not lawyers, and this is our opinion — not a legal ruling. But
these are exactly the kinds of terms that consumer-protection law exists to question.
To the Wurm Online team
We have no interest in a feud. If you want a healthier tooling ecosystem — and a
community that trusts you with it — this is where we would start:
Talk to developers before you act. A single message would have resolved this entirely.
Apply your rules consistently. A free feedback page should not be removed while tools that take real money for features carry on untouched.
Modernize your community guidelines. They have not been meaningfully updated in years — rewrite them to be genuinely inclusive of the developers and players who keep the game alive, and make clear what is actually allowed before anyone invests months of work.
Offer an official, supported API. The endless churn of community tools — and the player history lost every time one disappears — is a direct consequence of there being no stable foundation to build on.
Treat the people building for your game as partners, not threats.
And take an honest look in the mirror. The soulless, corporate direction Wurm
Online is heading in is something to be ashamed of — and your steadily falling
player numbers show it plainly.
What DustBowl Games stands for
We build modern, secure, community-first software — and we don't compromise on the
things that matter to the people who use it.
Community first
Tools built for players, with players — not extracted from them.
Secure by default
No known-vulnerable shortcuts, no quietly harvesting your data.
History that lasts
Your game's history should outlive the tool that recorded it — never be erased by it.
No hidden gates
No surprise pricing and no pay-to-unlock features — except where third-party licensing genuinely requires it (app-store fees, code-signing certificates, and the like).
This isn't the last thing we'll build.DustBowl Games keeps shipping modern, secure, community-driven software. Come see what's next.
