Tips & Tricks

General mouse/keyboard controls/macros:

* Ctrl + shift brings up an item tag. You can drop items directly onto the tag if they stack, you can double click item tags, and you can right click while having CTRL + SHIFT held down on tags that you don't want visible.

* Ctrl +q repeats the last thing you said, but not everyone realizes that repeated use of ctrl +q will cycle back through the things you've said. Very handy when pricing a lot of stuff on vendors.

* Ctrl + W goes the other way.

* Hold the right mouse button down and click the left, and your character will follow your cursor.

* Alt + Shift then left click someone you "follow them".

* When you have a pile of life bars but someone leaves and you want to get rid of just the one, Press Alt and left click the bar then let go and the bar will no longer be attached.

* Holding shift can move whole stacks without choosing an amount.

* Special moves can be accessed via the purple book at the feet of your paper doll. The two moves available to you vary depending on the base weapon you're holding. The moves can be quickly accessed by dragging the icons to your desktop (in the same way as magery scrolls), or by assigning them to client macros.

GGS/Skill gain:

* Grow plants on characters who still need to work skills, you can get your GGS when you log them in to water the plants each day.

* Creating a single button macro each for "last object" and "last target" is most handy. For example, say you want to chop a tree but you're running the circle of transparency. Whenever you get too close to the thing you can't target it 'cause it turns invisible. You can first target it from a distance, then use your "last target" macro button to hit it once you get in close.

* If you have a skill that is tough to gain in and you don't mind shelving the character for a bit (and have a bit of cash), buy a scroll of alacrity for the skill you need to train. Wait until it is GGS time then gain in your skill and immediately log them out. Log them back in when it is time again for your GGS gain, untill you have used up your 15 minutes.

* If you have less then 25 points in a skill, you will gain off every single attempt to use it (even if you fail).

Virtues and Gains:

* To gain compassion, mark a rune a bravehorn start and bravehorn finish... recall to the start (where the deer spawns) and then gate to the "finish" (the pond you're taking him to) you will gain compassion on every trip and you don't have to wait 5 minutes to gain the most mind numbing virtue... like you do escorting NPCs.

* The star symbol at the top of your paper doll allows you to access the virtue system. Two virtues which are well worth following are Honor and Sacrifice.

* Honor is gained by targeting monsters with it then killing them - gain enough and you can then target yourself, causing monsters to ignore you for a limited time. Monsters with more fame give more Honor. It only decays when you use it.

* Sacrifice is gained by using it on humanoid red-titled monsters (such as demons and evil mages). This causes you to lose all your fame, but gain in Sacrifice accordingly. With enough in stock, you can resurrect yourself a limited amount of times each week. Sacrifice decays a small amount each week, but not with use.

* Regular Liches (not lords or ancient) & Enslaved Gargoyles are also valid targets for sacrificing fame. Only the evil mages are actually Red (daemons are not red, though definitely low karma, and valid sacrifice targets).

NPCs (non aggressive):

* When buying large quantities, hold down the shift Key and Double Click on the item (such as 999 scrolls) and you'll buy them all.

Killing monsters/Monster behavior:

* The respawn engine checks what mobs are missing and randomly spawns any mob that hasn't reached it's quota. eg The area is supposed to have 2 boars, 3 goats and 3 bulls. If you kill everything, at the next respawn interval, the engine randomly picks one of the 8 animals to respawn. This means (for example) to get the solen queen pretender to spawn more quickly, do not kill her attendants, but lure them off instead.

* A non-player's dex rating determines it's movement speed. At about 125 a creature can move about as fast as a running, unmounted character. This is why rune beetles and most paragons are so incredibly fast.

* If you want the mob to flag on you, just teleport... all monsters automatically flag on you.

* Another way to get everything on the screen flagged on you is to open your paperdoll when you are walking. This refreshes the screen.

* One good thing to know is if your down in doom carry some kind of bladed weapon, (This is where use last object is handy!)... when you see the "unholy bones" lying on the floor double click the bladed weapon and target the bones, (sometimes you have to do it 3 or 4 times but eventually they will be destroyed) this keeps them from spawning more spawn on you. You DO NOT have to be standing beside the bones... You can actually cut them up from across the room.

* The unholy bones aren't just a Doom thing - Neira the Necromancer (the champ spawn boss) ALSO tosses unholy bones, and they can be cut just like the Doom DF versions.

Party/Group/Chat:

* UO has a chat system!

* When you are running in a party and have the party bars up, if you are a mage, you can click on the Red dot on someone's health bar to cast Greater Heal and the Green dot to cast Cure.

Crafting:

* Check the Craftsman Forum for more tips, including the numbers for the Salvage bag (it gives 1 extra ingot per item, and you need to be 101.1 or higher mining, counting gloves, to get the most ingots back).

Resource gathering:

* For bone gathering shadow wisps work really well, they drop cuttable bone about half the time. Ant lions drop bone as well. However, if you are needing regular leather, regular quality bone armor (for tapestries or rugs), you can kill skeletons for any kind of bone armor drop, or you can kill savages for arms and legs. You can also enhance this bone to get spined, horned, or barbed regular quality bone for bods.

* Double click a skinning knife while wielded or a butchers war cleaver (made by smiths, ML recipe) and target a corpse. If it can give hides and you are lightweight enough it will skin the animal, cut the hides into leather, and put them in your backpack. It will leave the leather on the corpse if you are too heavy.

* Salvage bag smelts/unravels at 1 single go, it's faster and gives back more resources than smelting individual items. NPC provisioners sell these bags.

* A good way to collect bolts from meers with no karma loss and no fighting use the spell dryad allure on the meer captains then release them and they will drop a blue bag on the ground that says meer captains bag open it up and take the 50 plus bolts and there is a bag of 15 to 20 regs also no gold but easy way to farm bolts with no danger!

* You can use empty pitchers on cows to milk them.

* Shearing live sheep gives more wool overall then shearing dead sheep.

* Not only do Tsuki wolves have bones, but give hides, and spawn very fast!

Player vendors:

* If you want your vendor to face forward but they are positioned awkwardly, you can open their menu, click on customize, then walk to where you are standing in the direction you want them to face, even if you are outside of the house at this point, and then right click the menu to close it. They will turn to face you wherever you are.

* Besides going into and exiting the customizing to make the vendor face you, you can also say "<the vendor's name> browse" to make him face you.

* Do you want to put a painting on the wall behind a vendor but can't get them off the tile? You can customize a customizable home and put a wall tile where the vendor is, commit, then go back in and remove the wall tile. This will pop them into the crate and you can retrieve them by using your own context menu on your avatar.

* Alternatively (if you have a classic home) you can go outside of your house and click on their life bar to get them to come to your location. This gives you three minutes to do whatever you need to do on that floor tile.

* This is for those that need to mark runes to their vendors - Set UOA's "use once" macro to ctrl+Q but leave UO's ctrl+q blank. Put all your marked runes in a bag and add it to the use once agent. Now you can press ctrl+q, it brings up the "rename rune" prompt plus brings up your last line of text at the same time (ie whatever you want to rename your rune to). Makes renaming tons of runes easier.

* To give money to your vendors, put in a bandage (or whatever you have handy) and price it 100,000 gp. Then have a second account buy it. Works even better if the second account also has a vendor, so he can put a similar item on his vendor for you to pay him back (note: you can also do this with checks, so you can essentially buy back what you paid for the check and put it right into that character's bank.)

* Always put a sample item or visual aid to let people see what your vendor is selling. You can lock down this in front of the vendor, or if you organize your vendor's goods in bags, put the sample/visual aid next to the bag. Nothing worse than finding a dozen unlabeled bags on a vendor and having to open each one to see what they hold. Lots of people just browse the first level.

Housing:

* If you secure your trash barrel and set user settings to "anyone".. anyone inside your house can use it. Otherwise, only house owners can use it. Also, A secured trash barrel has no weight limitation (also true for any other secured container).

* Locking down deeded items such as vet rewards, holiday items, taxidermy items, etc, that typically do not need to be locked down, will keep them from moving to the moving crate when you customize. (This also works great for those chopped up stone tables to keep them from poofing.)

* Heritage token apple trees will give 20 apples from each tree. 10 from the top half, 10 from the bottom.

* If you want to move heavy boxes inside your house (like from the first Floor to the 4th Floor) lock them down on the front steps and then customize your house. They will go into the moving Crate. Since you can get your moving crate anywhere in the house you just need to claim it on the floor you now want the boxes and take them out of the crate.

* Although you can't stick things directly into your moving crate (or the strongboxes within the moving crate), you can drag items into any other containers that are already in there.

* Some items (eg bulletin boards, soul stones) will always go into the moving crate when you enter house customization mode (even if they're legally placed). If you think you've lost something, it's a good place to look for it.

Death and Recovery:

* ctrl+shift object handles can be very useful. But 'all names' is better for finding your corpse in a pile of monster corpses.

* Using all names you can set the appearance color of your corpses name which makes it easier to find.

* I always have an insured bandage summoning Talisman on me ...Works like a charm if me and my pet die I retreat, summon bandies and it usually holds me over until i can loot my corpse or the mob that looted the bandies.

* Here's a tip for those with ML humans. If you haven't done so, I recommend doing the spellweaving quest. With the JOAT 20 spellweaving ability, you'll be able to cast Gift of Renewal and Nature's Fury pretty consistently. These are a boon, particularly when you are dead and are trying to return to your body. Nothing like having a healing spell and something that distracts spawn, all of it only requiring mana and nothing else!

* Logging out causes your pet to stable, so long as it isn't loaded with items. It'll automatically rejoin you when you next log in - so long as your character is alive. If this is not the case, then it'll rejoin you after you've ressed and relogged once more.

UOAssist:

* If you want to make UO count smoke bombs or enchanted apples... click the "User 1" in the resource menu... set the item and name it appropriately. Hit the "advanced" button and you can up to 6 items listed on your top bar. If you dont like them all running together, type what your item is, then put your cursor back the the begining of the word and add a couple spaces till it wont let you, that way you can space out your 6 items accross the top of your game window so they are easier to see.

Miscellaneous:

* To see if an item is "newbie" and therefore blessed, you can try to sell it to the appropriate NPC vendor, cut it up (if it's clothing, newbie clothes can't be cut up), or try to lock it down in your house (it won't lock down). Death robes are newbified items. If you like to wear robes, you can save yourself some insurance money by dying a death robe and wearing that.

* You can throw almost anything into a backpack or bag and hand it to a cobbler to throw it away. And a goat.

SKILLS:

Jack of all Trades:

* If you are human and not a mage... you can use teleport scrolls thanks to JoaT... conversely... you can also use tracking!

* Another JoaT perk is the inferred 20 points of Focus means you cannot use all your stamina just by running around. Elves without real Focus (or other stam regen) can't run indefinitely like a human can.

Hiding/Stealth/Stealing/Snoop:

* If you hide, you get a ten second "skill wait time" penalty. This penalty does not stop you from using stealth. The stealth wait time is only about three or four seconds, and that wait replaces the one you already had in effect, so by hiding then making sure you stealth, you'll be able to use your next skill sooner then usual.

* There is a 100% chance to hide in your own home, and when you hide and then stealth you have a chance to gain in hiding. So hiding and stealthing in your own home is one of the fastest ways to GM hiding.

* In order to hide instantly no matter how many aggressors you have on you... teleport (magery spell) and hit your hide macro right after you teleport (it used to be teleport, tab and then hide... 9 years ago... when people ran scribe hide mages!)

* You can snoop mirror images which is useful for training (if you have ninjitsu).

Taming and Pets:

* Stopped pets wander around like wild critters. Usually, a pet won't be "stopping" because you specifically told it to: feeding it also puts it into stop mode, so after doing so you must give the follow order again or it'll walk away from you.

* Telling a pet to "come" will make it use more advanced pathfinding techniques to get to you then the follow command. However, when it reaches you it'll again go into stop mode until you give further orders.

* Pets that are carrying items do not log out with you. I have forgotten to unload my packies at least once and when I relogged in, they have already wandered off somewhere. To prevent loss of pets like your beetle or packies, keep a pet ball for each pet in your bank. Works only if you did not logoff for too long and the pets did not go wild.

* When controlling multiple pets, the one you've had out the longest will obey your orders first. This means that if you tell your group to attack an enemy, the first critter you pulled out of the stables will attack first, and the monster will attack that pet (as opposed to any of your other ones).

* JoaT is also enough to allow the use of Animal Lore on tamed creatures. This reveals a full listing of it's stats, skills, resistances and damage potential. Pets gain stats/skills in the same way as characters, but gain no extra elemental resistances as their Resisting Spells skill increases. They lose 0.1 from each of their skills each time they die - that is to say, a tamer is probably worse off if his pets die then if he dies himself!

* Giving a pet an order will make it happier if it follows it. If it ignores it, it'll lose happiness. The more happy a pet is the more likely it'll obey you.

* A pet may refuse to be transferred, even if Wonderfully Happy, if you have never fed it.

* White Wyrms will eat any amount of gold if offered.

Barding:

* Have a few different Bard instruments in your pack, in case any one of them breaks and to keep others from beating your head in (ever hear a lute constantly for an hour?). Always keep one newbie/blessed instrument for emergencies. You can also insure your instrument.

Magery/Necro/Spellweaving:

* ML Humans can cast level 1-2 spells from scroll 100% of the time with only Jack of all Trades, and are about 75% chance to cast level 3 scrolls, about 50% to cast level 4 scrolls and 25% able to cast level 5 scrolls (allowing anyone willing to take the physical resist penalties to recast Reactive Armor, Protection and/or Magic Reflection). The human is also treated as having 20 Inscription, for these spells. Most spells that require Eval, aren't worth casting with no real skill. However, having a 25-27% chance of casting Blade Spirits from scroll can be useful.

* ANY character with 0 real skill can be used by a JOAT spellweaver to get a focus. So, if you get 5 people on an arcane circle, even if none of them ever did the quest but you, you can get the good focus - and it's amazing the power of a high-focus Gift of Renewal, even cast with JOAT.

* More Intelligence doesn't just mean more mana - it means faster regeneration too. Casting Bless on yourself will allow you to cast spells for longer.

* NPC humanoids in your circle count towards the power of your arcane focus (not sure if this is true of tame pets).

* Spellbooks with some level or LRC (Lower Reagent Cost) on them are constantly discarded by characters training Inscription. A human who wishes to cast the odd low level spell using JoaT can forgo LRC on his armor or reagents in his pack with such a book. An elf can do the same, to a lesser extent, if the book also has a +Magery property on it.

* Holding a Mage Weapon causes your Magery skill to drop by the displayed amount, the greatest amount of which is -29. Wands (which are easily found in bandit/gypsy chests) tend to have the MW property in addition to Spell Channeling.

* By holding a MW/SP wand and casting, you can go all the way to about 54 points of real skill while gaining off every attempt (54 - 29 = 25). It is therefore quite pointless to take the Magery skill when starting a new character, especially when you consider that the New Haven quests can enhance your early gain rate further.

* Summoned Moongates can be closed with the "dispel field" spell.