[Lumberjacking] Are logs/resources probabilities known?

[sos440]

I returned UO about 2 months ago, and has lumberjacked quite a huge amount of boards/resources. Based on my owns statistics, it seems that

ordinary 72.92%
oak 16.54%
ash 4.64%
yew 2.42%
heartwood 2.05%
bloodwood 1.03%
frostwood 0.41%

This is probably inexact because I gathered them from both human/elf characters since around 30 lumberjacking. But if this is exact, I would get only about 4000 frostwood boards out of one million boards! This is really insane.

Q. Is it that I am simply out of luck? Or is there anyone having a better statistics or even an exact data from dev?

I've literally piled up hundred thousands of boards, so in view of the law of large numbers I think this is quite close to the exact probability...


p.s. For resources, I got

bark fragment 61.62%
luminiscent fungi 18.78%
switch 12.77%
parasitic plant 6.25%
brilliant amber 0.57%

So my theory is that

bark : fungi : switch : parasitic : amber = 100 : 30 : 20 : 10 : 1

Also, the estimated probability that I get a resource from a chop is 16.47%, so the theory is that you get a resource out of 6 chops.

 

[Sarak]

i am similiar on lumberjacking as i do alot of it. luck suits seem to have similiar results; race of character i have an elf and human seem to be similiar as well; in the old days there were certain areas and trees that seem to spawn certain types of wood. as mining is also similiar. they are random now. i do mine and lumberjack in feluccia as it is double whatever spawns there. but the percentages are about the same. i haven't been able to play as much due to health reasons; but that has been recently. gathering resources has always been tedious, with the exception of leather; the only hard one is regular as it is monotonous to kill certain creatures for the resources using a butcher's war cleaver *it puts the resources in pack. i.e. ice wyrms give barbed, dragons horned; wyrverns spined and lizardmen. that is the only resource gathering that is consistent with the spawns of the monsters/animals you slay. as far as imbuing ingredients they too do not spawn on everything that is suppoosed to be on corpse when killed. such as essences, goblin blood faery dust etc. hope this helps.

 

[sos440]

It's not bad that I am not particularly out of luck, though the percentage is discouraging.

As for leathers, I didn't know that such a nice tool - I mean, butcher's war cleaver - does exist in UO! I should get one right now. This is a really helpful comment.

 

[Lord Frodo]

It's not bad that I am not particularly out of luck, though the percentage is discouraging.

As for leathers, I didn't know that such a nice tool - I mean, butcher's war cleaver - does exist in UO! I should get one right now. This is a really helpful comment.

Harvester Blade is better than the Butcher's war cleaver.

 

[Basara]

I remember someone giving out numbers long ago, to where the

0.5% Frostwood
1% Bloodwood
2% Heartwood

Sound right.

Not sure about the others.

But, as to the source for numbers, I don't know now.

 

[Basara]

As for the Harvester's Blade (and that diversion from the main subject), I just tweaked the Tailor FAQ


What special properties do Skinning Knives, Butcher's War Cleavers and Harvester's Blades have for gathering leathers?

These weapons can, under the right circumstances, save you LOTS of time. Normally, when you skin a creature, you get its hides (that weigh 5 stone per hide) in a pile. You then have to get those hides from the creature's corpse, then cut those hides with scissors into "Cut Leather" which only weighs 1 stone each). The Skinning Knife and the Butcher's War Cleaver make this a MUCH easier job, by bypassing several of those steps.

A Skinning Knife, if held in the character's hand, will cut the leather DIRECTLY into cut leather, and (if the character's weight carried is about 360 or less) put those cut leathers directly into the character's backpack.

A Butcher's War Cleaver takes a couple steps out of this. First of all, while the Skinning Knife has to be held for the special feature to work, the BWC only has to be in your pack, and you use it as your cutting tool. Second, if you actually DO wield it as a weapon, it is a Bovine Slayer that does double damage to cows, bulls and Gaman.

A Harvester's Blade takes the BWC even a step further. A two-handed weapon with no properties (but can be imbued), it is a semi-rare item, having been introduced for some of the Thanksgiving events (if you got a plucked turkey, you can give it to a butcher and receive the HB back), and some of the cornucopia/horn of plenty type things from those events and later (forget specifics) can still produce one of the plucked turkeys as a rare drop when emptied.
Used as a cutting tool, it is superior to the BWC in the following aspects:

• ALL items gained are increased by 10% or more. This includes leather, blood, meat (of various types), feathers and scales. This is for each 10 items, plus each fraction of 10. So, 12 leather would become 14 (1 extra for the first 10, then another 1 extra for the last 2).
• Any bonus gained from race is included in the BASE amount of material to be increased. So, if an elf gets 10 leather, and a human gets 11, normally, the Harvester's Blade will increase that to 11 for the elf, but 13 for the human (10+1, +1+1).

No resource gatherer should be without one or the other of these (my personal tailor uses a Reptile Slayer Skinning Knife, and kills everything personally, up to drakes & wyverns for horned).

 

[sos440]

Lord Frodo and Basara, thank you for the precious suggestion! 10+% increase sounds quite sweet.

 

[Tuan]

I remember someone giving out numbers long ago, to where the

0.5% Frostwood
1% Bloodwood
2% Heartwood

Sound right.

Not sure about the others.

But, as to the source for numbers, I don't know now.

I believe wood works exactly the same as mining, where you get 50% of TREEs as normal, then 25% Oak, 10% ash, 5% yew, 3,2,1 , or maybe 2,1,0.5 as Basara suggests. That said, even when you do find a tree that gives special wood, it will only give a set percentage. Each tree will ALWAYS give the same mix of normal + colored when it is giving colored, so some will give you 20 total logs, but only 5 colored, and some will give you 12 total logs and 8 colored. These % are fixed, the only thing that changes is what type of wood a given tree produces.

A tree has an, I believe, 1% chance to change color any time it is chopped and respawns, and then overnight after server maintenance as well. So the key is that when you find a tree that gives a high % of colored wood, keep going back to it, and skip the ones that only give a low % of colored.

That said, the average ratio of colored to normal is supposed to be roughly 50%, so... that means that the original poster is pretty close to the expected value.

BTW: the same principle holds exactly true for mining as well.

 

[Basara]

I believe wood works exactly the same as mining, where you get 50% of TREEs as normal, then 25% Oak, 10% ash, 5% yew, 3,2,1 , or maybe 2,1,0.5 as Basara suggests. That said, even when you do find a tree that gives special wood, it will only give a set percentage. Each tree will ALWAYS give the same mix of normal + colored when it is giving colored, so some will give you 20 total logs, but only 5 colored, and some will give you 12 total logs and 8 colored. These % are fixed, the only thing that changes is what type of wood a given tree produces.

A tree has an, I believe, 1% chance to change color any time it is chopped and respawns, and then overnight after server maintenance as well. So the key is that when you find a tree that gives a high % of colored wood, keep going back to it, and skip the ones that only give a low % of colored.

That said, the average ratio of colored to normal is supposed to be roughly 50%, so... that means that the original poster is pretty close to the expected value.

BTW: the same principle holds exactly true for mining as well.

And, also, the race bonuses are as follows for Lumberjacking.

• Elves get more chops (which can either be looked at better efficiency, or really ironic) and more extras (bark, fungi, parasitic plants, amber).
• Humans get 11 logs per chop, instead of 10, and about 25% higher carrying capacity compared to the other two races.
• Gargoyles, as far as I know, get nothing.

Mining's progression goes something like 50% iron, and the other 8 ores progressing 8x/7x/6x/5x/4x/3x/2x/1x, where "x" is 50% times 1/36 (x=1.3888888% repeating). before 2007, the info from the devs indicated that the numbers in-system may have used x=1.4 so that Valorite was actually about 1%, not 1.38%. However, one of the publishes in 2007 said that Valorite chance was doubled (raised to 2%), and it was never stated where the additional amount came from (other colored or iron) to keep it at 100%.
So DC is 11%+, Shadow Iron just under 10%, Copper about 8%+, Bronze about 7%, gold about 5.5%, agapite around 4%, Verite under 3%, and Valorite around 2%. The pre-2007 numbers are in the Mining Essay.

the 8x through 1x numbers also apply roughly to BOD pulls on the armor side of the equation (counting in weapons cuts the chances in half). We tested this out about 7-8 years ago.

Tailoring (BOD only) and Lumberjacking numbers, though, are just screwy, as there appears to be no rhyme or reason
Tailor BODs: If colored, 60% Spined, 30% Horned, 10% Barbed.
Lumberjacking: I don't remember what the numbers exactly are, as I noted before. All I remember is that they were absurdly low for the top 4 woods, and we were all pissed about that 10 years ago when they were introduced.

Also, remember for calculating the chances, you need to ignore the LOG amounts, and count just the TREE as 1 data point, because of so many chops even on a colored tree will be normal wood, and for the highest end woods, one or two high-payout trees could skew board numbers.

So, the chopping numbers above could reflect something like (this is a wild-ass guess - don't hold me to it)

• 1% Frostwood Tree (but about half the logs, on average, being regular wood - applies to all colored trees)
• 2% Bloodwood Tree
• 3% Heartwood Tree
• 4% Yew Tree
• 10% Ash Tree
• 30% Oak Tree
• 50% regular wood tree.