Dyes and Plants

[Coldren]

Before anyone says anything, yes, I am aware that UO Stratics has a guide to plant growing. To be honest, I find it a bit confusing. This must be one of the most complex systems in UO..

While I understand that you need to grow plants to make the dyes, the one thing that's really confusing to me is figuring out how/where you get the seeds for the different colors. Is there some place you need to kill mobs to get it? Or can you only get them from the Naturalist quests (Are they repeatable)? And I finally found the staining guide, so that's explained that part fairly well.

Man, if I had the ability to, I'd make a Youtube video explaining this...

I guess I'm just looking for advice on where to start. For some reason, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the prospect..

Thanks in advance!

 

[Petra Fyde]

oki.
The seeds from the naturalist quest are the rare colours. The quest is repeatable. These plants, when grown, produce no seeds, so doing the quest is the only way to get them.

The rest of the coloured plants come from crossing plants in the plant breeding system. Your best bet would probably be to buy seeds on your shard.
Plants grown from those seeds will produce 8 more seeds

 

[Silverbird]

You get the basic colours from bogs and boglings (plain, blue, red and yellow).
You get derivated colours by crossbreeding plants ( bright blue/red/yellow, orange, green, purple and bright orange/green/purple). To get bright colours, you simply cross the same colours like blue with blue for a bright blue. To get orange/green/purple you cross the basic colours with each other like blue + yellow for a green one.
You get 'rare' colours from the naturalist quests.
You can get black and white (aside from the naturalist) by mutations of any crossbreeding but the chances for those are really low.

 

[Zym Dragon]

You can get the basic seeds by killing boglings/things. They will drop red, blue, yellow, and plain seeds. The green, orange, and purple seeds are created only by cross breeding the basic plants.

Tower of Roses has nice plant information.
Tower of Roses - Gardening

 

[Coldren]

Thanks for the tips guys. That Tower of Roses guide was really good too.

I'm excited and scared at the same time to get it all going. Think if I can, I'll do a start to finish dummies guide for making dyes. I certainly got the dummy part down.

Also, does it really take 1 day to grow 1 stage? So just to get to the point where you can use it takes 9 days at best, watching them? How fast do they die?

 

[Zym Dragon]

Thanks for the tips guys. That Tower of Roses guide was really good too.

I'm excited and scared at the same time to get it all going. Think if I can, I'll do a start to finish dummies guide for making dyes. I certainly got the dummy part down.

Also, does it really take 1 day to grow 1 stage? So just to get to the point where you can use it takes 9 days at best, watching them? How fast do they die?

Personally, I think the best way to start is with a few plants (or even a couple dozen) and grow them in your pack. Plants grow on a 23hr cycle, so if you grow them in your pack you won't have to worry about your plants dying if you can't log in every day.

Yes, it takes 1 day (23 hrs) for each stage to grow.

Each day you will likely need to water the plant and/or apply a greater poison or greater cure potion. I don't bother with greater strength pots.

If you log in, but forget to tend your plants, then the following day your plant will usually drop from "vibrant" to "healthy". You would then need to apply additional GP or GC pots and Greater Health. The plants have hit points, even though we can't see them, so it can take a while to kill them as well.
Vibrant --> Healthy --> Wilted --> Dying --> Dead.

You can pollinate plants while they are healthy or vibrant.

While you can make a plant "deco" at stage 9, you will probably want to wait another 8 days so you can collect seeds first (they stack now).

 

[Victim of Siege]

You can use "Fertile Dirt" (gathered from earth elementals, ant lions, or bought from a mystic in Ter Mur) and it will give you a chance to get 2 days growth in one day. it takes 20 to fill each pot so my suggestion is buy it in Ter Mur.

 

[Beer_Cayse]

orrrrrr ... just put the smackdown on a boatload of earth eles and collect it. <shrug> easy pickin's and a small bit of gold as well.

 

[Coldren]

Ooo.. Fertile dirt. Good tip too! Thanks guys!

And thank you Zym for the explanation on the life/death cycle.

I just started making a spreadsheet of all the materials I'll need, from start to finish, to make some stains. Since I didn't have a lot of time last night, I just got some of the books and tools for glass blowing to make the empty venom viles. I also tried digging various spots to get sand for glass - Making sure you could do it in guard zones and whatnot. I have a 5 year account, although it was opened when UO launched, and all this time, I had no idea you could dig Sand..... Although with GM mining it seems ridiculous how long it takes to get sand.. Too many failures per success in my opinion....

Think I've been spending too much of my UO time mining in caves and filling BoDs, with little to show for it..

 

[Basara]

BTW, if you want to be silly, although there's only 1-2 spots to target to mine, you can mine sand in the "sandbox" between Umbra Bank and the Inn. If someone actually happens to be in Umbra at the time, they'll get so intrigued they'll ask you what you're doing...

 

[Aurelius]

One thing to note, if you plan on growing large numbers of plants either have an alchemist character, or know a friendly and relatively cheap alchemist - you can go through a hell of a lot of potions getting a big batch of plants through all the growth and seeding stages!

 

[Coldren]

One thing to note, if you plan on growing large numbers of plants either have an alchemist character, or know a friendly and relatively cheap alchemist - you can go through a hell of a lot of potions getting a big batch of plants through all the growth and seeding stages!

I thankfully have a GM Miner, Carpenter, and Alchemist, but thank you for the suggestion

 

[Trebr Drab]

Just a little thing that I don't see mentioned. When you are growing plants, you double click the pot to get the menu up, and if you click the various icons in that menu, you'll get another pop up with a brief description of what that's for.

Plants and seeds and dyes are one of the more interesting little careers in UO. I wish they had more stuff like this, for Fishing (maybe something along the lines of baits) and other skills of that sort.

 

[Coldren]

Just a little thing that I don't see mentioned. When you are growing plants, you double click the pot to get the menu up, and if you click the various icons in that menu, you'll get another pop up with a brief description of what that's for.

Plants and seeds and dyes are one of the more interesting little careers in UO. I wish they had more stuff like this, for Fishing (maybe something along the lines of baits) and other skills of that sort.

Agreed. I would definitely like more complex systems such as this. This is the first time I bothered to look at growing plants and stains, and I was pleasantly surprised (and affraid) to get into it.

I think the harder some things (SOME THINGS) are to do, the more rewarding they feel in the end.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

Tower of roses has a faulty detection scheme for Mozilla flash plugin(common for many sites) - I have Flash plugin version 10r32 enabled & it detects it as ver.0, guess I'll just stay home

 

[Yalp]

what shard are you on? I've got all the seed colors (naturalist quest excepted, you can run the quest yourself)... I'd be happy to get you started.

---nm I see your shard in your sig---

 

[Sevin0oo0]

What types/kinds of items can't be dyed?
Thanx n advance

 

[Quenchant]

If your going to grow lots of plants, I find the auto fill water pitchers, from the water ele's to work pretty well. They are easy to get.

After you get the hang of it, you might want to grow plants in large quantities just to reduce the time commitemnt. I only grow plants once every 1 or 2 years. When I grow them, I plant a fairly large batch of 120. That way I get enough orange petals and don't have to grow them for awhile again.

Q

 

[Coldren]

If your going to grow lots of plants, I find the auto fill water pitchers, from the water ele's to work pretty well. They are easy to get.

After you get the hang of it, you might want to grow plants in large quantities just to reduce the time commitemnt. I only grow plants once every 1 or 2 years. When I grow them, I plant a fairly large batch of 120. That way I get enough orange petals and don't have to grow them for awhile again.

Q

Wow! That's a freakin' lot of plants!

Don't know that I have that kind of motivation to do it on that scale just yet, despite the sense it makes. Just getting my feet wet at the moment.

Speaking of wet, thanks for that suggestion. If I come across a pitcher, I'll definitely put it to use, but since my house is right next to the water, I'm not too concerned.

 

[Trebr Drab]

Wow! That's a freakin' lot of plants!

Don't know that I have that kind of motivation to do it on that scale just yet, despite the sense it makes. Just getting my feet wet at the moment.

Speaking of wet, thanks for that suggestion. If I come across a pitcher, I'll definitely put it to use, but since my house is right next to the water, I'm not too concerned.

You'll soon be doing enough of them that you're character will be overloaded with weight. The water pitcher will be very handy.
I'm more or less a beginner, and right now I'm doing about 65 plants at once. All in a backpack, along with 4 barrels of potions. I have a set up of the things needed all stored next to a water trough. I used to do it setting the plants out, but between space, time, and organization, I went this way.

(I'd love to see it required to place them in a garden, btw. But I'd also love to see a garden that works better than just sitting them out. With smaller plants, planters, hanging planters and racks, etc.)

 

[Percivalgoh]

What types/kinds of items can't be dyed?
Thanx n advance

Hmmm... There was a thread on this .....don't know where it went. You can stain player made weapons and armor and spell books and rune books so you are colored coordinated. I forget what you can't stain