General mouse/keyboard controls/macros:
Newbie Tips (Production shards):
Powergaming a newbie on a new shard (by Harlequin)
GGS/Skill gain:
Virtues and Gains:
NPCs (non aggressive):
Killing monsters/Monster behavior:
Looting:
Party/Group/Chat:
Crafting:
RESOURCE GATHERING:
Bone/Hides/Wool:
Miscellaneous:
Mining Ore:
- 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 to "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.
- When gaining skill make sure you have another skill set to lower if you are at your skill cap, else you could waste time and resources trying to train a skill that won't gain.
- In New Haven you can do escort quests around town every five minutes and earn 500 gold per escort. It's a great way to make some starting cash to buy a horse, buy up new skills, etc.
- Before you do the dark knight quest, make sure you have at least 35 magery and are using a recall scroll to recall off the rune. It is a one time use rune and if you fizzle, you're out of luck.
- There is some debate about which character a new player would want to create first in order to advance quickly. Melee characters are often the preferred choice as it costs very little to start them off and they don't require expensive magery reagents.
- Another method of making money as a new player is NPC buying and selling. You can buy items from an NPC and resell to another NPC, netting a profit. Items that you can do this with are sold in bulks of 500. Keep in mind that every 1k of an item you buy the price will raise by 1 gps, and every 1k of item you sell the price will lower by 1 gps. You will also need to sell items to the appropriate NPC - the blacksmith will not buy fishsteaks, for example. Good places to buy items are in Felucca (though there is a risk of being killed by other players), good places to sell items are Luna and other places where a lot of players buy items from the NPCs, therefore bumping up their prices. This is a decent way to make some gold, but unless you are working your magery skill by recalling around and marking, you will not gain any skills this way.
Powergaming a newbie on a new shard (by Harlequin)
- Newbie quests in Haven are a very good source of starting skills and blessed equipment eg undead slayer spellbook, blades for cutting corpses, lrc wizard hat. Blessed equipment remain with you even when you die.
Use KR to create a char, it allows you to pick 4 skills and 120 skill points, plus the dark knight quest. The 2D client only allows you 3 skills and 100 points.
- For the first char, you will want a scribe mage to make money/mark runes/make runebooks/scribe scrolls. You also want to start off with skills at 49 instead of 50 to take advantage of the newbie quests. The NPCs woun't offer to apprentice you if you already have 50 points in the skill they teach.
- I like to create a character with 49 scribing, 49 necro (to get the initial necrobook/regs), minimal magery (to get the initial spellbook/reg), any remaining points into chiv (spellbook). Use an elf with maxed-out INT.
- First thing when you emerge in New Haven, buy a packy. You need it to carry the gold you will be making. Next, find and escort your first NPC. Put whatever you don't need in your bank, and all gold/regs/blank scrolls/scribe pen on you.
- Accept the focus trainer's quest (she's just next to the bank). Just double click her, read through the instructions on how/where to train and accept her quest. Additional note on the "where" - A gong sounds when you enter an enhanced skill gain area that you are eligible for. Also, an icon will show in the buff/debuff list (the one you get when you click the blue button in your character status gump)
- Make your way to the mage shop up north. Buy out all the blank scrolls and nightshade from the 4 mage vendors there. Remember to buy 1 nightshade for each blank scroll. Don't spend all your gold on blank scrolls, only to find that you have no money to buy nightshade. Accept apprentice quests from both the meditation (3rd floor)and inscription trainers (2nd floor).
- Stay on the second floor library room where the inscription trainer is in, and start scribing poison scrolls. That 1 point in magery that you started with, gave you a pouch with 30 of each reg, and a spellbook with 12 spells, including a spell called poison. Poison is one of the cheapest spell to cast/scribe. You should hit 50 inscription in a few tries (2 tries if extremely lucky). Double click the inscription trainer to collect your Hallowed spellbook. This book has 1st-5th spell circles all filled and is an undead slayer to boot.
- You can now do the necro quest or continue scribing until you hit 50 med or 50 focus or the shop keeper runs out of blank scrolls. The latter should happen first. But rememember to collect your rewards from the respective trainers once you hit 50 med (lrc wizard hat) or 50 focus (mana regen bracelet).
- Once you feel like taking a break (eg shop keeper ran out of scrolls, waiting for mana regen, it's getting old, you've earned your first 10k of gold), you can work on getting a full necro book. Go to the necromancer building east of the mage shop. Accept the necromancy quest.
- Head out east to the old Haven ruins. You will hear the gong to signify that you are in the right area. The undead here will not aggro you. Equip your undead slayer spell book, then use the necro spell "Pain Spike" to kill the undead. Zombies are the weakest, Skeletons are a bit stronger, Spellbinders are a bit stronger than skeletons because they cast curses. Should take you no time to get from 49 necro to 50 . Now go back to the necro trainer and collect your full necro book.
- Now you can continue scribing to make more money, train scribing higher level spells, work on the Magery, Resist, Hiding/Stealth/Ninjitsu apprentice quests, or go loot LRC, +skill, resist items from public corpses at popular hunting spots. Once you can cast mark, you can mark runebooks for your other characters and start creating a warrior or even crafter.
- 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, until 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).
- Newbie quests in Haven are a very good source of starting skills and blessed equipment eg undead slayer spellbook, blades for cutting corpses, lrc wizard hat. Blessed equipment remain with you even when you die.
- Use KR to crate a char, it allows you to pick 4 skills and 120 skill points, plus the dark knight quest. The 2D client only allows you 3 skills and 100 points (great tip!)
- When training a new skill on a char I always remove all other skills I do not need to a soulstone, you get much faster GGS gains that way.
- 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).
- 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.
- Saying 'Balance' to a banker NPC tells you how much cash is in your bank, but does not include checks - use a house placement tool, and when you pick a design the real total you have in the bank (cash and checks) is shown as the 'bank balance' available to build the house.
- If you wish to avoid having a quest NPC's health bar and targeting circle pop up when you double click them, use Ctl/Shift to bring up all names, then double click their name tag. This will bring up the quest gump without the health bar and targeting.
- 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.
- Like how dex determines a mob's speed, their int seems to determine their pathfinding ability. Ore elementals aren't very bright and are slow, +1 for using a bow.
- 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.
- Another point re Unholy Bones, the amount of chops required to destroy them varies, and relates to the the strength of the monster that'll spawn.
- As Connor says, a mage weapon elemental slayer bow works great. Use a couple of +magery jewels to offset the -magery.
- To tip a cow keep double clicking on any cow....eventually it'll fall over!
- Do the same with a boar and it will squat.
- Let's say your training or just farming with Swoop. Isn't it a real pain when he flies up onto the rocks and just sits there? (editor note: yes!) I have a strategy that will drag him off the rocks 9 out of 10 times. Get the Swoop's gump up. Move you and/or your pets as far away from the Swoop as possible and then attack. Works 9 out of 10 times.
- A tamed goat (or mountain goat) will eat anything you feed him inside a leather bag. He will also eat leather sandals (at least) without any bag.
- Sometimes corpses of mobs stack on each other and the bottom one doesn't open (it gives you a "you must wait" and opens only one of them). Just hold your use last object macro down and you will eventually open it. You can also move a few tiles away and hit your last object macro, then move back and hit it.
- If the corpse is in an inaccessible area, you can cast teleport/shadowjump and target the corpse.
- Disable gump offset so that all containers/corpses that you open will be placed at the top right of you client window. Then open your loot bag and position it directly below that position (Ed note: I do this! Very useful). This way when you loot, you minimize the dragging you have to do and thus speed up your looting. Minimizing mouse movements to improve efficiency by up to 500% is taught in designing efficient human interfaces like application frontends or webpages.
- Similarly try to set macro keys to cast spells/use skills as much as possible, especially those you use often or those you need to use quickly (like recall and sacred "retreat").
- Mimic common macros that you use on different characters - assign the same buttons to the same macros for different characters so you are comfortable swapping characters and won't hit the wrong buttons in a panic.
- Cutting up copses and animate dead/spirit speak closes that corpse's gump for everyone that has already opened it. Can be used to buy you a bit of time to loot a public'ed corpse if you are far away, a tad annoying to other people though.
- 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.
- 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).
- When filling BODs, fill the exceptional ones you have first. If you fail to make an exceptional bone armor piece that you need, you can use the normal to fill a normal bone bod, and save on resources that way.
- Like water troughs, looms do not require you to be near them to use.
- For efficiency of space, add ons like anvils/ovens that you do not need to dbl click or target to use, but simply need to be within 2 tiles of it, can be placed on floors above or below you.
- Also for efficiency, you can cram everything in a small space. Use a teleporter to get to the center of the room. Keep all containers within 2 tiles so they are within easy reach. You can plop an arcane circle down in this area too.
- You can dye some containers with a furny tub - crates stack higher than chests so if you need more containers it may be worth it to use them.
- Using a square goza mat raised up several times, you can place an anvil or small forge on the mat, then place it's counterpart underneath. This is true for any single tile add-on. Multi-tile add ons can be "broken" using goza mats, and can be usable in their smaller forms. See the Homes and Castles forum for unusual and useful ways to use goza mats.
Bone/Hides/Wool:
- 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.
- Not only do Tsuki wolves have bones, but give hides, and spawn very fast!
- When harvesting bones, if you are turning the bones from the normal piles/parts into the crafting resource, if you go overweight, the bones you cut will fall to the ground. HOWEVER, if you put them into a Salvage Bag, and use the "Cloth" or "All" option, all the bones will but cut into a single pile in your backpack, even if overweight.
- 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.
- Shearing live sheep gives more wool overall then shearing dead sheep.
- 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.
- If you use the "shift" method to buy all of an item at once, the stack of items will fall to the ground if it will not fit in your pack, so be prepared to immediately pick it up and stick it into a pack animal (if possible) or your bank. The downside to trying this near a bank is that someone faster than you might pick the pile up before you and stick it in THEIR bank box instead.
- Besides getting the gargoyle pickaxes via BOD rewards, they can be farmed off gargoyles. I camp hyloth for daemons and gargoyles to gain fame/karma/arties/gargoyle pickaxes/normal gems/gold. I admit that there are better ways to farm fame/karma/gold, but none will give me gargoyle pickaxes and arties at the same time. Because I am also switching between daemons and gargoyles, I also seem to get arties faster. So I'm killing multiple birds with 1 stone and saving time.
- Verite and valorite spots change very quickly, however agapite spots remain for much much longer. Use a garg pickaxe in conjunction with a prospector's tool to bump those aggy spots up to valorite.
- As Connor says, a mage weapon elemental slayer bow works great. Use a couple of +magery jewels to offset the -magery.
- Like how dex determines a mob's speed, their int seems to determine their pathfinding ability. Ore elementals aren't very bright and are slow, +1 for using a bow.
- Valorite elementals reflect all melee/bow damage that you do, a miner with low dex and tactics in this case works well because you actually get a chance to heal yourself +2 for using a bow.
- Elementals (and other monsters) have problems getting past the steps of player houses, and get stuck like the animals/npcs that loves to block your recall spot. So just plink away with your mw bow, +3 for using a bow. This is another instance where you can turn something annoying into something you can use beneficially. NOTE: don't use this method for non magic casting monsters, as it is considered monster blocking.
- The types of coloured ingots I use most are dull (for filling bods), shadow (for swampy armour), bronze (for tinkering golems), gold (for enhancing luck) and valorite (for enhancing resists). So this is how I upgrade my ore:
Iron gets upgraded to dull via prospector's tool
Dull gets upgraded to shadow via prospector's tool
Shadow I leave alone
Copper gets upgraded to bronze via prospector's tool
Bronze gets upgraded to gold via prospector's tool
Gold I leave alone
Agapite gets upgraded to valorite via prospector's tool and gargoyle pickaxe
Verite gets upgraded to valorite via gargoyle pickaxe
Valorite I leave alone
I save my gargoyle pickaxes to spawn valorite elementals and farm them for an easy 25 valorite ore. I always pick up prospertor's tools that people throw away at the smithy.
- 1 fire beetle plus 2 packies work wonderfully. I have a UO macro to use last item on last target for mining and lumberjacking. And I have a UOA macro to smelt large ore on my beetle. Once my weight turns red (from the UOA indicator) I will hit the UOA smelt macro. This way my last target doesn't get messed up and force me to retarget the mining spot again. Just note that if you are overweight, the ingots that you smelt drops to the ground.
- Sometimes, if you hit the smelt macro at the wrong time or due to lag, the smelting cursor targets your last target (meaning your last mining spot). When this happens, the ore isn't smelted. If you dbl it again, it will say "Someone is already using that". In this situation, it takes about a minute for the server to timeout your pending smelting attempt. To bypass this, dbl click any smaller ore of the same type and click on the large ore. This will combine the ore and make them all smaller pieces, and you can smelt them now.
- The smaller pieces of ore are actually very useful. They are the lightest, and changing the big ores into small ones makes them lighter overall. Useful if you don't have a firebeetle and are using 5 packies to hold the ore until you reach a public forge.
- NEVER let the medium ores exist in your pack or on pack animals, as they weigh 16.67% more than their equivalent amount of large ore (and 75% more than their equivalent amount of small ore). by comparison, medium ore would only fit 228 medium and 2 small into a pack animal (the equivalent of 229 ingots), much less than either of the other two options. So, merge them with small piles whenever possible.
- To gain mining quicker, smelt the hardest ores that your skill allows you to, 1 piece at a time. If you are working on gaining mining, remove your mining gloves and Jacob's pickaxe.
- To go above 100 mining if you want to use both the +mining gloves and Jacob's pickaxe, first equip the pickaxe, then equip the gloves, else the points won't stack properly.
- Recording a macro in UOA to mine relative tiles that are 2 tiles away from you allows you to reach alot of spots you normally can't reach manually. Like certain mountains where it merges with the grass (those areas that gives a "can't mine" or "can't see" message, but you can mine it using UOA), and also the walls of mining caves (those black areas). It's still restricted to the 8x8 tile resource grid of course, if you have mined from another tile in that 8x8 grid, this won't allow you to mine more from that grid.