A new player's guide to gaining stats: strength

The simple steps to perfect stats:

1. buy skills from NPCs to get to the skill cap of 700
2. collect or buy kindling
3. run camping macro for an hour

The details
Strength limits your number of hit points (the amount of damage you can take before dying), how much you can carry and, to a lesser extent, how hard you hit with a weapon. It also plays a minor role in many other skills (see Compendium - Skills). For most characters, getting to the maximum of 100 strength is a given.

Creating a new character
The default templates are very limited. Most players prefer to build their own character from scratch using the "advanced" option.



Here you have 80 points to spend on the three stats: strength, dexterity and intelligence. For a mage start out with 25 strength, 10 dexterity and 45 intelligence; your goal is 100 strength, 25 dexterity and 100 intelligence. For a warrior, if you plan on doing magery, you'll want to start out the same way (after you've done magery you can come back for some more camping or snooping to adjust your stats). If you don't plan on doing magery (or you plan to start with 50 magery and leave it at 50), then you should start with 25 strength, 45 dexterity and 10 intelligence.



The mechanics of gaining strength
You have a chance to gain strength every time you use a skill that requires strength. From the Compendium - Skills you'll notice that some skills rely more heavily on strength; these are the skills that can give the greatest chance of gaining strength. For example, animal taming at 14% offers a much higher chance than tinkering at 5%. However, some skills (like animal taming) cannot be used as frequently as others. By far, the best skill for raising strength is camping. Camping is perfect because it has a high chance of stat gain (20%) and you can use it very frequently (every 1 second). As a side benefit, it's also the best way to gain intelligence and dexterity.

The trick to fast gains
Before you run out and start building campfires everywhere, realize that your fastest stat gains occur when your skills are the lowest--even when they are at zero. Each character can have a maximum of 700 skill points. You'll want to buy/work your way to reach that 700 point cap. Which skills you buy doesn't really matter so long as you do NOT buy camping.

First make sure all your skills are pointing up. This is the default. To set all your skills, click on the dropdown next to "Set all locks", select "up" and click "Set all locks". To select an individual skill, right click the skill and choose "up".



Buying skills
Most of the non-player characters (NPCs) you find in towns can train you in something, all you need to do is ask them by saying "<name> teach". Some NPCs can teach many skills. If you have your journal open (Alt-J), you'll see the full list of skills they can teach you. The command to have an NPC train you is "<name> teach <skillname>". For example: "Johann teach archery". The NPC will respond with the amount of gold they require to teach you. Drop that amount of gold on the NPC and you'll see your skill increase. (Note: If you drop more gold than they request, they'll just keep it.)


(Note: you could also train up some "free" skills that raise quickly like snooping, meditation or herding.)

Collecting kindling
Once you're at the 700 skillcap, it's time to find some kindling. The simplest way is to double click any bladed weapon (like your newbie dagger) and target a tree.



As you're going to need to harvest a lot of kindling, it's best to use a macro. Each area of trees has a limited supply of kindling, so when one tree runs out, you'll want to move at least 8 steps and find another tree. Areas that have lots of trees will produce more kindling. Some good areas to find kindling (without much hassle) are southwest of Britain, near Yew and north of Skara. If you have the gold and want to make everything happen faster, you can also buy kindling from a provisioner.

Macro for collecting kindling
With this macro you just stand east of any tree and it will collect all the kindling. Once you get the message that "there's not enough wood to harvest", just move at least 8 steps and find another tree to stand next to.

Code:

!Loop
Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickTypeAction|3922|True
Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|1
Assistant.Macros.TargetRelLocAction|-1|0

How to copy and paste a macro

Camping
Be sure you are at the 700 point skillcap and that all skills, including camping, are pointed up. Any stat that you want to raise should also be pointed up. Hit Alt-S to open your status.



To camp, just double click the kindling in your backback. It doesn't matter if you successfully create a fire and it doesn't matter where you are doing this (in town or a house is safest). You're going to be doing this a few hundred times more, so a macro is helpful.

Macro for camping

Code:

!Loop
Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickTypeAction|3553|True
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.7000000

How to copy and paste a macro

Watch it fly
Now you just have to keep collecting enough kindling to keep building fires. You may want to assign a hotkey to your kindling macro and your camping macro so you can easily switch between the two. Keep an eye on your status (Alt-S). The total of all your stats is a maximum of 225. Once you reach a total of 225, you'll have to set one stat to down if you want to raise another stat. So, if your goal is 100/25/100 (str/dex/int) and after camping a bit you end up with 90/35/100, then you'll want to set dexterity to down and keep on camping until strength hits 100.

Update: Herding
While the camping method is the fastest means to perfect stats, it requires the collection kindling either by cutting trees or buying from NPCs. Herding, on the other hand, requires nothing more than a 20gp shepherd's crook and can be done completely AFK. Herding also produces faster gains in strength, so if you're making a new character use 10/10/60 (str/dex/int).

A shepherd's crook is available from any stablemaster and stables are the perfect spot to work herding. As shown above, be sure you are at the skill cap (700), have zero skill in herding, and have the herding skill pointed up. Stand near some small animal (cat/dog/goat), double click the shepherd's crook, target the animal you want to herd, and target the same location where the animal is standing.

Macro for herding

Code:

!Loop
Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickTypeAction|3713|True
Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|1
Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|34170|1511|1541|25|201
Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|1
Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|34170|1511|1544|25|201
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.3000000

How to copy and paste a macro

[Note: you will want to customize the 2 absolute targets. Once you have the macro loaded in Razor, right click the 3rd line "Absolute Target" and target the animal. Do the same for thh 5th line "Absolute Target" and target where the animal is standing.]

My macro varies a bit from what is described above, so I figured I'd add it and bump this a bit considering how many new folks have come about recently.

Once you skill cap leaving Camping out, lock all skills and turn camping up (described above), then I do like so:

Record a macro of using your dagger on a tree that is on the tile directly west of you, then double clicking the kindling.
Right click Use Dagger and convert to 'D-Click by Type'
Right click Absolute Target and convert to Relative Location
//Insert Pause 1.0s
Right click the Use Kindling line and convert to 'D-Click by Type'


Once that's set, run it with the loop checkbox checked and all you need to do is walk around from tree to tree, always standing on the east side of the tree.

Hope this helps as an alternative or supplement. Thanks for putting up this well composed guide Upgrayedd.

As a new player it's tough to hit the 7000 skill cap, especially since you'll have little cash flow. Even when I do have the money it's annoying going to every vendor in Brit training skills.

Here's how I do it:

First I GM Herding. The last character I did this on got me from 10 strength to 83 and it took about 7 hours, but I wasn't paying much attention. For the fastest gains start on a goat, then once you hit 50, switch to a bull.

Next I train my combat skill, whatever it may be. For melee characters I do this just by playing the game. Start with farm animals (except bulls), then skeletons / zombies, then harpies, then earth elementals. You'll GM in about 8 hours and have 100 strength long before that. You'll also gain a bit of int due to anatomy gains.

Fantastic guide - thanks!

Just my 2gp,

I took this from another guide but it work FAN-TAS-TIQUE!

Get your 700 base skills by doing the 'teach me xxx" thing.

Go to Occlo animal pens by the horse vendor. Buy a sherpherd's Crook


!Loop
Assistant.Macros.DoubleClickTypeAction|3713|True
Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|1
Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|651576|3610|2516|0|231
Assistant.Macros.WaitForTargetAction|1
Assistant.Macros.AbsoluteTargetAction|0|0|1090151506|3610|2516|0|12791
Assistant.Macros.PauseAction|00:00:00.3000000


Get this macro into razor and for line 3 (absolute target) pick an animal and line 5 (absolute target) click on the ground close to that animal.
Run this macro
Your skills will SHOOT up. I got to 100 str in less than an hour. It was crazy fast. You can raise intel (and MAYBE dex as I had it pointed down but i dont see why not).

There isnt a built in timer for herding so you are spamming the skill in that macro. MUCH faster than kindling or Lumberjacking or fighting.

Enjoy! I will give credit when I find the original post

did something change with the hearding? im doing it now and not gaining at all

I don't understand the point of buying skills up to 700 first. Why not just start with herding or camping or whatever at 0 and start gaining those skills to raise your stats?

@peacetype you may try, but I believe herding will raise very quickly from 0 to some decent value, thus slowing down your stat gain significantly.
I'm actually curious how long would it take to raise STR from 60 to 100 with herding raising from 0.

I miss @Upgrayedd
Such a different experience not having him around.

I guess that part I'm confused about is if skills are maxed at 700 then you won't gain skill in Herding, so how does that raise your STR?

I went ahead and took my STR from about 60 to 100 without maxing skills at 700. It took about an hour macroing Herding on the polar bear at Magincia zoo.

I did herd and camping to 100 on each and was able to get my stats where i wanted.
I locked dex at 25 and had 100 str and 100 int in no time

You need 700 skill points total because you don't want to gain in the skill that you are using to raise a stat. The skill must be pointing up to gain in stats but in order to keep it from gaining, you need to be maxed out at 700 with all other skills pointing up or locked. You don;t want to gain in the skill because you have a greater chance to gain a stat with the lower the skill is.

So even though you won't be gaining points in the skill, you can still get stat gains from it? I thought you only had a chance for stat gains when you actually gained a point in a skill.

Nope. That was a change that appeared later in the Ren era. It then created the see-saw method. You picked two skills. Gain in one till 10.0, then point it down and gain the other to 10.0. And you kept repeating it until you were done. UOR follows the older original mechanics.

Oh wow... this changes everything! Lol
I remember the see-saw method well I played UO back in the day and just found UO Ren. It's a trip playing back in the world again. If only it ran better on a Mac...

I am willfully ignorant of all things mac My only advice would be to emulate windows xp on your machine and then UO would run smoothly.

A PC fanboy eh? I'm kind of platform agnostic myself but my PC is dying a slow death so Mac is the best option these days.

I know you can do a dual-boot setup where you can choose to launch either Mac or Windows OS. But that seems like overkill to me just to run a single game. Luckily some clever folks developed Wine which is this free app that acts like a "wrapper" around PC apps and runs them by emulation. So you can actually run classic PC games like Diablo, Warcraft, UO, etc. within the Wine environment right there in the normal Mac OS.

It's pretty cool, although unfortunately in the case of UO there are some unfortunate bugs that get in the way of the play experience. Still, not bad for having everything free. Back in the day I remember that paying $10 a month for OSI's UO was a big deal... saving up my allowance or my shitty job bagging groceries for minimum wage

For error in one of my char I have camping raised. I have the cap of 700 skill reached. I put Camping down and went to train another skills in order to low camping again. But I'm getting a msg from NPC and I cannot train more to be able to down camping.

Am I missing something?

Kind regards.

@Reaper are you sure the skill you're asking NPC to train is near zero and pointing up?

Ummmm is near zero, but to be honest, I need to double check if it is pointing up

I'll check after work ><