Since I've had so many people hit me up for a beginner's guide to earning some starter cash, I decided to make this writeup. Keep in mind, things ARE likely to change throughout the life of this shard, and I will adjust this guide accordingly as time permits. If you have any alternate ideas/suggestions feel free to post them in the comments down below. Please be civil with each other's comments and try not to derail the thread. Keep in mind that everything here are just my opinions, and they are not the only way to do things. The beginning If you haven't created a character, read one of my previous guides here and be sure to maximize your stats by following HateCrime's guide here. Be sure to do this on all of your characters before attempting to develop your skills. I realise that HC's method requires some starting cash to max your stats, but you can get a decent jump by just practicing camping/herding (make sure the arrow is pointed up). This should get you to about 80-90 strength. Take advantage of being able to play three accounts at once. If you are only playing one at a time, you are not being 100% efficient with your time. Now, this is where you need to make a decision. Do you want to be a warrior, bard, tamer, mage, craftsman, or a combination of many? In the end you need to settle on two to three solid templates to get the ball rolling. "What's your choice Gharik?" I'm glad you asked! I personally am most comfortable with a bard or tamer. I use the bard to take on big game and they are fairly cheap to raise. However, you can get rolling with a tamer right away without much work. My secondary character is usually a warrior of sorts. However, a craftsman is a great substitute for the warrior. If you don't feel like getting your hands bloody, mine ingots and/or lumberjack boards. Once you have a sufficient supply of ingots and/or boards, sell them to players who are too lazy to do this themselves. Keep in mind, many find mining and lumberjacking to be mind numbingly tedious, it's not for everyone! Starting templates Tamer Starting stats: 50 str, 20 dex, 10 int (Not terribly important, you'll be macroing them up anyway) End Stats: 100 str, 25 dex, 100 int Starting Template 50 - Magery 50 - Taming These are the two more difficult skills to raise. And Magery is one of the more expensive. Your lacking of funding in the beginning will make you wish you have 50 Magery to begin with. End Template 100 Animal Taming 100 Animal Lore 100 Magery 100 Meditation 100 Veterinary 100 Resist Spells 100 Wrestling (Can easily be swapped for either 100 Evaluating Intelligence or 100 Hiding) This is a typical pure mage tamer. People do some crazy things with this template for pvp or pve. Each template has its ups and downs and you'll have to mold it to whatever works best for you. Bard Starting Stats: 50 str, 20 dex, 10 int (Not terribly important, you'll be macroing them up anyway) End Stats: 100 str, 25 dex, 100 int Starting Template 50 - Magery 50 - Provocation Also not terribly important, as you will be macroing these skills up as well. I just find those two skills to be the more difficult of the two to raise quickly. With the changes in a patch shortly before this server went live, you can rocket Resist up to 55 walking through firefields. So I switched from 50 Resist to 50 Magery. End Template 100 - Provocation 100 - Music 100 - Magery 100 - Resist 100 - Meditation 100 - Evaluating Intelligence 100 - Wrestling (This skill can be easily swapped for Hiding. Hiding is a very useful skill here, but wrestling allows me to have a chance to cast spells without being interrupted. This comes in handy when you're trying to either heal or recall in a tight spot.) I have since switched to hiding from wrestling, it allows me to be invisible until I move, or am revealed. Once all the monsters are fighting eachother, I will hide in case an unfriendly player approaches. Warrior Starting Stats: 35 str, 10 dex, 25 int (I do this so I can lock int at 25 right away) End Stats: 100 str, 100 dex, 25 int Starting Template 50 - Magery 50 - Lumberjack All of these skills are easy enough to macro up. However, I find the above two skills to be the biggest pain. Lumberjacking is a pain to raise here. Yes, you can get LJ to 50 by sparing or fighting creatures, but as of right now, this skill is based on a 5x5 system. What do I mean by 5x5 system? This skill will only raise .3 while standing on one tile. After you've gained that .3, you need to move 5 tiles in any direction to gain another .3. This isn't as big of a deal if you want to raise it fighting small creatures, because you'll be running around anyway. However, if you're raising it sparing, you'll need to move around. I don't know about you guys, but I'm lazy as hell. I don't plan on moving when I'm sparing two characters. I hit the go button and that's all she wrote. The 5x5 system will not always be an issue here, but it's here to stay until the staff can find a better method of discouraging AFK resource gathering. 100 - Swordsmanship (Can just as easily be swapped for Fencing or Macing. I wouldn't suggest Archery as a starting toon) 100 - Tactics 100 - Lumberjacking (Can be swapped with Parrying if you choose not to be a swordsman. This just adds a damage bonus if you choose to swing an axe) 100 - Anatomy 100 - Healing 100 - Resist 62.9-100 Magery (What?!?! That's a random number! 62.9 magery is the amount of skill necessary to successfully cast up to 4th circle spells without failing. This is useful for Recalls and Greater Heals in a pinch. The last thing you want to do is fizzle Recall when you're cornered. I always have Magery on every character I make, purely for convenience. Unless I'm in a very strict Roleplaying environment, Magery is a must.) If you choose to only go 62.9 in Magery, you can distribute the rest of the skill points as you please. Perhaps a little parrying? Hiding? Tracking? Meditation? The world is your oyster... I'm not here to make all of your decisions for you. "Gharik, you're a damned liar! I cannot start with 7 skills set at 100!" You're right, you can't. This is where the work comes into play. The above templates are what your characters will be when it's all said and done (hopefully). If you choose to mine/lumberjack, you won't need to do the following steps. Instead, gather resources until your heart's content and buy reagents to supply your Magery on any toons you desire. For those who do NOT wish to hit mountains or trees, follow these next steps. Macroing until you're useful Start by heading to the sheep pens or cotton fields. Yew has three sheep pens, Skara Brae has one. Cotton fields can be found near Moonglow, Skara Brae, and Cove (Thanks Wise!). To find these fields consult UO Auto Map (If you don't have it, get it! It's free and VERY useful!) or you can confult the wonderful map the staff has created here Anyway, you have a couple choices to make here too. You can sell the wool/cotton to tailor NPC's, which can be extremely slow and tedious. OR, you can turn them into bandages. To make bandages go to a tailor shop. Use the wool/cotton on the spinning wheel. Wool will turn into yarn and cotton will turn into spools of thread. Use the yarn/thread on the loom. This will create bolts of cloth. Turn the bolts of cloth into pieces of cloth with scissors (bought from the tailor in the shop), then turn the cloth into bandages (also with scissors). Kind of a drawn out process, but it'll be worth it in the end. Now that you have a sufficient amount of bandages (5,000-10,000), split them evenly between your bard, warrior, and tamer. Now, either find a nice quiet spot in the forest (not recommended) or find a nice guild that accepts new players. We have quite a few guilds that welcome new players with open arms. Do not beg for starting gear. Often times they will hook it up on their own, but if they don't, don't worry about it. You only needed to join so you can have your characters fight each other without becoming criminals. Keep in mind you aren't just using the guild, be polite and offer assistance. It'll pay off in the end if you put in a little effort here. Now, idealy it'd be best for both of you characters (bard and warrior) to have 100 strength, 100 dex, and 25 intelligence to begin with. But this will work with whatever stats you've managed to acquire. The above stats are just for maximum gains in the melee fields. "Wait! you said the bard should have 25 dex and 100 int!" Yes, in the end the Bard will drop dex for int. However, you need the dex to gain wrestling more quickly. Dex affects swing speed. The more swings, the more gains. Also, if you have the money, I'd recommend buying Anatomy and Healing to 30ish from the Healer Guildmaster with both characters. This is where being green (guilded) comes into play. Stand by the bank and either use a restock agent to pull bandages one at a time from the bank, or have all your bandages on your character. The downside to not using a restock agent is, thieves can steal your bandages, or if you die to a failed heal and you're AFK too long, you'll lose all your bandages and have to start over. I will post my healing macro here at a later time, it's fairly simple. Depending on what melee skill you went with, you'll need to spend a little gold on a low damage weapon for sparing. Butcher's Knife for Swords, Dagger for Fencing, Wands for Macing, and obviously empty hands for Wrestling. If you chose to gain parry, be sure to buy a few bucklers. Your gear will break, have extras on hand. Now beat on each other until you reach a desired level of usefulness. Some people wait until GM, but 60-70 in you main combat skills should suffice. Combat skills being Swords (Fencing, or Macing), Tactics, Anatomy, and Healing. If those four skills are in the 60-70 range you will be able to kill low end monsters. Ettins, Trolls, and Earth Elementals are all great starter monsters to kill. These creatures do not cast magery and pay about 100-150 gold a piece. If you've chosen to make a tamer, and I strongly advise that you do, you can get started with him/her right away. No macroing needed. While I advise macroing some of you stats up first (strength, dexterity, intelligence) You do not have to in order to get started. Start the tamer off in Vesper, leave town and head west toward Dungeon Covetous . If you choose Vesper and it starts you in Britain, just head to the moongate and take it to Minoc, you'll end up in the forest East of Covetous. Use your UO Auto Map! On your way to Covetous tame Brown and Black Bears. You can control up to 8 of them, 7 if you're riding a horse. 3-4 bears can take a single ettin with ease, but an army of 8 will make you feel godly. Stay away from spiders and scorpions, their poison will most likely kill you, and they drop very little money. Once you've reached Covetous, enter and leave your bears near the entrance. Be kind to other players and leave a path so they don't get stuck in your mob of bears. There are several fire traps at the entrance, do not walk through them. These traps do 30-40 damage and that quickly adds up. Around the corner is a room with about 8 harpies in it. You usually can easily single pull, but if you get 2 or 3 it's not the end of the world. Pull your harpies and walk them through a couple fire pits on the way back to your bears. They should be pretty beat up by now and your bears will finish them with ease. Skin the dead harpies and save the feathers, the raw chicken can be fed to your bears to keep them happy. Each harpy drops between 80-100ish gold. Be sure to bank frequently in case a PK rolls in and kills you! Spend some time in the forest here, tame anything you can gain from. Brown/Black Bears, Panthers, Cougars. Get your taming up a bit and then head to Yew (use the moongate). South of Yew is a dungeon called Shame. In there you will find Scorpions and Earth Elementals. When your taming/lore is 55ish (You can attempt to tame a Scorpion at 47.1, but you'll fail a ton and they won't listen to you.) tame Scorpions. Use the Scorpions you tame to kill the Earth Elementals. The level 3 poison Scorpions hit with drop the Earthies pretty quick. Each Earthie drops 120-150ish gold, a gem, a mandrake root, some dirt, and 5 iron ore. The gems sell for 25-100 gold, depending on the gem. Save the mandrake root, it's the most commonly used reagent in Magery. Leave the iron ore, it's heavy and 5 small ore only yields 2.5 iron ingots. Leave the dirt, it's useless as far as I can tell. Getting your hands on some spending money If you've been following the tamer guide above, you can skip this section. Now you can take most level 1 and 2 spawn types in most dungeons. Level 1 Shame has an abundant source of Earth Elementals, but they're in the company of Scorpions. Scorpions pretty much hit you with level 3 poison with every hit on this shard, not really sure why. If you're going to take on the Earthies here, lure the scorpions away. Wrong has a decent source of Ettins and Trolls. You can even wander the wonderful world of T2A for random Trolls, Ettins, and Orcs (It's what I did in 1998!!), but beware of the casting creatures like Gazers. The Orc Fort just south of Cove has a great source of Orcs and Ettins as well. Be careful around the Orc Mages and the Orcish Lords (Can't miss them, they wear ringmail tunics and a goofy helm.) While you're off adventuring with your warrior, I'd start macroing Musicianship/Provocation. There isn't an official guide on Provocation yet, it's on my to do list. But for now refer to this thread to get a quick idea on what needs to be done. When I get a chance, I'll post a more detailed guide with my macro on the subject. Now you have some starter gold... Well done! The world is at your disposal, for the most part. However, the journey out of newbiedome has just begun I'm afraid. Now that you have a little spending cash, I'd advise macroing Magery/Resist on your bard. HC's guide to Magery should help you get a good start on Magery. Keep in mind, you'll need someone healing the person practicing Magery. I'd advise practicing Magery while you're off doing something in the real world, or when you're sleeping. Otherwise, you'll be watching your computer with a glazed look in your eyes. Save the majority of macroing for when you don't have time to play when you can. You may decide the warrior life is your cup of tea. If this is the case, forget about the bard! This is a game folks, do whatever is the most fun for you. Otherwise it'll turn in to a grind, and you'll quit. You should have a pretty decent start at this point. Good luck to you all! If you ever have questions, jump on IRC and send me a PM. I'll get back to you when I'm not otherwise occupied.
Finally completed this guide. Sorry if it's a bit long, but there's so much information needed to get started. I could go on and probably double that post if I were to give all the starting money making ideas in my limited brain space. I gave what I consider to be the three simplest routes for quick starter cash. Hope you all find it useful.
Nice guide, Gharik . Just a question to be sure: Does lumberjacking really add damage to swordsmanship related weapons as anatomy does in OUR era? If yes i had to think again and maybe drop parry for lumber. Right now my dexxer is going for: GM Swordsman GM Tactics GM Parry GM Healing GM Anatomy GM Magery GM Resist I'm not very familiar (anymore) with the era mechanics. So maybe there are other skilloptions for a dexxer that fits better to the OUR era? Greetings Duffrey
Lumberjack adds a damage bonus (18%?) to any axe weapons. This damage is caped by default at 65 against a player on runuo, however I believe that has been set to 50 damage here. So on a monster thats still a max swing of 100 damage.
From what I can tell on this shard so far, is you have two options with your build. A.) Keep Parrying and switch to maces instead of swords. Maces carry a special move that hits for double damage, so your defensive bonus from parrying doesn't keep your damage down. B.)Go with Lumberjack and use axes. See this is from UOGamers.com I could go a little deeper into the numbers, but the choice is this. Defensive, or Offensive?
This is the beauty of UO. You have to choose with your templates. Sure you can be a Jack of all trades, but you won't be great. As far as offense vs defense... I choose offense every time, whether it's PvM or PvP. But that's just me. A newer player that's looking to go at a slower pace and not worry about healing as often may choose defense. PS. Thanks for the response HC. I can always count on you to answer questions accurately when I don't have time to do it myself.
On shards I have played back in the day, Ocllo also has a cotton field. Moonglow has a flax field with veggies and a second cotton field. At this time these and the field in Cove are disabled. Not sure if staff will spawn them when live. The following is easy gold, takes little time, not big gold. If you have a warrior type, collecting hides for a crafter or just building some skill, the animals here give lots of meat. Sell this meat to butcher npc, granted, doesn't pay extremely well, but 8 gold a rib isn't bad. Every gold coin in your bank is a plus when starting out. If just building skill, sell hides to other players. Also don't forget escorting: Even a player with no magery skill can use public moongates to escort many of the npc seeking a guardian while traveling. These gentle souls seem very grateful for the assistance and pay very well. Take care all and most of all, enjoy this fantastic "other world". :}
Good input Westra. I avoided the sell-to-NPCs method on purpose... You can only sell 5 items at a time, and the price drops rather rapidly here. Any money is better than no money though.
Updated 12-26-12 This guide was given a much needed face-lift to bring it back up to par. I Adjusted some of the templates to mesh better with patches that have been applied after Beta. Tamer template added. As usual, let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.
WHat is the move to allow maces to do double damage? Im about to build a Parry/Macer. First time ever! IM excited
The move happens automatically on 1/4 of hits (assuming GM Anatomy). But, it only happens with a war hammer, which of course is 2-handed, so you can't wear a shield.
Ahhh the ol crushing blow? If one were to be using a trio handed war hammer what would be a good skill to use those 100 parrying skill points? I know with swords it would be lumberjacking. nothing like that for maces
I assume your base is: Magery Maces Tactics Anatomy Healing Resist The 7th skill on this template is hard to fill. Most things you might want to add would take two skills (Music/Provo, Music/Discordance, Music/Peace), in which case you'd sacrifice Resist. Or maybe magery.
If you are only going to use magery for travel you could roll with a build like this: Macing 100 Tactics 100 Anatomy 100 Music 100 Peacemaking 100 Healing 90 Resist 80 Magery 30 Use recall scrolls to move about the world, and as for stats you could go 95/85/45 is my favorite...I know, I know an odd number for str is a waste of a half a hit point! But my ocd kicks in and they look so nice all ending in 5
I'd go 100 Healing though, and take the other 10 out of Resist. Healing impacts both your chance to succeed the bandage, and the amount of damage it heals. It's super important.
Leads me to my next question…How effective is Magic Resist? How much does it reduce the damage? The planned template will be GM Maces GM Anatomy GM Tactics GM Parrying GM Healing GM Magery GM Resist Stats 90/80/55 I was planning to start with 50 Magery and 50 Healing and then do the fire field walk up 55 on my resist and then macro Magery and build resist and use healing to heal myself and buy anatomy up and then just let it macro until I GM Magery. The rest should be well in to the 90's by then. Buy up mace, tactics, Parry and go start killing stuff. Im trying to 7x GM my peace/dexxer before I start this Mage Warrior but Im chomping at the bit.
FYI, Lot of earth elementals, ettins, and trolls in Despise. It's the best hunting place for new players imo. You can blade spirit and let them do work, or just melee stuff to death. Plus PK's don't go there much, if at all.
