Nefchast’s Gaming Blog

The last couple of days have been busy… with some Ultima Online. Since I grabbed the lifetime sub for Champions Online, I don’t really feel the pressure to level as quickly as possible right now — I can wait for them to iron out the content gaps at the higher levels and re-tool the powers. With the time spent waiting I’ve learned a good bit about UO that I didn’t in my trial period — the game is not nearly as hard starting out as I thought. I was just a newb before.

Well, on second thought… I was and am still a newb. I started out on my first character, the Gargoyle featured above, the same way as before — grabbing my initial lowbie skill gain quest right from the start, then trying to complete it (which I did, and it was Chivalry — if you were wondering). This might seem pretty normal, to newbs like myself, but there’s one little thing to think about… you can’t buy skill trainings while the quest is active. You can drop the quest, though, so it’s not really a problem — unless you’re stubborn like myself. The best way to start UO off is to buy the skills you need to the max rank possible at the trainers — just ask about training a skill, they’ll tell you how much gold, drag and drop the gold amount on them. As you can probably guess, my first character is the first for a reason…

This leads me to: Gargoyles. They’re the new race introduced in the expansion and they’re pretty cool! They have innate flight abilities and a fun little buff that initiates when you’re low on health (and helps you run away), BUT it seems they can’t use the same equipment regular humans/elves can… meaning that, if you go to Haven (a smart move as a lowbie), you won’t be able to use gear purchased there. Not realizing this, I headed to Haven right away (if you want to: go to the help section and click the top option, it’ll teleport you to Haven). It took a bit of work, but I managed to break my weapon (no Blacksmithing skill to repair it) and was left weaponless… well, except for the pickaxes.

So, I picked up Blacksmithing and Mining (along with Tinkering) in order to try and get the Grandmaster level (which I’d guess is 100%). That level of Blacksmithing allows you to alter equipment to fit Gargoyles — something I find very useful.

I seem to remember crafting years ago in UO, and there being bronze and such… it looks like they might have simplified it to just Iron. In any case, I grabbed a bundle of pickaxes from the Blacksmith and headed out to the mountains in south-western Haven. There’s a nice little camp with the Mining trainer, a forge (smelting), and anvil. Just use the picks and attack the mountain — keep clicking and you’ll fill up with ore eventually.

It’s important to point out that crafting tools in UO have limited uses, once they’re up they’re gone (with the exception of picks like the blessed one you get from the mining quest). So you can keep a supply from the NPC merchants or pick up Tinkering and make your own.

Crafting is simple enough; you have an interface that lets you see what’s available to craft — click the button to the right side to view the info (chance to craft, skill needed to craft, material cost) and the button on the left of an item to craft one. There’s other buttons at the bottom that do various things, most of which should be self-explanatory.

After doing a few hours of mining and crafting I decided enough was enough, I wanted to kill something! So…

New character, essentially the same — a Paladin — but as a Human. Starting as a Human has some advantages, you’ll automatically be sent to Haven, go through the short tutorial, and be able to use the equipment sold there.

This time was going to be different. I had some knowledge now and a bit of a plan… Soon enough things turned from broken newbie to:

Slightly advanced newbie! It only took a day’s worth of pretty casual play but I hit the newbie account’s max skill cap of 700. Skill cap you ask? Yup, there’s a limit to how many skill points your character can have — which means you can really screw yourself over with a poor build. That’s my next issue to work out — getting a decent build worked out. Generalizing, unlike CO, is not too good here. You need a specific build if you want higher skills and the ability to do higher content. I generalized a bit too much with this character, wanting to try things out, so now I’m in the process of down-skilling stuff I don’t need. How’s that work? Pretty simple: with skills in UO you can set them to three different statuses — up, down, or locked. Should be pretty obvious from there what happens. Since you can only have 700-ish skill points on a character you can down-train some skills to replace them with others (essentially, the skills you train up at this time will cannibalize the points from the down training skills, locked skills will not be effected).

Some tips for potential newbies (the game is still quite cool, if you haven’t played it I suggest you do):

- Remember to train skills before grabbing quests

- There’s plenty of escort quests around, the NPCs with the blue names — usually shouting at you — will give you 500 gold for escorting them around, easy money

- Once you’ve gotten trained up, grab the training skills for the skills you use and go train them! You’ll get some good starter gear

- Think about your build and try to specialize some, you should know what your main skills are — same points to get them raised up

- You can have 5 followers assist you — hire NPCs around town or use the animal taming skill — right click on their names in the pet window to issue various orders

- Stable any extra animals you might pick up and don’t want to release (it does cost some gold)

- Anyone using Chivalry will need to get Tithes to use their abilities — look for the big Ankhs, get close to them and click, you get one Tithe per gold piece

- You can train up stats like Strength through activities other than fighting — like Lumbering

- Moongates allow you to teleport throughout the lands, watch where you go — it’s a dangerous world

- Merchants and trainers buy different items — if you have something you think might sell, look around, especially if it’s something that fits a certain trainer/merchant

- UO is not strictly PvP anymore — you start off in the world of Trammel, a non-PvP world, the original world was Felucca and you can still travel there through the Moongate — if you don’t want to PvP, don’t go there, stay in Trammel

- There are plenty of dungeons around, since there’s no levels it will be hard to decide on what you can do — the best option is to check them out and be quick at running away… watch out for traps, too

- When you die you have 15 minutes to get your corpse back… might sound harsh, but there are plenty of wandering healers around

- Explore — this isn’t a linear game, there isn’t any simple progression path to choose, no “do this, then this, then this…” you have to explore the world and create your own adventures or quests… there’s plenty to see and kill, so set a goal and work towards accomplishing it

- Lastly, there aren’t any official forums so look around for fan-sites — many located on the UOHerald site — for the forums used by the community. I’ve only just started exploring them, but it’s obvious the community in this game is deep.

In case anyone cares to share some knowledge, I’d love some tips, the character I’m using now is Nika Volkov on Catskills — the shard that has the best name, ever.