New Player Guide - Combat
I'm sure you're dying to test your combat abilities. Go back into Kalandor Dungeon and take some swings at a local neighborhood zombie or mongbat. If you haven't already, you'll want to put a weapon in your hand and possibly a shield as well; fighting with your fists can work, but usually isn't as effective. So go ahead, walk over to a beastie and say hello with your sword. On your paperdoll there's a button that says either "peace" or "war"; click it to toggle back and forth between peace and war mode. When you're in war mode, you can initiate combat by double clicking on a target. So double click on that zombie and you'll start swinging.
Weapons do more than plain bashing. Each different type of weapon has its own special abilities; for example daggers can poison and shadow strike, katanas can ignore armor and double strike, bone harvesters can mortal strike and paralyze, etc. To look at the abilities available, go to your paperdoll and double click the purple book of weaponry in the lower right corner.
The book lists the various weapon abilities, and also has the two icon buttons you use to activite the abilities. If you double click an icon, the next attack you make will use that ability. You may not be able to use them right now, as you may not have the skill required to use the abilities yet, but in time these abilities will become invaluable. You can drag the icons out of the book for easy access, and eventually you will want to bind hotkeys to the abilities so you can activate them with a push of a button.
Maybe you want to fight with magic instead. If you have a spellbook, double click it to open it up. Try single or double clicking on various points (the numbers at the bottom or the corners in the upper right/left) to get a feel for how you work your way around the book. Now find the spell you want to cast and double click the icon. You can also drag the icon out of the spellbook to make it more easily accessible. Generally, spells require you to have the associated magical ingredients, or reagents, to be able to cast the spell. Later you will want to assign hotkeys to the spells you'll be using most often, but that's a more advanced topic we'll look at later.
Hopefully you dispatched that zombie. Double click its corpse and take whatever you desire from it as your spoils. Now at this point in your young career as a player, your skills and stats are unfortunately rather undeveloped. You'll probably want to do some skill training, at least to get your basic survival skills up to par. Walk back up north and you'll see a sort of training room. In Ultima Online, your skills improve simply by using them - for example, whack something with a club and your macefighting skill automatically starts to increase. So if you wish you can use the stuffed dummies, the archery buttes, or the goofy swordsman to train some of your skills.
What about other skills besides combat? There are plenty of other things to do besides fight. If you're a miner, double click your pickaxe or shovel, target the mountain or cave ground, and you'll start digging. If you're a tailor, double click your sewing kit to bring up the tailoring menu. You'll need to have some leather or cloth though. Look at the skills and profession pages to read all of the details about the different skills.
You may have noticed a series of blue books floating in the air. Double click them to read them; they contain information that you'll probably find useful.
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