New Player Guide - Training
At this point in your young career as a player, your skills and stats are unfortunately rather undeveloped. One of the things you'll want to start doing is training your skills. Unlike most other Ultima Online servers, ABCUO has no cap on the skills you can train. You can get 100 of every skill if you so desire, and up to 120 if you've acquired and used the appropriate scrolls of power.
You'll also want to raise your stats. Each stat can be raised to 150 points, with a limit of 305 total points for the three stats combined. That limit can be raised up to a maximum of 330 if you manage to find a +25 stat scroll. Note that these limits do not include equipment bonuses, so you can go over those limits if your equipment provides additional stat bonuses.
While you're training, you should make sure that all of your stats are eligible to be raised. Press alt-s to open your character status window. The arrows next to the stat icons for strength, dexterity, and intelligence should be pointing up. If not, click them until they're pointing up. At some time in the future you may want to change that - when you've reached the 305 total stat cap and want to focus on specific stats - but for now it's best to raise them all as fast as possible.
Here are the main functions of each stat:
- Strength: Determines how much you can carry, how many hit points you have, and affects how much damage you do in weapon-based combat. In addition, there are weapons and armor that require high strength in order for you to equip them.
- Dexterity: Indirectly determines your swing speed; swing speed is based on your stamina, and having higher dexterity gives you higher stamina. Dexterity also determines the speed in which you bandage yourself; at high dexterity you can bandage yourself very quickly. Finally, dexterity affects your parrying ability, because if your dexterity is below 80 your parrying ability suffers.
- Intelligence: Determines your mana pool; higher intelligence increases your maximum mana. Intelligence also affects the rate in which you regenerate mana, and the damage you do in spell-based combat.
Now that you know what the stats do, put it aside. Don't worry much about raising your stats - they will go up automatically as you're training your skills.
So now for the nitty gritty. How do you train your skills?
Walk north of the entrance in Kalandor Dungeon 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 frozen swordsman to train some of your skills.
Weapon skills are by far the easiest to train. Each time you take a swing with a weapon, you have a chance of gaining skill, so you'll want to use the fastest weapons you can find - for fencing use a dagger; use a katana for swordsmanship, a tessen or a club for macefighting, and a repeating crossbow for archery.
Auxiliary skills are very important. Train your healing skill by using bandages - use the built-in bandage command by typing "[bs". You can also heal yourself for free using the spirit speak skill. To use the skill, open the skill list by pressing alt-k. Find the spirit speak skill in the list, and press the blue button next to it to activate the skill. You may find it convenient to drag the skill out of the list of skills - you get a convenient button you can double click instead of having to use the skill list.
What about other skills besides combat? There are plenty of other things to do in the game besides fight, and there are associated skills.
Spellcasting: As described in the combat chapter, double click one of your spellbooks, turn the page to a spell, and double click it to cast it. You gain skills when you attempt to cast spells that are within your reach based on your skill level - not too easy and not too difficult. Magery and Necromancy spells require that you have reagents to cast them. Chivalry spells require that you tithe gold. You also need the appropriate spellbooks in y our possession - NPCs sell all of them though the Necromancy and Magery spellbooks will be empty. Find or purchase the spell scrolls and drop them onto the book in order to add them to the book. You only need to do this once for each spell.
Crafting: Dedicated player crafters make some of the finest equipment around. To learn a craft, you need the appropriate tool as well as the materials needed to make things. For example to become a tailor, get a sewing kit and some cloth. Double-click the sewing kit to bring up the crafting menu - the menu should be self-explanatory. As with other skills, you will gain in skill by making things that you have some chance of success at, but are not guaranteed to be able to do. Save money by making things that consume the fewest amount of materials.
Harvest: Gathering materials for yourself can be useful, and selling materials to others can be quite profitable. Harvesting is usually a matter of using an implement. For example to mine for ore, double-click a shovel or pickaxe, and target the mountain or rock that you want to dig. If you manage to get some iron ore, take it to a forge and smelt it by double-clicking the ore and targeting the forge.
Animal training: Most players on ABCUO have some level of animal taming skill, as pets can be quite useful in combat, and rare pets can be sold to other players for gold. To tame an animal, find the animal taming skill in the skill list and click the button. Then target the animal you want to tame.
Barding: Barding skills are almost exclusively used in PVM (player vs monster) situations, and can be quite effective. They are activated similar to other skills: find the skill in the skill list - peacemaking for example - click it and target a monster.
You may have noticed three skill balls in your backpack. Hopefully you haven't used them yet! These balls allow you to set a skill of your choice instantly to a level of 75. You only get these skill balls with your first character, and if you mistake there's no way to undo it. Because we have no skill cap, it's probably best to use the skill balls not on the most valuable skills, but rather the skills that are the most difficult to train. Here are the skills that most people seem to think are difficult to train:
- Animal Taming
- Provocation
- Poisoning
- Lockpicking
- Bushido
- Remove Trap
One more thing you should do - if you have the money, you can pay trainer NPCs to teach you. For example, go to a tinker (just northwest of the main square in New Haven), single-click them, and select "Train Tinkering". You can typically raise your skill levels from 0 to 25-30 this way, if you can find the right trainers for each skill.
You will probably want to read the main skill guide for the details about the specific skills, how they're used, and strategies about how to train them.
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