Important Notice! This is presently only working in Felucca, im not sure if there is a trammel bug, or a perminate change to guilded players no longer being able to do this in Trammel, or if there are plans to make this change to Felucca.

Animal Lore

What you want your animal lore skill to end up being depends on how you will go about training it up.

It will passivly train nicley into the 60s, every time you tame an animal there is a lore check, and you have a shot of automaticly gaining a point.

Passive training will actualy happen from the mid 60s to low 80s, but then its Really going to slow down.

If your fine with animal lore being in the mid 80s dont worry about it, it will get there eventualy with your normal taming training, but if you want to GM it, there are going to be 2 ways of doing so.

Your ability to control a pet is 70% Animal taming and 30% your animal lore skill

(I STRONGLY recemend way #2, Ship based Animal lore 8x8)

Method #1

The first way is to just let it passivly tame, and when you get past the 60s, set up a 1 button hot key for animal lore, and check each animal before you try and tame it, might sound like a pain but its really easy and will keep your lore skill moving up a lot faster than if you just rely on the passive checks.

I know you can (after a long time) get into the 80s, but I doubt its possable to GM the skill from passive animal lore checks alone. By activly checking every animal you come across it will eventualy happen for you. The second time I GMed animal lore, this is how I did it and it took over a month. Not as effective as 8x8 but still not bad :)

Method 2

8 x 8

You have probobly heard or read something about 8 x 8 in the past, when it first came out people were saying that there were 7 way GMs being made in a week, That now everone could be GM anything in hours, etc.

8 x 8 is a powerfly effective teqnique, but it is not a do all catch all for skill gain in UO. So withouth any puffery here is how 8 x 8 animal lore is done. Side note, a lot of people have a hard time with 8x8, but its totaly doable, if you follow these directions precisly you will be able to do it, and GM animal lore in either a few days or one 3-5 hour session. Also once you can do 8x8 with animal lore, you will know how to do it with any skill where 8 x 8 applies.

Your going to need some things for this, dont be intimidated by the list of things. This is such a great way to GM animal lore its worth it.

1-Two combat animals with a lot of hit points and a fast attack. Polar bears are Ideal because they meet the reqiements and are easy to tame, but wolves would also work well if you werent up to gating polar bears back from ICE isle. Also, if you plan on useing the same spots to gain on more than once (like the next day) you will have to be useing the same animals.

2-Boat

3-Be in Felucca or be in a guild if you really want to do this in Trammel.

4-Up to 2000 bandages (40 bolts of cloth)

You will probobly also want to have:

Extra Greater Heal regs (Ginsing, Garlic, Mandrake, Spider Silk), enough to cast greater heal 60 or 70 times

Twenty Pieces of meat to feed the animals (One piece every 90 minutes)

Plenty of fruit to feed your horse

World Map

You are basicly going to fill the hold of your ship with all your supplies and a ton of bandages so you dont have to make trips to and from the mainland while your doing this.

How animal lore 8 x 8 works is this, every time you use the veteranary skill on a pet you have a passive check for animal lore. Your going to move the pets onto the boat, get them fighting eachother, lock your vet skill and bandage them while you sail around for several hours. You will gain like crazy, I went from 50ish animal lore to gm in about 4 hours.

Step by Step this is how its done.

1-Tame or Buy two polar bears

2-Assemble all the items your going to need into the hold of a boat in felucca (or in tram if your guilded)

-Get the bears onto the boat, I simply stabled them, marked a rune to the stable. Then got on the boat (you can recall from a boat key and appear on your boat but you cant gate from a boat key). Then I cast gate from the boat back to the stable, "claimed" them and had them follow me back through the gate.

You can also do this withouth having to gate if you can get the animals to a dock or stretch of land where its perfectly leval with the boat and shore, animals will just follow you right on. I have had lamers jump on my boat before, if it ever happens you can just say "I ban thee" and it will ban them off the boat, but they might hide, or do any number of things which are a pain, so I typicly dont do it.

There are occasional gate hoppers, but that does not happen much at the Skara stables (the ones that I use for this) reason being is skara is a known tamer hang out, hoping a gate that pops near the skara stables is often probable death for the lamer that hops it as tamers often "quick gate" to save their pets from extremly dangerous situations. Its still a risk anywhere, but its a bit less of a risk here.

Also because I really favor the gate method over the dock method of getting animals on a ship, but could not cast gate reaiably at the time I used gate scrolls.

Once the animals are on the boat, go to the front of the boat and have them follow you, order the one firthest from the bow to guard you, (make sure your standing over that one so your not trapped waiting for you dex to rise while the other bear mauls you) then order the one directly on the bow to kill you.

That will get the one guarding you attacking the other one then you just step back, and cast invisable so you get out of the attacking pets target list, then you have both your bears fighting.

Your going to lock your Veteranary skill, but before you do make sure you have at least 30 or 40 vet skill, you dont want to succeed healing the pets every single time, but you do want to heal them every now and then or elese one will kill the other, also if you let one get too low on hit points then it will start loosing dex, and the other one will really clobber it without taking much damage itslef (so you will only have 1 animal to practice with instead of 2)

Assuming you have at least 30-40 points of veteranary, lock the skill, get the boat moving slow forward and heading either north or south (upper right hand corner of the sceeen or lower left hand corner). Start healing the bears.

This is just as effective out of power hour as in.

Your going to keep the boat moving, untill you get an animallore gain, then your going to STOP!!!!!! and try it again a few times, if you get a second gain stay put, you should get several gains in this 1 spot, keep at it untill you heal each bear 5 times in a row with no gain, at that point the "spot" is worn out for the day.

Now what you want to do is back up exactly 8 spaces, not 6 or 9 spaces, 10 is right out! Back up 8 spaces and try healing each animal at least 5 times, if you get a gain stay here and keep it up untill the spot it played out, if not then Back up exactly 8 more spaces and try again. Keep this up untill you dont get any more gains, now you are going to sail forward ONE SPACE at a time untill you are 8 spaces infront of the first place that you gained on.

This is 8x8 :)

I would strongly suggest you set up 3 ingame speech macros:
"slow forward"
"forward one"
"back one"

When giving orders to your tillerman dont just start hitting buttons as fast as you can, if you tell him for example 8 times "forward one""forward one""forward one""forward one""forward one""forward one""forward one""forward one" you will not move forward 8 times, you will probobly move 5-6 spaces forward. So tell him "forward one" then pause a moment before saying it again.

If you loose track of how many times you have told the tillerman to move hit alt-j to bring up your Jornal, and you can count that way.

Basicly every resource square is 8 spaces long, and 8 spaces wide, some people have read or offered 8x8 advice saying that you have to be in the exact center of the square. These people range from mistaken, to not knowing at all what they are talking about. 8x8 works anywhere in the square, and you merely have to move the next square of a run for it to work again.

I gmed lore in about 4 hours from the 50s to 100, (I got to the 50s from passive animal lore gains while taming). This is an awsome method, but it may take rereading this section a few times to "get it"

But anyone can "get it" and once you "get it" and can make it work with animal lore, you can make it work with anything. One of the biggest surpises that people have when they actauly get 8x8 working, is that it can be done out of power hour. This is an awsome method if skill gain, I would highly reccomend 8x8 :)

Make sure your ship is stocked up.

Every now and then one bear will really get going on the other bear and your bandaging will not be helping, make sure you G-heal your animals before their hit points drop below 1/2. They will start loosing Dex. If they loose dex they will be attacking the other bear less, thus doing damage on the other bear less often, and you will be applying bandages to a bear with no damage and you cant gain that way. Also if you dont keep a close eye on it one bear can end up killing the other one too.

Dont forget to feed your pets every 60-90 minutes

Heal them both, but you will only gain with one of the bears on a certain run, and your next run it might be the other bear. If you are doing this over a few days time make sure yous stable your animals and bring the same ones back the next time.

The same gain run will work for you after a while, If you were to log out then back in the next day it would work just as well as it did on day 1. I tried to see if it would work after only 4 hours, but it either was not the right 4 hours, or not enough time.

....(testing..ladedadeda...)

About 90 minutes from the first gain

About 2 hours from the first gain, after this I spent about 30 minutes looking for my next gain spot/"Run", and went back and checked some of my original gain spots.

About 4 1/2 hours from the first gain :)

Method #3 (Annother method of 8x8)

Land Based 8x8

Movement based Skill gain.

Animal lore is one of the skills in UO that requires you move around while useing it. If you keep doing it in the same spot then it will just -stop- giving you skill gain in that place for the day.

Once your animal lore hits the 60s start doing animal lore checks on whatever animals you see, this works both in and out of power hour, so if you want to tame during power hour, then animal lore out of power hour its fine. (There are actualy a ton of skills that are easy to work up even when not in power hour.)

Here is the deal tho, Dont just do animal lore randomly on 50,000 Animals. Your going to have a pair of trained combat animals with you, polar bears, timber wolves, something like that. Make sure you lock your Vet skill, and have one guard you, and the other attack.

The diffrence between land based, and Shipbased, is you will be doing the moving, and telling them "all follow" once they get attacking eachother.

Start off doing it untill you get a skill gain, then dont MOVE! You should get several gains in a minute or so. When you can go 5 attempts without getting a gain, ride off exactly 8 spaces north or south (Upper right hand corner of your screen or lower left hand corner of your screen) from where you were standing when you got the first skill gains and do it again.

You can sometimes hit sevaral "Gain" squares in a row by useing this method, it will raise your lore MANY times faster than just riding around and randomly doing animal lore.

Land based is more difficult because you have people and monsters that interfere with you more often than you will on the high seas, also if your not in a guild this has to be done in felucca. There are not as many PKs in felucca as one might think, but this is definatly something "interesting" that you will be doing (doing land based 8x8 with 2 fighting animals) it will attract a lot of attention.