Setting up the Macros!

Most of the time when out taming, seconds count. I wouldn't even leave town to hunt normal monsters if most of these things were not done. For dragon taming its even more important because every second matters. When a dragon is on you, its Fire breath, Claw, Claw....then your OOOoooOOOoo...

First is setting up the emergency recall, there are two ways of doing this depending on if you use UO assist or not.

Your going to want a rune marked to a safe spot, probably a town, but you also want it marked in spot that will probably not have people or things blocking it, all banks can be busy, but their is usually a "busier" side of each bank, you can mark your rune 5 or 6 steps from bank on the lower traffic side you usually will not have to deal with it being blocked. If you use banks like serpents hold, Magencia, or Nujelm you will almost never have a rune blocked because there are so few people banking there.

Not everyone is aware of this, but you can put a rune in a rune book and then set that rune location as "Default" you can then cast and target the outside of the rune book and not have to open it at all. Under normal conditions its a great way to save time, and under combat conditions its a life saver.

The first which does not require UO assist, is to set up a "Cast Spell" "Recall" macro on your keyboard, its the kind of thing that is going to be cast a lot, and sometimes its being cast in emergency situations so I would recommend putting it on one of you f1-f12 keys (I use f7)

UO in game macros

If you have never set up a UO Macro before this is how its done:

1. Hit Alt-O to bring up your options menu

2. Its the lower left hand tab on the menu that comes up

3. There are 3 sections (actually up to 4) that you can add, the first is what type of action you want the macro your setting up to be. It can be a simple macro like "Last object" which uses your last object again, such as with mining, it will target the shovel for you for each stroke, or "Last spell" which gets you casting the spell you last used from your spell book.

Each section has several options

They can be for doing things, saying things, using skills, items, objects, attacking, casting spells, etc. This particular one is a speech macro:

From there they get more complex, for example a mining macro might be "last object" to get it started, then in the second line you might use "last target" to have your miner dig in the same spot he has been digging in, in the next line you could even add some other things that you want your character to do while mining.

In the pre trammel days, almost all miners were Master Hiders, basically we all had "last object" (for the shovel) and "Use skill" "hiding" set up, so every time we were out mining we were practicing hiding.

One last thing to remember about the macros you set up, is your connection. If you have a DSL or cable and a very fast connection it wont be as much of a concern, but if your on dial up, a slow computer, or an aol type connection, then your going to have to make some choices. I found that by adding hiding to my mining macro, that it took about 35 minutes as opposed to 30 minutes to mine out my main mining cave.

4. Setting up two part macros (such as spell casting) are first the thing you want to do (cast spell) then exactly what you want to do with it (Set a specific spell to be cast)

5. If there is something you want to add on the macro you set up, you can add it in the next line. Be careful not to set up macros that give your Avatar too many orders, at best it will slow down the execution of your primary orders by a moment or two, but at worse it might "jam" and cause you to have to log out then log back in to fix the problem.

6. When your done hit APPLY! I always hit it twice, its a laggy button, and if you dont hit it then the macro does not save and you have to do it again GRRRRR lol :)

Be particularly careful on spell casting macros, when they jam a lot of the time your character is physically frozen because the game thinks your casting a spell, and anything that was chasing you can now catch you....

That is how to set up an in-game macro

UO Assist macros

Setting up a UO Assist macro is a little different, for the 1 button recall macro it works like this:

1-(Have your spell book open to the page where recall is, otherwise you will record "opening your spellbook")

Hit Record on your UO assist menu

Cast recall, now target the rune or rune book (only use rune books with a default location set up, but don't Open the rune book or target locations in the rune book for this macro, it will jam you or even "lag" delete the rune book)

Hit "Stop" on your UO assist menu.

Now you need to assign a hot key to play that macro, for the example we used macro #16 so we hit the "keys" tab on UO assist, then highlight macro 16, then put the cursor in the box and press the keys you want to use :)

Being able to hit a single button and recall out of a danger zone is one of the very best things about UO assist.

Make sure you test out the macro before using!!!! If there is a problem you don't want to figure that out while 4 lich lords are bearing down on you.

Gate escape spell/scroll macro.
This is for getting your newly tamed pet out of harms way. As soon as you tame a pet and feed them they will follow your orders, but they will still have the Gray criminal flag for up to 2 minutes (from the last time they did something criminal like try and attack you) Invis for a moment to get them out of war mode, then Cast gate to your special location. I personally use the north tip of Skara, its out of a guard zone, but close to the stables. Its usually a safe place to wait while your pets criminal flag expires.

DONT take pets through town when they are still gray, they can freak out and attack players or npcs, and for sure don't do it in Felucca, Lamer players will sometimes attack your gray dragon then call the guards on it as soon as it counter attacks.

Now you have your escape macros set up, its time to make some other macros.

You NEED to be able to Cure and G-heal yourself with a macro. While dragon taming you're going to take a lot of fire breath and the occasional clawing. I use UO assist for these, but you can use the in game UO macros as well.

For UO assist:

For the UO in game macros, make a macro to cast each spell and a "Target self" macro. (Don't forget to hit "APPLY" after setting up each macro.)

If your macro-impaired (lol I was the first several months of playing UO until a kindly Blacksmith on Baja named Stone Cold took the time to show me how to do it, and hung out until he was sure I "had it") another option for spells is to drag the picture of the spell from your spell book, and have it "floating" on your screen.

My tamer has these macros set up I use both UO and UOA macros:

I also have these spells set up on hot keys (I use Alt number keys and Ctrl number keys)

I have the standard speech macros as well:

And I have the taming specific macros set up as:

And finally I have the "all names macro" set up as well. Since I'm on dial up, "show incoming names" is absolutely not a possibility for me, as a side note if UO is laggy for you, and you can see the names of incoming people, animals, monsters etc, turn it off, that will solve the bulk of your lag problems. If your on a slow ISP or have an older computer the game will still not run as fast for you as it would for others, but having "show incoming names" checked as on in those cases would make the game just about unplayable.

What all names does for me is gives me a quick "heads up" for all the monsters, players, animals and corpses on the screen, its pretty useful to see who a person that is heading for you is, and what kind of animals are around you when your out taming in heavy brush.

* UO assist
If you don't already have UO Assist you can get a lifetime membership for your UO account for $15 at www.tugsoft.com In addition to it being the only legal 3rd party macro program and being extremely useful, its also not a hard program to use, and the directions that Tug uses are written in plain English (not a ton of computer jargon). Highly Recommended.