Hell (and Heaven) is other people...
                  an Ultima Online odyssey
                       by Dave Booth.
                 (Continued from issue 61)

Part two - Survival and getting rich

One of the first lessons that you learn about UO is that life is
cheap. There's no true death, because after dying you resurrect at
a healer; either one of those in town, or one of the many that
wander the landscape. (Sod's law dictates though that you can't
find one when you want one, and end up running around the woods in
ghost form for 20 minutes. Grrrr.)

Death means that you lose your belongings. (Unless you were killed
by a monster, find a healer before your corpse rots, and loot it
before the monster does you in again!) Now, if you are one of
those who likes to wear snazzy (expensive) armour and carry
high-powered, magical (expensive) weaponry, this labels you as a
magnet for player-killers.

Unfortunately one of the most coveted resources in UO - magical
reagents - can't be seen without snooping someone's backpack.  So
the traveller who wears only a robe, to illustrate just how skint
they are, may be taken for a mage and become another target.  Not
that all pks kill for what they can get; just the vast majority.
Some kill for fun. Some roleplay it. The solo pk, like a predatory
animal, seeks out victims, appraises their ability to fight back,
selects the weak, then attacks.

Most pks however travel in packs, akin to hyenas, looking (again)
for the weak but wealthy looking. This makes most of the money-
making skills in UO incredibly hazardous. The manufacture of
armour pieces by blacksmithy is profitable, but even more so if
you provide your own metal ingots, by mining the ore from the
mountain and smelting it. But try being a miner in the infamous
North Britain mines.... working for ages at the excruciatingly
boring task of mining ore, then smelting the ore to get a few
ingots, only to lose them to the first pk who decides to make a
visit.  Other professions performed out of town are less subject
to attack : bowmaking from wood cut from the trees is next on the
list of attackables. Bows can be sold in town, but since most pks
can't go into town, they're less covetous.

(The reason most pks can't enter town, is that upon killing 5
people in succession you are branded a Murderer. This renders you
eligible for instant killing by guards if you enter town. It also
means that for 40 hours, should you die you will lose some of your
hard-earned abilities. It does mean that your name is displayed in
a nice warning shade of scarlet however.)

Still less hazardous but much less profitable are jobs like taming
and selling horses, or killing animals for wool or for hides to
make clothing and leather goods. ARMOUR. That sort of leather
good.  However there is no 'safe' profession out of town, as your
chosen occupation is not displayed anywhere on your character
profile.  Since many people are out in the wilderness making cash
by the expedient of killing monsters, therefore the fella who is
seen just shearing a sheep may a moment before have been slaying
ogres.  So in the woods, consider yourself a permanent target.
As for the dungeons...! It's blatantly obvious what folk do here.
Not sheep-shearing, that's for certain. Accordingly, gangs of pks
regularly sweep the dungeons and pick off folk en route. Why spend
an hour to make 5k killing monsters at considerable risk, when you
can make it in minutes killing one player? That's the theory.

I know it sounds like the only way to make money in UO is by
player-killing, but that's an exaggeration. At least it is since
the UO world was changed in April 2000. Origin finally brought in
the pk- free lands, whole shards where you could not attack or be
attacked by a player. At the moment (mid-May) it seems that
virtually the entire population has shifted to the newlands, how
much of that is due to the safety and how much to the novelty
factor it is too soon to anticipate.

So it is possible now to talk of how to make money "regardless of
player-killers". Not that it couldn't be done before, but it was
much more hazardous. There were a number of professions that could
be performed entirely in the safety of town (where attacking an
innocent player has always been punishable by death).

I had a character on the Drachenfels shard who was a tailor. By
the expedient of buying thread (3 gp a spool), winding it into
bolts of cloth (5 spools a bolt), making fancy shirts (5 pieces of
cloth a shirt, 50 pieces a bolt), and selling the shirts to NPC
shopkeepers (at 12 to 15 gold pieces each), I made more gold in an
hour, risk free, than in three hours of hazardous monster-hunts.
Tedious work, not fun, but safe. Many a small house was paid for
from cloth, before Origin got round to upping the price of thread
(sigh).

Oh yes, housing! Perhaps the ultimate acquisition in UO. Quite
aside from the achievement that you get from finally affording a
house, and buying a deed, and finding a spot to place it (by far
the most difficult job), a house is the only other place where a
person can store goods and money once the bank box fills up. Bank
boxes hold 125 items, which is soon taken up after a few weeks'
hard work.  The house (of which there are many types, varying from
the humble small wooden shack to a fully-blown castle) is also the
only place where players can place vendors. These are npcs whom
you hire to sell your wares to other players, and as such are hard
at work when you are offline. Very handy for flogging all that
armour that you made today, or the bows you fletched, or the
reagents that you took from your latest victim.

So after a while of working hard (in whatever profession you
choose, noble or ignoble) you can expect to have a home, a vendor
to sell your goods, money in the bank, and a character in whom you
have invested quite a bit of your own real-life time and effort.
What more could you want?

Well... this IS an online, multiplayer game. There must be a
social aspect to it?

More on that anon.

@~... Next issue


                              - o -