What's new

Player Written Guides UOAlive Animal Taming Guide

Insanonaut

Member
UOAlive Animal Taming 0 - Legendary

So, you want to build a Tamer? Whether it is your first time building a tamer, or your 50th, welcome to my guide. The reason that I am making this guide is because skills work a little bit differently on UOAlive. There is an increased skill gain on UOALive which makes building a tamer much easier than on all other servers. Because of this, the other guides out there may actually hinder your training more than helping. Or, at least that's what my experience was.

Anyway, this is going to be a step-by-step walkthrough of the training process. I will be building a fresh tamer from scratch while writing this guide so that you can follow along in my path to get yourself up and slaying some of the toughest bosses in the game in no time.

The things that I am going to cover in this guide include...

⦁ What Skills to pick at character creation.
⦁ How to start training your base skills.
⦁ What animals you should focus on to go from 0 - 90 skill.

⦁ How to use "The Trick" once you hit 90 Animal Taming.
⦁ What pets are good to start making money.
⦁ Items to buy to make life easier.
⦁ How to use pet training to make your pets gods.

What skills to pick at character creation.
First things first, you need to have the right skills at character creations. The 3 skills that are mandatory for success are Animal Taming, Animal Lore, and Magery. The 4ths choice can be yours, but I chose to do Veterinary because I want to use that later. Set Animal Taming and Magery to 50 because those two are going to be the more challenging skills to raise. Animal Lore will come for free while you are training Taming.
I would recommend starting your stats at 50 Strength, 10 Dexterity, and 30 Intelligence. When you create your character, go ahead and lock your Dexterity at 10. You shouldn't need that for anything that we are going to cover in this guide.

jreifEb.png



How to start training your base skills.
Believe it or not, the first skill that we are going to GM is not Taming. We are going to GM Magery. This is going to help us not only survive, but get around and take our pets with us. Magery is very important because it gives us the Gate spell which will allow us to transport fresh tamed pets back to the safety of the towns.

Before you begin training Magery, get yourself a 100% Lower Reagent Cost suit. This shouldn't be very hard to do. There are lots of vendors that sell LRC pieces. If you can find pieces with Lower Mana Cost, or even Mana Regeneration, that will be even better.

Once you have gotten your suit, we are going to start training. Use whatever program you use to set up a macro for your Magery. Like I said, this server uses a much faster, more reliable skill gain for skills. You can gain while casting a single spell for a lot longer than you can on regular servers.

The spells that we are going to cast to go from 50 - 100 are as follows.
⦁ 50-60 = Magic Reflection
⦁ 60 - 85 = Invisibility (More reliable gains than Magic Reflection)
⦁ 85 - 100 - Earthquake

All in all, it should take you less than 2 hours to GM Magery using this technique.
ia2MFwi.png


What animals you should focus on to go from 0 - 90 skill.
Now that you have GMed Magery, you need to start focusing on your Taming. I would start by making a macro for Taming so that when you push it, it automatically uses the skill. You can also make a macro so that when you push a button, it selects the 'Last Target'. his way, when you fail a tame, you can quickly retry without having to click on the animal again. Anything to streamline the process.
HycUelu.png


Once you have your macros put together, head to the Minoc Moongate. Right off the bat, tame every animal that you see to get your skill gaining. Right away, we are not going to focus on anything specific. Our goal is to get to 53.1 so that we can focus on what I call "Fail Training"

What I mean by "Fail Training" is that we are going to be gaining skill while trying not to tame the creature. The chance of us taming creatures at these levels will make it so that was can gain a lot of points off a single animal. This limits the amount of time that we need to spend running around looking for something new to tame. We are going to focus on taming just a few specific animals to get all the way up to 90. The list looks like this....

⦁ 50 - 53.1 = Tame every small animal you see in the woods.
⦁ 53.1 = Focus on Grey Wolves and Panthers. (Minoc Forest)
⦁ 59.1 = Focus on Great Harts and Grizzley Bears (Minoc Forest)
⦁ 65.1 = Focus on White Wolves (Dagger Isle has a ton)
⦁ 68.7 - 90 = Focus on Gaman (Homare - Jima has a ton)

A helpful tool that can speed up the process is using a Scroll of Alacrity. This blue scroll makes it so that when you gain, you have a chance to earn up to 0.5% towards your skill instead of just 0.1%. The scroll buff will last for 15 minutes so you want to make sure that you get the most out of the scroll.


0jbRW7A.png


While I was training my way up, I used a Scroll of Alacrity when I was at about 78.0 skill and it took me all the way up to 90 before it wore off.

TqLJECU.png


How to use "The Trick" once you hit 90 Animal Taming.
SIEHBmV.png


Once you hit 90 Animal Taming, take the last Gaman that you trained back to town. We are going to use a trick to fast track your training process and get to 100 skill in no time. In fact, this will be the same trick that we are going to use if you plan to take your skill all the way up to 120.

The first thing that you are going to need to do is acquire a "Book of Masteries". This is a book that you can use to give yourself extra abilities to use when you have a specific skill above 90. You can buy a "Book of Masteries" from player vendors around town or do one of the various bard quests to get one yourself.


2UzXFEK.png


The next thing that you are going to want to acquire is a "Primer On Animal Taming Mastery". These are drops that you get from doing Champion Spawns. They come in 3 different Volumes: I, II, III. Volume III is the best and will usually give you the best bonuses for your skill. It doesn't matter which one you get for training purposes. A volume I will work just as well as a volume III.

0Li619A.png


Double click the primer and it will get added into your book. Now, single click your book to 'Switch Mastery' and select your Animal Taming from the list.


xLx7dtn.png


Now that you have selected Animal Taming as your Mastery, you have gained access to a few new abilities. The first is "Whispering" which we will talk about later in the guide, but the one that we are going to focus on now is "Combat Training".

Pull the Combat Training icon out of the book for more ease. Double click it and it will want you to select a pet to use the skill on.

2IhIaoG.png


When you select your pet, a window will pop up giving you a few training selections to choose from. Just ignore this window.

Nu2rUCi.png


Rinse, repeat. Double click the ability, then click your pet. Every time you do this, you have a chance to gain in Animal Taming. Do this until you hit 100, or however high you have scrolls for.

ngwuqWT.png


What pets are good to start making money.

JmiEhq3.png


Now that we have hit 100 Animal Taming and 100 Animal Lore, it is time for you to go out and get your first pet. There are several options for pets that are good for a beginning tamer. I will list a few of them below and explain why I like these pets.

Drake - Drakes, Crimson Drakes, and Platinum Drakes are a great starting pet for a new tamer. They require 85.0 Taming so they should be fairly easy to tame once you beat them down and get them running.

Dragon - Slightly harder to tame is the Dragon. The minimum required to tame a Dragon is 93.9 which means that you are going to spend a lot of time angering the beast before you get a chance to start taming. If you manage to tame a Dragon at 100 skill, it will be a noticeable power difference to that of a drake.

Unicorn/Ki-Rin - The Unicorn and the Ki-Rin and both magic using ridable pets. Unicorns can only be tamed by females and Ki-Rin can only be tamed by males. Unicorns are immune to basically all poison which makes keeping them alive a whole lot easier for a new tamer. An added bonus is that these monsters are blue when you find them in the wild, meaning that they are non-hostile. You can stand next to them and keep trying to tame them and they will not bite back at you. Both of these pets require 95.1 Taming which means that you are going to be trying for a while, but the tradeoff is that you do not need to worry about staying alive while doing it.

Nightmare - The nightmare is an iconic pet spanning all eras of Ultima Online. This fire breathing, Magery casting dark horse is a fantastic starter pet if you can manage to tame one. They require 95.1 skill just like the Unicorn and the Ki-Rin, but this one will bite back hard. Another useful bit of information is that on UOAlive, Nightmare can occasionally be found at only 1 slot which means that they have a lot more training potential if you find one of these rare mares.

Hiryu/Lesser Hiryu - Both of these pets are the top of the line for what a tamer with only 100 skill could even hope to successfully tame. They both require 98.7 taming which means you need to be unbelievably lucky to succeed. If you do manage to get one, it will be a fantastic pet. Later on, when you get into pet training, Lesser Hiryu end up being some of the strongest pets in the game. I'll go more into that later.

In most cases, for higher Intelligence pets, you will need to beat them down to very low life and continuously try to tame them until you "break their will", and only then will you start the taming process having a chance to successfully tame. The higher your taming skill, the more likely you are to start the taming process.

Mix578m.png
RmHXqta.png


For the purposes of this guide, I chose to tame a Unicorn and will use that as my example for the rest of the guide.

8QIo3X7.png


Items to buy to make life easier.

Once you have tamed your new, badass pet, head back to town. You are going to want to do one of two things to bond your pet. The first option that you have is to feed it, and then lock it away in the stables for a week. This process is widely known as the safest way to bond your pet on most servers. Once the pet has been alive for 1 week, just feed it again and it will bond to you.

The other way to bond your pet, is to buy a pet bonding deed from the gold stone at the Britain Bank. It costs 175,000 gold but will instantly bond your pet to you.

iAmqMbr.png


There is actually a third way to bond a pet and that is by using the UO Shop to spend your Sovereigns that can be purchased with your Kudos.

The other item that is highly recommended that you buy is the Pet Leash. This item allows you to turn your pet into a statuette so that you can carry them in your bag. Kind of like a Pokeball. This will allow you to carry around multiple different pets and eliminate the need for stabling your pets. Be careful though. If you leash your pet when they are not happy with you, it will be impossible to ever get them to come back. Always make sure your pets are happy.

0xXmBfC.png


How to use pet training to make your pets gods.

The last category that I am going to talk about is pet training. This will be the most important category to talk about as it is basically the equivalent of "end game" for Tamer builds. The core concept of pet training is that you can train up your pets to become unique and use different skills and spells to fit whatever situation you need. I am going to do my best to explain this in the best layman's terms that I can for the newer tamers.

To start, every pet has a slot count. You can see that when you use Animal Lore on your pet. You can see that my Unicorn starts at 2 => 5 slots. This unicorn takes up 2 of my 5 available slots for pets that I can hold.

bhnuBlx.png


When using Animal Training, you fight with your animal to gain experience for them and every time your fill your experience bar, you "Level Up" to the next slot. For example, when I "Level Up" this unicorn, it will go from 2 slots to 3.

Every time you "Level Up" your pet, you are able to assign points to train its abilities and increase its stats. This includes everything from increasing its Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Hit points, to increasing its resists to make it tougher. You can also add in the ability for your pet to regenerate HP, Stamina, and Mana. You can also use points to increase your pets’ skills all the way up to 120 by using Power Scrolls, or even train them in new Magics that they normally wouldn't come with.

There is no right way to do it. But there definitely is a wrong way and through the rest of this, I am going to do my best to make sure that you do not waste your time by ruining a pet. I've done it on a few occasions and it is not fun.

This is how I recommend starting training a new pet.

Before you begin this process, you will need to invest in some Power Scrolls. You are going to need to get yourself to about 110 Animal Taming and Animal Lore to be able to successfully train any “end game” pets. You can often find the scrolls on player vendors, or if you are feeling very daring, you can grab a couple of your friends and go run a Champion Spawn and have a chance to earn your own scrolls.

syiDIfg.png
yoY7vOV.png


Once you have gotten those skills trained up, you will be able to continue with training your pets. Use “The Trick” that we talked about earlier to achieve this.

GfqK1fF.png


The first thing that you need to do is hit the button on your pets Animal Lore window is hit the button that says “Begin Animal Training”.

DkKAd1l.png


What I like to do first is go to a low-level dungeon. My favorite is Covetous. I am going to take my unicorn and go through the whole first level killing everything that I come across. A good idea here is to use the Animal Taming ability that you get from your Book of Mastery called Whispering. It makes your pet gain its skills a lot faster. Maxing out your skills like Wrestling, Parry, Magery, etc. early before you get too deep into training is a great idea.

tAGEaxF.png


Now kill everything and get those skills topped off and then come back. You can also use this time to start working on your Veterinary skill if you plan to use it.

As you are killing things, you will notice your pets battle experience gaining. There are 3 levels of gain, Slightly, Fairly, and Greatly. Ideally, you want to find monsters to fight that give “Greatly” gains because they will fill up your bar faster.

dSDxm9m.png


GzcT7LC.png


When you get your bar up to 100%, it is now time to start distributing your first set of training points. First thing you need to do is use Animal Lore on your pet and at the bottom of the main screen click the button that says “Pet Training Options”. This will bring up a window that looks like the left box. At the bottom middle, it says “PLAN”. Click that button and it brings up the window to the right. Before doing anything, click “ENABLE” at the top of the right window. This will enable a planning mode that will make it so that you can plan out your enhancements before you commit.

EsVe5zx.png


As you can see at the top of the right window, you have 1501 points to spend on this level up. Everything that can be added has a weight to it which determines how many points it takes to enhance it. Things like Strength and HP take 3 points each, while Mana and Intelligence take .5 each. Play around with it to see how much everything takes before you commit.

The first thing that I would recommend is to always use the first level up to make your pet tougher. Enhance their resists, regens, strength etc. This will make it a lot easier to keep your pet alive while we are doing the rest of the level ups. I will explain the order that I like to add points so that it is easy to understand why.


  • The first thing that I like to do is make sure that “Base Damage” is maxed. A pet’s base damage can go up at 3 slots and at 5. Making sure that it is maxed will ensure that your pet is always hitting as hard as they can. (In this case, my unicorn is already maxed for its slot count.
  • The next thing that I do is Max out Mana Regen at 30, and Hit Point Regen at 20. I usually only put in 5 Stamina regen because I feel like anything more than that is a waste of points.
  • Next, add Stamina and Dexterity to your plan. Max both of those at 150. Stamina is how fast your pet attacks, while Dexterity is how fast they move.

The next thing we are going to add points into is your resists. This is one of the points where people mess up their pets most often. Pets have a maximum of 365 resist points. You cannot max out all of your resists, so don’t even try. I usually like to set up my resists on all of my pets to look like this...

  • 80 Physical (most common damage type)
  • 75 Fire (second most common damage type)
  • 70 Cold
  • 70 Poison
  • 70 Energy
At this point, your plan should look something like this...

6LVp3zt.png


As you can see, I have 222 points left to spend. You may have more; you may have less. You are going to want to look at the stats that your pet has and see what you could do to make your pet a little stronger. I see that my Unicorn only has 204 Hit Points. I am going to use the rest of these points from this level up to increase its max HP.

y4tjdEm.png


Once you have planned out all of your points, it is now time to start committing them. At the top of you Planning window, hit the “DISABLE” button. This will make it so that any changes that you do become permanent and use up your points. Start from the top and work your way down making sure that you do exactly what you did in the planner. Delete the stats from the planner as you go to keep from getting confused.

Congratulations! You have successfully upgraded your pet to the next level. Now you will be able to let your pet fight by themselves without you having to closely monitor their health. You are also able to go fight stronger enemies to make your training go faster. A few good examples of ways to train your pet are...

  • Swoop who is in Twisted Weald, which is a place that can only be accessed after you accept a quest for Dreadhorn.
  • Tyball’s Shadow who is in the Underworld Dungeon.
  • Shadow Iron Elementals which you can find in the Rat Cave, or dig up yourself. They are immune to pet damage which means that your pet can keep beating on them but never kill them.
Second Level Up

Alright, now that you have filled the bar up to 100% again, it is time to start giving your pet points into things that will make it do more damage. Start by using Animal Lore on your pet and hitting the “Pet Training Options” again. Set up your windows by hitting the “PLAN” button and make sure that you hit “ENABLE” on the planner window. Just like last time, we are going to fill up our planner before we commit anything. This will make it a lot harder to mess up by giving us a template.

Here is what we are going to be dumping points into this round...

  • Base Damage Per Second - if you did not add anything to it on the last level up, you should be able to put points in here to make your pet do more damage.
  • Strength – at this point, I like to max out my Strength to 700. This will make sure that your pet is hitting as hard as possible. Note, this is very expensive because each point of Strength costs 3 points to buy.
The next thing that we are going to max is Intelligence, but we are going to take a quick detour so I can explain why you need to do this in the correct order. Just like your character, your pet only has a certain number of points to spend on Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. Dexterity will always have a max of 150 unless you pet comes with higher Dex. The maximum number of points that you have to spend between these is 1220. This means that if you max your Strength at 700 and your Dex at 150, you will only be able to put 370 into Intelligence. If for some reason, you accidentally max Intelligence before Strength, then you have just cut your pet’s damage in half.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, we are going to disable our planner and commit the changes for Base Damage and Strength. Do this, and then continue.

Now that you have maxed your base damage and set your Strength to 700, “ENABLE” your planner to continue with this level up.


  • Intelligence – You can now click the >>> button to max out your Intelligence.
  • Hit Points – Dump whatever points you have left into HP so that your pet can take a bigger hit.
Commit these new points, and if you have 1 or 2 points left, just dump the excess into Mana.

You have now completed the next level up. My unicorn has 1 more level to go, so we are going to go back to training.

If your pet started at a 1 slot pet, you will have 1 more level up than I have. During this level up, decide how you want your pet to play. Are you going to change what Magic it does, or even add a new one? Are you going to add any special abilities?

Most pets can be taught up to 3 things. 1 Special Ability/Move, 1 Area Ability, and 1 Magic Ability. If your pet already comes with one of these things, choosing a different one will replace the original, except for in some cases.

You can look that up and do your research because there are too many variables to list. Google will always be your friend.

Final Level Up!

Alright, you finally did it! You maxed out your final bar and are about to start looking at where to put your points to max out your bad ass pet. The first thing you need to decided is if you are going to just dump all of the points into stats, or if you are going to try to get some Power Scrolls to increase the caps of your pet abilities. I almost always leave room to max out my power scrolls. Here is how we are going to do this...

Start by hitting your Pet Training Options button just like always. Set up your windows with your planner, and hit “ENABLE” to make sure that we do not mess anything up.

The first thing we are going to do is make sure that our Base Damage is maxed. This is your last level up, so make sure your pet is doing as much damage as possible because you won’t be able to change it later. Add to Plan.

S4RpIBb.png


If you haven’t yet added your special moves, or magics, do that now. I don’t plan to do that with my unicorn.

Next, we are going to go through and add our Power Scrolls. To do this, we need to click on the, “Increase Magic Skill Caps”, and “Increase Combat Skill Caps” buttons to access the skills.

V85bUfw.png


When you click those, you will see a list of all of your skills that you will be able to increase your skill caps for.

UsvppVv.png
sQu1G55.png


Go through every skill and select the option to increase your skill to 120. It doesn’t matter if we can’t complete it now, but it reserves the points until you do have the 120 scrolls to add in.

Yjhi4RU.png


Once you have gone through and added all of the skills, your Planner should look something like this...

vL3FDIY.png


When you get a scroll that you would like to add to your pet to increase their skill, all you need to do is “DISABLE” the planner and go to that skill in the Training Menu, select the level of scroll that you have and select “TRAIN”.

Ep7woml.png
lma63nG.png


After you have committed the change, go back to the planner window and hit “ENABLE” to put it back in planning mode. This will make sure you can’t mess anything up. I do this between every scroll I add. You should now delete the entry in the planner for whatever skill you just increased. In the training menu, go back to that skill and select it again, planning it for the max 120. This will recalculate your planner to show your correctly how many points you have left to spend.

You can see that Meditation now costs 10 points to get to 120, instead of the 20 points it cost earlier.

GBJOEmU.png


Finally, if you have any points left over, spend them where your pet needs them the most. I find that I end up healing my unicorn a lot, so I am going to use my spare points to increase his Health a bit, but also, he ran out of his Mana on long fights, so I am going to dump some points into Mana as well.

wqLKvYk.png


Now that you have figured out where you want all of your points to go, hit the “DISABLE” button and commit your Base Damage and whatever else you decided to add in.

At this point, your planner should only be the scrolls that you have not gotten to 120 yet. Your pet is essentially completed. You can now take your pet out into the world and start shouting “ALL KILL” at the top of your lungs.

3j9y1nD.png


Here is a list of some helpful links that a lot of us tamers use and why they are useful.

https://www.uo-cah.com/ - This is an awesome resource for Tamers. It has a bestiary that lists all of the tamable pets and where to find them, what they can learn, what their stats ranges are, etc. It also has a bunch of calculators and planners so you can see how good your pet is before you even start training it.

https://www.uoguide.com/Animal_Taming - Will give you a lot of tips on the training process from 0 – 120, but I like my way that I listed above better. It does however have different links in the “See Also” section at the bottom that are very helpful including...

https://www.uoguide.com/Tameable_Pets - which I use to look at what each pet takes to tame it. This is also helpful in pushing you in the right direction during the training process.

You can use the https://forum.uo.com/ to see what other people are asking and answers given, as well as the Stratics forums https://community.stratics.com/forums/uo-tamer.419/ . Chances are, somebody has asked the question before.

Like I said earlier, Google will be your friend.

Finally...

Thank you for reading my guide for Animal Taming on UOAlive. I spent a good chunk of time working on this guide, so if you enjoyed it, let me know in the comments, or send me a message on Discord @Insano.

If you have questions, you are definitely able to ask, and if I don’t know the answer, then we will figure it out together.

Have fun, be safe, and just remember... as the Pokémon motto goes, “Gotta Catch’em All”.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This... Is... AMAZING! for someone new to UO like myself (played similar titles) taming has always seemed so daunting... this guide is so well put that i'll be following it basically exact! Thank you for the time and effort that went into this!
 
Hi , thanks for the GREAT guide.
When taking advantage of the 5x 90 skill tokens , which skills would you advice to get first?
Its my very first character in this server , so im starting without any gold.
I think animal taming , animal lore , and magery are a must?
What about mining to get some starting gold?
 
So, you never got back around to why lesser hiryu are some of the best end game pets. Is it because they're already strong for the number of pet slots they take?
 
I have created a house in Homare-Jima that I am going to try to keep stocked with all of the supplies that I talk about in this guide. Gear, Spellbooks, Book of Masteries, Transcendence and Alacrity Scrolls, and most importantly, Power Scrolls. It is located near all of the Gaman where every tame who is finishing their journey will have easy access to it. There is also a mailbox where you are able to deposit pets that I will display for other new tamers to use as guides now that we can use Animal Lore on shrunken pets.

Please feel free to stop by.

1653693533445.png
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi!
This guide is really amazing... But is really amazing for an quite already established player.

For example, as a totally new player, I can't train magery upfront; I just can't afford to buy reags (not to mention a place to train AFK).
Are there some suggestion for a newcomer that started fresh, with 1k in his account, 50 Taming and 50 Magery?
Already in the 70s in taming and Lore, but there is no way I can afford a low regs suit or in a sufficient reagents stock to train my magery like that...
Any advice?

P.S All my initial gold went to train eval int, I feel I'm not taking advantaged of my Young Status, taming great Harts in New Haven outskirts... :p

My plan for my 7GM Tamer would be:
Taming
Animal Lore
Vet
Magery
Eval Int
Med
Hiding? Resist? Wrestling?
 
Hi!
This guide is really amazing... But is really amazing for an quite already established player.

For example, as a totally new player, I can't train magery upfront; I just can't afford to buy reags (not to mention a place to train AFK).
Are there some suggestion for a newcomer that started fresh, with 1k in his account, 50 Taming and 50 Magery?
Already in the 70s in taming and Lore, but there is no way I can afford a low regs suit or in a sufficient reagents stock to train my magery like that...
Any advice?

P.S All my initial gold went to train eval int, I feel I'm not taking advantaged of my Young Status, taming great Harts in New Haven outskirts... :p

My plan for my 7GM Tamer would be:
Taming
Animal Lore
Vet
Magery
Eval Int
Med
Hiding? Resist? Wrestling?

Magery has never been a cheap skill to start with. If you want to make some money faster, pick a warrior.
BTW there are 17 skills that aren't considered for the 720 skillcap, and hidding is one of 'em, same for lockpicking, carpentry, herding, camping, lumberjacking, mining, arms lore, taste ID...
I started as a 50/50 Mage/Tamer and I could handle myself. It's even fun. Now I have those same 6 skills maxed out (100-110) + some wrestling.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ahoy you can piece together a 100% LRC suit fairly cheaply (a few thousand gold) or from killing entry level mobs. That will save a ton on reagents.

Also you can train your skills AFK just about anywhere. Obviously a less busy place to cut down on the spam is nice. Come on by the Three Stone Tavern and use any of the upper floors to train away.

(Moongate system, special locations)
 
Thx for the tutorial really helping!

My 2 cents for new player like me, could be validated by more experienced player :p


If like me, you could not aford a full spell book and the regs to train magery early on (so no recal spell), skip the part on Dagger Isle that have no moongate and keep taming Grizzley Bears until 80 skill and then you can moongate to Gaman location.
 
Last edited: