Tips, Tricks, and Necessities for a Treasure Hunter

[Varak]

A treasure hunter is a unique breed in the UO world. Level 1-5 Maps are dropped in the world, and only level 1 maps can be completed by everybody. You need to collect a particular set of skills in order to successfully navigate the higher level maps. At minimum you need GM cartography, and GM lockpicking. 95 lock picking and 60 detect hidden is acceptable to open level 5 maps, but you’ll want those 55 points back eventually. A treasure hunter has about 15 skills he could use well, so it really ends up being a pretty tight build. So that’s 200 points spent (Cartography and Lockpicking). One quick caveat before we get to far down the road, this should not be your first character on the shard. You’ll expend some serious resources (time and gold) getting this up and running. Wait till money isn’t an issue anymore before trying this out. 

 
The End Game
 
The keys to not dying when opening a chest are four fold:

1. Control the spawn – you need either taming or barding skills. Level 4 & 5 chests spawn some tough creatures. Summons don’t work well because the high level spawn quickly dispels them. You’ll need to ensure you don’t get hit. That means giving them an alternate target by having a tame attack them, or provoking them to attack each other. That’s 200 more points spent (taming/lore or provoke/music)
    
    
   
2. Bring a mount. Seriously. Those high level chests have some nasty things. Sometimes even when properly provoked they may lash out at you anyway if you are close by. Don’t be close by. Plus the level 5 poison. You can’t mine (dig up a chest) on a mount. You take the mount a safe distance away, near a landmark so you can remember its exact location. You invis/stay it so grays won’t attack it. Then start digging the chest up with a shovel. With the advent of rune librabries, there is no longer a need to spend points on mining (Yay!). To cast 6th circle spells without fail requires 90.1 magery, so we might as well sink another 10 points into it and call it GM magery. That’s another 100 points. The only build I would ever recommend taking magery without meditation is a primary dexxer build. That means 100 points in meditation. Magery can do great offensive damage, great heals, great control, great cures, and great rebound damage spells. You’ll want to be casting as often as you can, and meditations means you can cast much more. It’s starting to get pretty hot in here. We’ve burned through 600 of the allotted 700 points, and we still have two primary functions we have to perform to stay alive.
    
    
   
3. Run! Or teleport as soon as the monsters spawn. Get out of there! 4-10 monsters will spawn around you. They take two seconds to react once spawned. Use that time to get as far away as possible (preferably in the direction of your mount). Then Hide/Invis. After about 15 seconds any spawn that followed you, will start working its way back to the chest. You unhide, reveal your mount and you have all your enemies at distance.
    
    
   I know you can use invisibility items and the spell, but I really prefer hide here. The invis spell will root you for a small bit, which can be problematic on level 4 and 5 chests. This is where the conundrum really takes hold. Hide is an excellent skill, and you will honestly need it to GM lockpicking anyway. You won’t really have any option but to start with it. Once you GM lockpicking, resist is a good call, and hiding is a good call. If you went the bard route for control, you could add peacemaking (which negates the need to run right away). If you went the tamer route you could add vet. If you want a true thief you could add stealth. While stealth is great to get in and out of those level 4 dungeon chests, it really doesn’t have much use on map chests. They automatically unhide you as you empty the map chest, so stealth isn’t going to get you anything over what hiding would bring.  
    
    
   
4. Finally assess.  If you went tamer this part is easy. By the time you get back to the chest on your mount, the dragons will have engaged the mobs for you. If you went provo you need to understand the spawn. Run up and hide close enough to see the full spawn, but far enough away to not draw attention. Start pulling their health bars and prioritize your kills. You may not have resist. So ranged casters should get the first provoke, then run/hide if necessary. Then poisoners second and so on. At the end since you are a GM mage, you can always throw down an EV to clean up any monsters left standing.
    
   

There you have it the four keys to safely processing a chest. Engrain those into your memory banks. They will save your life. As long as you are executing good control over the spawn, it really won’t matter whether it is a level 3 map or a level 5 map. The only real difference is a level 3 gives you some room for error before dying, a level 5 does not. You need to have your process locked down before attempting a 5. So now that we know what the final picture looks like, lets back up a bit and think about how we get there. We’ll go down each skill.
 
The Skills
 
The first question you have to ask yourself is do you want to tame or provoke. Personally when I look at the “active” time and effort it takes to GM a tamer, I would probably finish him off with skills that make him a better tamer. I likely wouldn’t have room for carto/pick. Provo requires very little time. You can literally drop him/her off at the Moonglow zoo and leave him/her there for 2-3 days. All of those days will be “passive” time which means it requires very little intervention and you can get caught up on movies, or be playing another character. There’s no money investment, and very little time investment. You’ve got a lot of skills that require a great deal of time to build. I wouldn’t make that worse by adding taming to the list. A tamer is perfectly viable if not easier if you have the time and inclination though. It’s a great build. It’s just a  considerable increase in time and effort to GM.
 
Stats:

I recommend 100 str and 100 int because you are going to want to cast quite a bit, regardless of your path. On the advanced screen I would take 10 dex, 50 int, and 30 str. If you go the taming route you’ll probably want 50 taming/49 mage/1 herd. If you go the bard route you’ll want 50 mage/49X/1 music. The one music is critical later because it will get you a newbied instrument. That is a tool worth its weight in gold if you die out in the field as a bard. I’d probably go meditation for the 49X just to save some time leveling. Meditation makes Magery gain much faster as you can cast more often. Your first stop should be the stable to herd your str/int/dex up. Herd makes str go up fast with decent int/dex gains. If you GM herd and still have a little str/int left, feel free to camp/mine/spirit speak your way to 100 in both. Training resist is also a good way to get some quick and easy intelligence gains for a few hundred gold in regs.
 
Now we will break down each skill. From this point I am going to choose the bard route, since that is what I’ve used. There are lots of tamers on this shard, so it shouldn’t take much time at all to find someone to give you tips about raising taming. Last time I did it I used compassion desert-deluccia bulls-hoppers bog-fire dungeon with the Tamer parked and a puller bringing the target mobs to the tamer.
 
Cartography – this skill is pretty simple. By some beginning skill from the cartographer (usually in same place as boats are sold  - shipwright), and buy up his blank maps. Once you make them using a macro, sell them back to him, then by some more ad nauseum until the end. It’s a pain, but it’s simple as it doesn’t matter which map you make.
 
There are a few quick notes though. Empty your pack of everything except gold when making maps. You’ll want to buy and hold as many maps as you can in your pack at a time to reduce the number of buy/sell cycles. Every time you sell a map to a vendor, a blank one shows up. So if you sold him 100 finished maps, you can then turn around and buy 100 more blank maps.
 
I often find it beneficial when starting the grind session, to recall to a couple different shops to buy up 100 maps before starting. Then stop and drop off reg’s, runes, etc, and hit the town map seller. Buy up what he has as well and start processing. Essentially what you are doing is stacking the deck. Rather than buying 20 at the dude every cycle now, he’ll have 100+ to buy for each cycle. It will dwindle over time as you destroy maps by using the skill. You aren’t perfect. So you will have to repeat the map stacking cycle over time.
 
One final side note, if you haven’t gm’d lockpicking and haven’t added detect hidden to the build do not GM cartography. You don’t want to decode a level 5 map when you can’t open the chest. I stopped in the mid 90’s so I couldn’t decode a level 5 map. Once you GM lock picking, you can finish up Carto and have an epic level 5 treasure map run with all your stored level 5 maps. Plus we can’t really make mistakes on level 5’s remember? You’ll have lots of experience doing level 3’s and 4’s to get your technique down before you attempt the level 5’s.
 
Lock Picking – the bane of every treasure hunter who wishes to do level 5 maps. You can get to 95 by buying successively difficult locked boxes, but 95-100 you have to raise by picking high level chests in dungeons. Usually very dangerous places in those dungeons. Usually half of them are picked when you try because other people want to level their picking too.  It’s IMO the hardest skill to raise in UO. Most shards you can only gain off of level 4 chests. Jack has done all treasure hunters a huge favor by letting us get gains from level 3 chests as well. Thanks Jack! To get the boxes to 95 you can buy a set of 30/50/75/GM or something similar. While you could make the 30/30 and 50/50 boxes by creating trash characters, and you can usually by a GM box for 100-200 gold on most carpenter player vendors, that 70/70 box will be a nuisance. I managed to get by this way, but I’d recommend just forking over the 3-5K to get a full set. Macro to 95, then go to a rune library and find the lockpicking section and mark all the spots where there are skill gaining chests.
 
As far as actually picking level 3-4 chests, there are a few things to keep in mind. A good chunk of them have a static spawn (they are always on the exact tile in game every time they spawn). After being picked, you need either “remove trap” with the skill, or to step back one tile and manually open it (no damage), or back up and use telekenisis. This is where we really run into trouble. Remove traps, hide, stealth all make popping/looting these chests much much easier. Stealth is amazing for those chests that move around the map a bit. So you’ve got a decision to make. You either need to have all these skills and become a treasure hunter later, or you need to find a way around the problem. I chose to find a way around the problem.
 
My method for doing level 3-4 chests wasn’t easy like adding stealth, and it wasn’t risk free (stealth + remove traps). I added hiding which is very handy for all encounters, with a little luck and a dash of mechanics. With the static chests, it was pretty much risk free. You open a gate, then hide, then go through the gate. You start picking since you are next to the box. Once the chest is unlocked, the tricky part happens. You have to back up one tile so you can pop it, with a lot of dangerous mobs around. If there are two mobs within sight, I would use my provoke skill to neutralize them. Then move a tile, hide, and pop the chest and loot. If there was one or many mobs, I would simply try to back up a tile and hide as quickly as possible. You’d be surprised how often this actually works with a room full of mobs. Now that you are one tile away and hidden, you are free to pop the chest-loot-recall to safety. Non-static chests use the same principle, except after you gate in hidden-wait 10 seconds (to refresh hide timer)- then run up to the chest and hide as quickly as possible. If it works you are golden. If it doesn’t you have a nice Gate open to get out of there quick. Reset and try again after you do a few other chests. Stealth makes life much easier, because on those non static chests, you can simply walk right up to them in safety. The skill absolutely has its merits for picking high level chests safely in dungeons, but you can get by just fine with Hide.
 
The last bit of advice I’ll give here is don’t try and grind lock picking. You’ll hate yourself and the skill and get frustrated all the time. Just make a habit of making a lockpicking run to start your day, and maybe one before you log off, maybe one every couple of hours during a long play session. It seriously takes most people a couple months to GM. Give yourself a break and let it grow over time, and absolutely use your power hour for picking.  It’s a very lucrative field of play. Once my pack is full, I’ve usually have 5-10 good quality magic items, and 5-10K of vendor trash. That’s on top of the gold I’ve collected. You’ll slowly get rich and get lots of great loot, so don’t burn out on it. FYI, PK’s like to camp the chests sometimes. Picking with a full backpack of stuff isn’t recommended.
 
Those are the two new skills that need to be covered. The rest of the skills are very common and have likely been covered multiple times, so I’ll do a quick review here for you.
 
Provoke/Music – head anywhere you can find a caged gray in a guard zone. Stables work great. The Moonglow zoo has always been a hot spot. If you just GM’d herding for stats, you are probably in a good spot to provoke. Create a macro that provokes the gray onto you, and then strums the instrument a several times between provokes. The only real key here is to make sure the gray can’t actually get to you. That’s why fenced in animals work best. GM music makes the provoke gains go faster, so you’ll want that moving up as fast as you can in between provokes. Now just leave him there. Check back every once in a while to make sure you and the gray target are still alive, but other than that just leave him parked there. Voila! GM music and provoke in a few days with no effort!
 
Magery – If you are going to add resist, you’ll want to fire field until resist is 55 – lightning until resist is 60+-Ebolt until resist is around 80ish maybe a bit more – then flamestrike to GM all while having an alt heal you outside of a guard zone. Alternatively, you could join a resist party get your resist that way. I adore a good resist party.
 
If you are not adding resist you will want to cast cheap 5th circle spells until 65- cheap 6th circle until 80-cheap 7th circle until 95 – cheap 8th circle until GM. I would just park myself in town and lightning-ebolt-flamestrike myself (with a health check). Then at summons time (95+) I’d find something good to EV and earn a most of that money backJ in between macro sessions.  That means active play time though, but most things you need an EV for pay pretty well.
 
Meditation – You will work this at the same time as magery (also try drunken mediation using AR13 to AR 17 leather suit while pounding the liqour) as you will be actively meditating between most casts to be more time efficient. The trick to getting good meditation gains while training magery is making sure after your cast, you are in the range for ideal meditation gains. Figuring out ideal meditation is easy. It is 100-med skill if you have 100 INT (and you should). So if you have 54 meditation skill, the ideal mana level to med at would be 46 (100-54). The only real “trick” to it, is you want to be at that level AFTER you cast. You do this by inserting an “if” statement that does a mana check based on the circle you cast. If you are casting a 4th circle spell which is 11 mana? You would want the “if” check at greater than or equal to 46+11 or 57 (roughly, I always round up or down to the nearest 5 or zero so 55 in this case). Then you have your casting code (simply record yourself casting), then add an else statement, record yourself meditating. To finish it off, add in appropriate delays (10 seconds for med section, and 2-3 seconds for casting section). You are now efficiently leveling both magery and meditation in harmony.
 
Hide – just park yourself somewhere and let the macro go. I usually choose quiet places at first, then busier places as it gets higher. 
 
Additional Tips
 
You’ve got an idea on the end game. You’ve got an idea on how to build the character. You’ve got some good suggestions on how to build individual skills. Let’s talk about what can go wrong and how to fix it.
 
Let’s pop a level 5 chest and start running away, and hit a lag spike. Bam! The gray screen of death! The best way to help ensure unneeded death or quick recovery is to scout the area. If there are any silver serpents, get them out of the way if possible. Let’s say during the scouting mission before popping that level 5 you spotted a healer close by. Woot! We can be up and running in just a few seconds. Run and get rezzed by the healer, have your provoke skill ready in case there is a monster standing over your corpse. Provoke the monster onto something, and quickly hide on top of your corpse. Now loot your corpse, heal up, and reset the encounter (you might need a new mount). This takes a newbied instrument (remember we put 1 into music? This is why), and the hide skill. Unfortunately you can’t invis yet because your reg box is still on your corpse. This is one of the few areas where it really pays to have hide as a skill.
 
If you didn’t spot a healer nearby it isn’t a big problem. Just have a decent mage head to a rune library, and open a gate to a chest location near the one you died at. Run through the gate get healed/rezzed and reset the scenario.  It’s 2-3 minutes of annoyance, but nothing more. Chances are the actual chest location is blocked and swamped with mobs. Most chest locations are within one to two screens of another chest location (UO stratics has a nice map of all chest spots) to spot the best one. Or if you are lazy like me just go a number up or down from your map number. One of those will be pretty close (unless it’s one of those islands with only one map spot, then you are hosed).
 
The final note I want to leave you with is paralyze. Learn to love it. It will save you many deaths. Once the first spawn is cleared, you have to get close to that chest to clear it. Monsters spawn close to that chest as well. You won’t have distance on your side like you did with the initial spawn. Pick it, open it, then cast paralyze. With the paralyze cursor up start dragging stuff into your bag. If something spawns (say a dread spider) you have paralyze pre-casted. Immediately target the spider and dump your pre-casted paralyze instantly. You should be able to apply that paralyze before it reacts to you. Then you can provoke it onto something. If nothing is around to provoke it onto, let it chase you a bit to get it away from the chest. Then paralyze it again. While it is paralyzed, keep using your chest clearing routine with the pre-casted paralyze until you can find him a dance partner.
 
There really are no surprises in any chest you have control of, and therefore no deaths. Death’s come from not having control. A silver serpent wanders into your operational area (scouting) when your provoke timer hasn’t reset. You bring someone along and they get themselves in trouble (which you have to stop your routine to cast para/heal/cure/rez/provoke). You don’t reparalyze that Ogre Lord before the other paralyze wears off. The mob literally spawns next to you and you accidently wrestle and break the precasted paralyze. Avoid these common mistakes, follow the four keys above, and you’ll safely be gathering untold riches for the rest of your life here.

[Blyth]

Great guide Varak!

99.5 lockpicking, embrace the grind.

[Varak]

Woo! 99.5 is the time to grind. Finish it!

[Veranis]

This is awesome Varak, fantastic work. Once again, haha.

So many of the points are perfect, like this one: "don't try to grind lockpicking." I always told people that, but everyone insisted on getting it done and over with as fast as possible, and then hated lockpicking (and usually themselves) afterward. Even here, I don't feel like I grinded it whatsoever, just doing a run whenever it crossed my mind, and I'm at 99.2 after just three and a half days (about 550 level 4 chests done, or about 30 runs, and two power hours where I did two runs each power hour). It's really not that bad in my opinion (still I agree, the hardest skill in the game to GM). If you notice someone else doing the chests, just leave it and come back an hour or two later. Not worth racing someone else for the untapped chests imo.

I would like to add a couple things. First of all, I'm not sure if it was because you had bad experience with it or never tried it, but recall-hiding is very efficacious, and could save a lot of time/mana. The only time it has failed on me were during lag spikes. Basically, you recall using a runebook, and as soon as your toon starts casting, just hold down your hiding hotkey until the recall is complete. You should be hidden before your character even moves and arrive at destination hidden. Just make sure you bind the hiding hotkey to hiding in your client options (not razor) and you should never fail unless you ping 250+. It may work just as well with razor's Hotkeys->Skills->Hiding option, however just don't record a razor macro of yourself using the hiding skill, as that will be too slow. I prefer client-side hotkeys for all spells and skills, just because I've had so many problems with razor over the years, and find the client ones much more reliable. It may be due to never having a steady ping of less than 140 (I'm always between 140-200).

Second thing is restock and organizer agents. To each their own, but I love these things. All my farming toons have one organizer agent with literally every lootable item type in the game, and I bind it to a hotkey. I leave the hotbag either in my bank, over the edge of my patio, or inside my house somewhere depending on the toon's build, and then no matter what loot you have, you can just hit the hotkey and sort it later (I'm a sort it later type guy, I absolutely despise sorting items as soon as I get them; however, lots of people are sort it now type people, therefore for them this tip will be useless ). Anyways, for lockpicking and treasure mapping, restock agents are also very useful. Just add all item types you want to loot to a restock agent, record a macro to restock from last target, and then just set last target to the chest and hit your macro. All the items you want from the chest will be automatically looted to your restock hotbag. If it weren't for this, I quite literally would never lockpick or treasure map: dragging items around has always been my least favourite part of the game Once again, everyone is different, this is just my style and share it for those who might not know about it. Just remember, make sure your "object delay" under "more options" in razor is at least 750 plus your average ping. You can just test it. I would start at 800 and then see how often you are getting the message "You must wait to perform another action." I personally can't have an item delay less than 1000 without getting the message more frequently than I prefer, so I leave it there.

When doing tmaps, you will frequently have to stop the restock agent to provoke spawn, so set a hotkey for "Clear Drag/Drop Queue" (Razor->Hotkeys->Misc). This way you can drink potions and access trapped pouches without them being added to the end of the item queue. Once spawn is under control, use the restock agent hotkey again and it'll resume where it left off. Later on, when you are using an organizer agent for organizing the loot, you may notice that items aren't going where they are intended, but instead just moving around in your backpack. Since the razor agents are finicky this way when using "clear drag/drop queue," I just run the organizer once with and object delay of 0. This clears the queue, and then you can run the organizer with 900 or 1000 object delay with no problems (I wish razor had a "toggle object delay on/off" hotkey... so useful, but you must set it to 0 by hand.)

Lastly, you can usually take a step and hide with mobs on screen very reliably if you just click walk and hotkey hide very quickly in the right order. Even though you haven't visually seen your toon move to its new position by the time you try to hide (due to ping), the commands are still sent to the server in the correct order so it will succeed (make sure you're already facing the right direction). Might take getting used to, and I still recommend just macroing stealth (it's a 100% afk macro to GM, just put armour on after 80), but it could be useful to some situations.

If anyone needs a razor profile with all the lockpicking/treasure map items in the organizer/restock agents, feel free to PM me and I can upload it somewhere

[Varak]

All very good points and very useful. The main reason I gate in rather than recall is so I have a very good chance of getting out. There's no room for wrestling in the build, so if something goes wrong your recall out can get interrupted. It is likely a waste of mana, but I like the safety blanket.

[Veranis]

Very true. I guess I need to keep some excitement in each aspect of the game I play Plus I only carry reagents and a couple runes, so I don't care too much about dying.

Anyways, thanks for the write-up! See you in game.

[Swunk]

cool guide

[James]

Very nice guide, thank you for posting.

I have used two accounts in the past, one as a provoke/tamer. He does the battle portion of the treasure map. I have a thief who picks the lock and utilizes the 2 seconds to hide on the spot.

Once the tamer has provoked all of the enemies into combat and they have all died, the thief will a summon a daemon and say all guard me.

I then start looting, my thief will run once spawn starts coming out from looting. The daemon will fight the spawn, as my tamer kills or provokes the spawn. Repeat until all the loot has been taken and all the spawn is dead.

[Varak]

If you can afford to keep two accounts (wholly or partly) dedicated to maps, it does make life a lot easier. You can get and keep stealth on your lockpicker which makes the skill gain safer, etc. Everything is easier with two accounts though. I remember the dark ages (97) when everyone had only one account. Man gaining skill/gold was so much tougher back then

The treasure hunter is particularly tight build since so many skills make life easier. Spreading them out over a couple of characters makes a lot of sense. If you are willing to do it, then go for it. Having two people to cast high level spells, having two ways to control mobs (provoke/tame). Being able to carry out twice the loot…

There’s lots of good options and synergy you can create with two accounts. The only thing I would likely stress is making sure both characters can cast Rez & EV. Rez for that one time you mess up. EV to speed up the kill rate. I loves me some purple llama’s of death. I think we should all petition to have every EV display as the purple Llama of Death.