Ultima Online Animal Lore - the control chance formula, the inspection thresholds, and the vet heal

Function one - what the gump actually reports

Target a creature and the gump comes back with a full read-out. uo.com lists what is on it:

• Hit points, stamina and mana, current and maximum
• Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence
• Barding Difficulty — the number Discordance, Peacemaking and Provocation are checked against
• Hit point, stamina and mana regeneration
• Resistances, as a percentage blocked per damage type, plus damage type percentages and base damage
• Combat ratings: Wrestling, Tactics, Resisting Spells, Anatomy, Poisoning, Detecting Hidden, Hiding and Parry
• Magic and lore ratings: Magery, Evaluating Intelligence, Meditation, Necromancy, Spirit Speak, Mysticism, Focus, Spellweaving, Discordance, Bushido, Ninjitsu and Chivalry
• Loyalty rating, preferred food and pack instinct
• Pet slots, current and potential maximum
• Taming requirement, rounded up

That last line is the one a tamer uses most. Before you spend an hour on a creature, the gump tells you what Animal Taming it wants and how many of your five follower slots it will eat once you have it.

How much skill you need to inspect what

Three bands, published on uo.com:

Animal Lore	What you can inspect
Below 100.0	Statistics of any tamed creature only — and uo.com warns it may take several attempts
100.0 – 109.9	Statistics of any tameable creature
110.0 or above	Statistics of any creature

100 and 110 are the two thresholds that decide whether Lore is a pet-management tool or a scouting tool. Under 100 it only tells you about animals you already own.

Function two - the control chance formula

Published in full on uo.com’s Animal Lore page, which is where the tamer’s half of the equation actually lives:

• tamingBonus = difficultyModifier × ( taming skill − pet difficulty )
• loreBonus = difficultyModifier × ( lore skill − pet difficulty )
• skillBonus = ( tamingBonus + loreBonus ) ÷ 2
• Final control chance % = 70 + skillBonus

The difficulty modifier is not one number. uo.com publishes three cases:

Case	Modifier
(skill − pet difficulty) is positive	6
Taming skill is less than pet difficulty	28
Lore skill is less than pet difficulty	14

Read that table carefully, because it is the whole argument for training Lore. Being over the pet’s difficulty is worth a modifier of 6 per point; being under it is charged at 28 on the taming side and 14 on the lore side. The penalty modifiers are larger than the bonus modifier, so the skill you are short of costs you far more than the skill you are ahead by earns you. The base is 70, and the two halves are averaged — a tamer with 120 Taming and 80 Lore is not the same character as one with 100 in each.

Function three - half of every Veterinary bandage

uo.com puts it as a direct analogy: Animal Lore “works in conjunction with veterinary in the same way as anatomy works with healing. It contributes to determining the number of hit points healed.” If you know how Anatomy feeds Healing, you already know the shape of this.

• Min_Healed = ( lore ÷ 5 ) + ( vet ÷ 5 ) + 3
• Max_Healed = ( lore ÷ 5 ) + ( vet ÷ 2 ) + 10
• Amount Healed = random ( Min_Healed, Max_Healed ) + ( pet’s max HP ÷ 100 )

Note the asymmetry, because it decides how you split points. Lore contributes ÷ 5 to both bounds; Veterinary contributes ÷ 5 to the minimum but ÷ 2 to the maximum. Veterinary widens the top of the heal; Lore raises the floor and the ceiling together.

Two abilities are gated on both skills at once, and neither works on Lore alone:

• Over 60 in both Animal Lore and Veterinary — a chance to cure a pet’s poison.
• Over 80 in both — a chance to resurrect a bonded pet.

The 80/80 gate is the one that saves an endgame pet from being permanently lost, and half of it is bought here.

Loyalty, and the word that means trouble

The gump reports loyalty as a phrase, not a number. uo.com publishes the whole ladder:

Rating shown	Level
Wonderfully happy	Extremely high
Extremely happy	Very high
Very Happy	High
Rather Happy	Good
Happy	good
Content	Neutral
Content, I suppose	Neutral
Unhappy	Low
Rather unhappy	Low
Extremely Unhappy	Very low
Confused	Extremely low

Confused is the emergency. uo.com’s warning is flat: “A confused pet is in imminent danger of becoming wild.” Everything above Content is comfort; Confused means feed it now or lose it.

It is also the door to Animal Training

The Animal Lore gump carries the Begin Animal Training button that opens the pet training system introduced with Publish 97 — the system that lets you raise a pet’s stats, resistances, skill caps and abilities rather than waiting for it to train itself. uo.com notes that traditional pet skill training and animal training “may run concurrently”, so a pet advancing through the training system is still gaining skill the ordinary way at the same time.

The weights, caps and ability limits for that system are published on the Animal Taming side and are covered there.

[!] What Animal Lore and Animal Taming levels are required to use the training system at all is not published. The uo.com Animal Training page does not state a skill requirement.

In PvP

• It is half of whether your pet obeys you. Under pressure, a failed command is a lost fight. The control formula averages Taming and Lore, so a tamer who put everything into Taming and left Lore short is running a lower control chance than their Taming number suggests.
• It is half of your pet’s sustain. Every Veterinary bandage is partly Lore, and the 80/80 gate is what lets you resurrect a bonded pet rather than lose it.
• Scouting, at 110. At 110 or above you can read any creature — its resistances, its combat ratings, its damage types — before engaging it.
• [!] uo.com does not state that Animal Lore can be used on player characters, or that it reveals anything at all about an enemy player. Any such claim is unpublished.

In PvM

• Deciding what to tame. The gump reports the taming requirement rounded up and the pet slot cost including the potential maximum, so you know both the price of the attempt and the price of keeping it.
• Feeding the bard skills. Barding Difficulty is reported here and is the figure Discordance, Peacemaking and Provocation are checked against — useful even on a character with no pet at all.
• Keeping the pet standing. Half the heal, the poison cure at 60 and the resurrection at 80.
• Reading a pet’s progress through Animal Training, and opening that system in the first place.

Caps, stats and training

Animal Lore is on the Power Scroll list: 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 with a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary scroll, counting against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Str. It is not one of the skills with a Skill Mastery.

120 is worth real points here for two published reasons: control chance uses Lore directly, and stable slots step at 100, 110 and 120 in each contributing skill. There is also an item bonus — +5 Skill Bonus [!] from the Library Talisman — Birds of Britannia Random Summoner.

NPC trainers: Animal Trainer, Fur Trader, Rancher, Ranger, Ranger Guildmaster, Vegetable Seller, Veterinarian and Gypsy Animal Herder.

[!] No numbered training path is published for Animal Lore. The skill gains through active use on creatures and passively through related activity, but no benchmark table is published. What backstops it is the Guaranteed Gain System’s mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity raising each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] Any statement that Animal Lore works on player characters.
• [!] A numbered training path with benchmark creatures.
• [!] The Animal Taming and Animal Lore levels required to open the Animal Training system.
• [!] Any success-chance formula for the Veterinary poison cure or the bonded-pet resurrection — both are described only as “a chance”.

Where these come from

uo.com Animal Lore · uo.com Animal Taming · uo.com Pets & Ownership · uo.com Animal Training · uo.com Veterinary · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.