Ultima Online Camping - the 30 second timer, the 7 tile radius, and why nobody trains it

For official shards · Wilderness skill · Dex/Int · caps at 100 — no Power Scroll exists for it · every figure sourced

uo.com: “Camping allows a character to log out relatively quickly, as if you were at home or at an inn.” Put more plainly, it lets you log out safely out in the wilderness. That is the skill. There is no second function waiting further down the page.

This page is short on purpose. Camping has two real mechanical constants, one honest assessment, and a supply chain. uo.com says outright that training it to Grandmaster is not worth the points, so padding this out would be misleading rather than helpful.

What it does, and the two numbers that matter

The whole mechanic, from uo.com:

You use kindling to light a campfire.
After a 30 second timer, the camp becomes secure.
You must remain within 7 tiles of the fire.
A secure camp lets you log out quickly, bypassing the normal combat-related logout wait.
Camping also enables logging out on ships.

Constant	Value
Time for a camp to become secure	30 seconds
Radius you must stay inside	7 tiles

In practice you need kindling and a bedroll: put the bedroll on the ground, double-click it to unroll it, then double-click it again. A Tainted Tree Sample can be used as kindling, and there are two limits worth knowing before you rely on the skill: you may hide while the camp is being made secure, and log out while still invisible, and camping does not work in Doom or the woods of Ter Mur.

uo.com says it is not worth training

This is the part most skill pages would bury. It is near the top here instead, because it is the most useful thing on the page.

uo.com says Grandmaster skill “has little benefit other than the skill title” — the title being the explorer.

uo.com’s own threshold table explains why. The skill does one thing, and it stops improving at that one thing very early:

Skill	Effect
0	Almost impossible to ignite kindling
20 (human Jack of All Trades level)	Sufficient, with patience
GM (100)	Primarily grants the skill title “the explorer”

So the published advice is: get to around 20, where you can reliably light kindling, and stop. There is no published reason to spend cap beyond that unless you want the title.

In PvP

[!] uo.com claims no PvP use for Camping. Nothing about it is a combat mechanic and nothing here should be read as one.

The one adjacent fact is that you can hide while the camp is being made secure and log out while still invisible — which pairs it with Hiding and concerns logging out unseen rather than fighting anybody. That is the extent of it.

In PvM

Marginal, and honestly so. The published benefit is a fast, safe logout in the field and aboard ships, which matters if you hunt a long way from a house or an inn and do not want to sit out the logout timer. That is a convenience, not a capability — it does not help you kill anything or survive anything.

A caveat before you count on it: Camping does not function in Doom or the woods of Ter Mur, which are exactly the sort of places a far-from-home logout would be handy.

Where kindling and bedrolls come from

Bowcraft & Fletching — uo.com notes kindling can be crafted from boards and logs.
Lumberjacking — the source of those boards and logs. The kindling-from-boards rule is published; the supply chain is stated here only as where the wood comes from, not as a published mechanical interaction.
Begging — uo.com notes bedrolls can be obtained from Heartwood elves this way.
Stealing — uo.com notes the Wrong artifact blanket is obtainable this way.
Hiding — you can hide while the camp secures and log out invisible.

Caps, stats and training

Camping has no Power Scrolls, so its ceiling is 100.0 real skill — there is no 105, 110, 115 or 120 Camping. It still counts against the 720 total skill cap, which is the real cost: every point spent here is a point not spent on a skill that does something. Primary stat Dex, secondary Int. Camping is not one of the skills with a Skill Mastery.

If you do want it, the route is two lines: buy the first 30 [!] points from an NPC Gypsy, then carry plenty of kindling and keep double-clicking it — every camp you secure is a chance to gain.

NPC trainers: Brigand, Fur Trader, Gypsy, wandering Healer, Ranger, Ranger Guildmaster and Shepherd.

What is not published

[!] Any mechanical interaction between Camping and Cooking or Tinkering. Campfires and cooking are intuitively related, but uo.com states no link, so none is asserted.
[!] Any success-chance figure for igniting kindling at a given skill level. uo.com describes 0 as “almost impossible” and 20 as “sufficient, with patience”, and gives no percentages.
[!] Any PvP application at all.

Where these come from

uo.com Camping · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.

Every skill in the game

This is one of fifty-eight. The full skill list has all of them — what each does, its stats, where it caps, and which skills it works with.

The other 6 wilderness skills:
Animal Lore · Animal Taming · Fishing · Herding · Tracking · Veterinary

The spell books

Magery · Necromancy · Chivalry · Bushido · Ninjitsu · Spellweaving · Mysticism