Ultima Online Forensic Evaluation - the threshold ladder, and where the documentation stops

Four things it reads

The skill is used on a target and returns information. Accuracy improves with skill; below the level a given use requires, the message is simply “You notice nothing unusual”.

Target	What it tells you
A corpse	The name of the killer, and who looted the body
A living character	Whether they belong to the Thieves Guild
A locked container	Who recently picked the lock
A lost item	The item’s owner and its city of origin, when used repeatedly — the Honesty virtue use

The fourth of those arrived with Publish 72 [!], which is when the skill stopped being purely decorative: returning lost property is how the Honesty virtue is gained, and Forensic Evaluation is how you find out where the property came from.

The threshold ladder

This is the substance of uo.com’s page, and it is a genuinely useful table because it doubles as both a capability list and a training route — each row is a new thing you can read and the next thing to practise on.

Skill	What becomes possible
~36	Begin examining creature corpses, or blue beggar NPCs
40+ [!]	A chance to learn who picked a chest lock
41.1	Successfully identify lost-property destinations; examine picked boxes and chests
61	Determine the exact owners of lost-property items
71	Examining thief NPCs becomes worthwhile
91+	The Thief Guildmaster NPC becomes usable, and stays “optimal” through to Grandmaster

[!] The 40+ and 41.1 rows describe the same lockpicked-container check, and the figure is not settled. uo.com gives 41.1, which is the documented figure; the 40+ figure is unpublished. Both are recorded.

The gap between 41.1 and 61 is the one worth understanding. At 41.1 a lost item tells you where it should go; at 61 it tells you whose it is. For the Honesty virtue loop that is the difference between a guess and a return.

The Honesty virtue is what keeps it alive

Everything else the skill does is a curiosity. The Honesty loop is an actual reason to have it on a character: find a lost item, read its owner and city off it, return it, gain virtue. Publish 72 [!] is what made the skill worth having again.

[!] How that conversion works numerically is not published. uo.com does not state how much virtue a return is worth, or how many uses of the skill on a single item are needed to establish owner and city — uo.com says only “when used repeatedly”. uo.com has no reachable Honesty virtue wiki page at all; the expected URL returns a 404. So the skill’s one live purpose is documented at the level of “this works” and no further.

The one place it touches PvP

Marginal, but real, and it is the only Miscellaneous skill that can say so.

• On a corpse it names the killer, and everyone who looted the body. After a fight in Felucca that is a list of who was actually there and who helped themselves.
• On a living player it exposes Thieves Guild membership, which is information you cannot get any other published way.

[!] No numbers are published for either use — no success rate, no range, no restriction on who can be examined, no statement of whether the target is notified. In PvM the skill has effectively no combat function at all; its modern use is the Honesty loop described above.

The Detective build, and what it actually connects to

uo.com suggests a template around the skill, which is more than most Miscellaneous skills get: Forensic Evaluation, Detecting Hidden, Tracking, a weapon skill, Anatomy, Tactics and Healing. The weapon slot is any of Swordsmanship, Fencing, Mace Fighting, Archery, Throwing or Wrestling.

The genuine mechanical links are narrower:

• Lockpicking — a locked container remembers who picked it, and Forensic Evaluation is what reads that back.
• Stealing and Snooping — Thieves Guild membership is what the living-character check returns, and thief NPCs and the Thief Guildmaster are the named training targets from 71 and 91.
• Begging — only in that “blue beggar NPCs” are a named target at 36.

[!] No interaction with Remove Trap is published, despite the lockpicked-container use sitting right next to it. Do not assume one.

Caps, stats and training

It stops at 100. Forensic Evaluation does not appear on uo.com’s Scrolls of Power list, so it has no Power Scroll. There is no 105 and no 120. It counts in full against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Dex. No mastery — it is not on uo.com’s Skill Masteries page.

[!] Note that uo.com does not actually state a cap. The 100 above is read from the absence of the skill on the Power Scroll list, which is an inference from a published list rather than a published number. It is recorded here as an absence, not as a quotation.

Training follows the ladder, with NPC trainers at the bottom: Bloodletters, Healers and Fortune Tellers, available on most shards but not on Siege Perilous or Mugen. From there it is creature corpses and blue beggar NPCs from ~36, picked boxes and chests from 41.1, thief NPCs from 71, and the Thief Guildmaster from 91 to Grandmaster. Another option is to macro the skill on picked paragon chests.

The Guaranteed Gain System applies as normal — a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9 on a 700-point character — and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

The ladder is good. Everything around it is missing, and it is worth being explicit about that, because a threshold table can look like documentation when it is really a list of unlocks:

• [!] No success-rate formula, and no per-skill accuracy figures, for any of the four uses. uo.com says accuracy improves with skill and gives no curve.
• [!] No figure for how many uses on a lost item are needed to establish owner and city.
• [!] No published cap statement on either page — see above.
• [!] No numeric detail on how the skill feeds the Honesty virtue, and no reachable uo.com Honesty page.
• [!] No published interaction with Remove Trap.

Between them, uo.com’s page and the few unpublished notes above amount to a threshold table, four sentences about what the skill reads, and a training note. That is the whole published record for a skill that has been in the game since launch.

Where these come from

uo.com Forensic Evaluation · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Masteries · 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.