Ultima Online Hiding - what reveals you, what does not, and the one published tile figure

Hidden, not gone

uo.com’s framing is that you are invisible but still physically there. Someone who walks onto your tile shoves you aside and gets the message “You shove something invisible aside.” — and being shoved through reveals you. That message is the published tell: anyone who sees it knows exactly which tile a hidden character is standing on.

The success chance is the most straightforward published figure of any thieving skill. Your chance of hiding successfully equals your Hiding skill [!]. At 70 skill you hide seven attempts in ten, at 100 you effectively do not fail a permitted attempt. There is nothing more to it, and [!] no percentage table is published beyond that one sentence.

The other half of what makes it good is duration, or rather the absence of it. The contrast is with the Magery Invisibility spell: hiding does not wear off, and it keeps you safe until you take another action. You can hide and walk away from the keyboard.

You cannot hide your way out of a fight

This is the counterplay, and it is published plainly. uo.com: “You can not hide when in combat, or when creatures are actively hostile”. Skill does not remove that lock-out; it shortens the escape needed to clear it — “the higher your hiding skill the less distance you will have to run from combat before you can hide again”.

One endpoint of that scale is given, unpublished: at GM Hiding, you can hide in plain sight of a hostile monster or player only 8 tiles [!] away.

[!] That 8 tile figure at Grandmaster is the only distance given, and it is unpublished. There is no table of required distance by skill value. uo.com states the direction of the scaling and stops.

[!] No cooldown or timer is published in seconds either — not for how long after combat, nor after being revealed, you must wait before hiding again. The only detail is that using Stealth shortens the wait before you can hide again by a few seconds. A timer exists; its length is not published, so no figure is given here.

The one exception to all of it is your own roof. uo.com describes Hiding as a no-fail skill in your own house regardless of skill level.

Exactly what reveals you

uo.com publishes both halves of this list, which is unusual and makes it the definitive answer to “what can I do without breaking cover”.

Reveals you	Does not reveal you
Looting another corpse, monster or player	Taking items from your own corpse
Casting spells aloud on screen	Global, party and alliance chat
Area effect spells, monster auras and explosive potions	Equipping items and moving things in your backpack (not on uo.com’s list; unpublished [!])
Failing a Snooping attempt, if insufficiently skilled	Snooping successfully — and uo.com states “Grand Master Spies will never fail to snoop successfully, and therefore will never be revealed by the act”
Being shoved through	Detecting Hidden, Lockpicking, Item Identification, Anatomy, Arms Lore, Animal Lore, Evaluating Intelligence, Forensic Evaluation and Poisoning
Stealing — “whether successful or not”	Remove Trap — “Using this skill will not cause a hidden character to be revealed”
Failing a Stealth check
Losing a Detect Hidden contest inside 4 tiles
A monster casting Reveal at your last known location

Two entries on the left deserve their own line. Stealing always reveals, success or failure, and uo.com adds a hard window afterwards: “you will not be able to re-hide for 10 seconds”. And uo.com notes that spell-casting monsters frequently cast Reveal at a character’s last seen location — so sitting still near a caster is not safety, it is a delay.

The right-hand column is why a hidden rogue is useful rather than merely safe. You can scan a room, pick a lock, disarm a trap, re-poison a blade and call targets to your guild in chat without ever coming off the ground.

Hiding and Stealth are one system, and only one of them has a Power Scroll

uo.com’s Stealth page states the dependency: “To use this skill you must first be hidden, If you start walking while hidden you will automatically attempt to stealth if your skill is 25 or more.” Hiding is not a companion skill to Stealth, it is its precondition.

The two are then weighed together against an observer: “A check is made by comparing the stealthers Stealth and hiding skills versus the other persons or monsters Detect Hidden skill.” So Hiding is not a dump skill on a stealther — it is half of the defensive side of the only contest that matters, and it keeps working while you move.

Here is the structural consequence people miss. Stealth is a Power Scroll skill and goes to 120. Hiding is not and stops at 100. A fully scrolled stealther brings 120 + 100 into that check and cannot bring any more, which is the ceiling every Detecting Hidden character is measured against.

[!] A 30.0 Hiding floor for using Stealth at all is unpublished — uo.com does not state it, giving only the 25-Stealth auto-attempt threshold.

[!] There is no armour penalty published for Hiding. This one matters, because the armour rule belongs to the other skill: armour weight penalises Stealth, where uo.com publishes the 65-in-normal-clothes and 75-in-medable-armour thresholds. uo.com applies none of that to Hiding. Do not carry it across.

What Ninjitsu does with it

uo.com calls Hiding and Stealth the “must have” supplemental skills for a ninja, and three Ninjitsu abilities trade directly on the hidden state:

• Shadowjump — “Allows you to teleport while maintaining stealth, but only if you succeed in a stealth check at your destination.”
• Smoke Bombs — “They can only be used by characters with 50 or higher Ninjitsu skill.”
• Animal Form (Rabbit or Rat) — “Grants a 20 point bonus to the stealth skill.” It is the only published numeric stealth bonus from another skill, and note that it helps Stealth, not Hiding.

And one that runs the other way: Death Strike damage is “determined by the attacker’s Ninjitsu, the average of the target’s Hiding/Stealth and the number of tiles the target was tracked for”. Your own Hiding is an input to how hard you get hit by it — the only published case where carrying the skill is a liability.

In PvP

• It is the entry condition for everything. No hide, no stealth, no repositioning unseen, no approach. A stealth template that skimps here is contested twice: once standing still, once moving.
• Aggression denies the disengage. You cannot hide in combat or near actively hostile creatures, so an opponent who keeps pressure on simply prevents the escape. Grandmaster shortens the break to 8 tiles; it does not remove it.
• Stealing costs you ten seconds of exposure. The act always reveals and blocks re-hiding for 10 seconds. That window, in Felucca, is the whole risk of the profession.
• Explosive potions and area spells flush hiders with no skill at all. They are the published skill-free counter, which is why a suspected hider gets bombed rather than searched.
• Chat is free. Global, party and alliance chat do not reveal, so a hidden scout can call targets for their group at no mechanical cost — one of the strongest things a low-investment stealther contributes.
• Houses are the absolute counter. A defender’s Detecting Hidden in a home they own or are friended to is “always 100% successful”. There is no skill ratio that beats it.

In PvM

• It is how you cross dangerous ground. uo.com’s framing of the skill is transit — “a preliminary to stealthing from, or through danger areas”.
• It does not time out, unlike Invisibility, so it is viable for waiting out a spawn or a patrol rather than merely surviving one.
• You can loot your own corpse hidden. That is the published death-recovery play for a stealther: die, run back, hide, retrieve, leave.
• Looting anything else reveals you, which is the real constraint on hidden farming — you cannot quietly strip a monster corpse.
• Monsters carry Detect Hidden and cast Reveal. The check is explicitly against “the other persons or monsters Detect Hidden skill”, and casters throw Reveal at your last known position, so hiding in place beside a spellcaster is not a plan.

Caps, stats and training

Primary stat Dex, secondary Int. Hiding has no Power Scroll — it is absent from uo.com’s published list, which does include Stealing and Stealth — so it caps at 100 against the 720 total skill cap. Scrolls of Transcendence do apply, since uo.com states they cover all skills including non-Powerscroll ones. There is no Hiding mastery.

uo.com names the trainer: “Initial training and an accelerated gain quest can be obtained from Chiyo the Hiding Instructor in the Ninjitsu Dojo in New Haven.” The usual route:

Range [!]	Method
0–33	Pay Chiyo the Hiding Instructor, or Gypsies, Rangers, Thieves for a less effective lesson
33–50	Chiyo’s quest “Becoming One With The Shadows”, for accelerated gain while training inside the Ninja Dojo
50–100	Hide in your house, where you cannot fail — Stealth — repeat

The house loop works for two reasons stacked on each other: hiding in your own house cannot fail, and using Stealth shortens the wait before you can hide again by a few seconds, so you get more attempts and gain faster. You are using Stealth as a cooldown reducer, not as a skill.

The Guaranteed Gain System backstops it with a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] Any cooldown or timer value, in seconds, for hiding again after combat or after being revealed.
• [!] The tile distance required to hide at any skill value other than Grandmaster. Only the unpublished 8 tiles at GM is given.
• [!] Any armour penalty for Hiding. The armour rules belong to Stealth.
• [!] A success table by skill value, beyond “directly equal to that of the Hiding skill”.
• [!] Whether the unpublished 30.0 Hiding prerequisite for Stealth applies — uo.com does not state it.

Where these come from

uo.com Hiding · uo.com Stealth · uo.com Stealing · uo.com Snooping · uo.com Detect Hidden · uo.com Remove Trap · uo.com Ninjitsu · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Scrolls of Transcendence · 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.