Ultima Online Lumberjacking - the axe damage bonus in three parts, every wood bonus, and the two figures that are not settled

The damage bonus, which is three published facts in two sentences

uo.com publishes the combat side explicitly, and it is worth quoting before it is unpacked:

“Lumberjack gives a bonus to Swordsfighters wielding an axe or hatchet. The formula for this is Lumberjack ÷ 5 (Add 10% if Lumberjacking = 100)”

“swordsmen with GM Lumberjacking will have a 10% chance for a Lumberjacking damage bonus of 100% from base weapon damage.”

Those two sentences contain three separate mechanics and they should not be merged:

Part	Published figure	When
Base bonus	Lumberjacking ÷ 5	Always, with an axe or hatchet
Grandmaster addition	+10%	“if Lumberjacking = 100”
The proc	10% chance of a 100% bonus from base weapon damage	At GM

At 100 skill the base component is 100 ÷ 5 = 20. The third line is the one people mis-describe: it is not a constant. It is a one-in-ten roll, per swing, for a bonus of 100% of base weapon damage — a proc that doubles the weapon’s base contribution when it fires.

uo.com scopes the whole thing to “Swordsfighters wielding an axe or hatchet”. That is a Swordsmanship bonus specifically; it does nothing for Fencing, Mace Fighting, Archery or Throwing. The weapons it covers are the Axe, Battle Axe, Double Axe, Executioner’s Axe, Two Handed Axe, Ornate Axe and Hatchet [!].

[!] Two things about it are not published. Whether the “Add 10%” is ten percent of the damage or ten percentage points is not stated anywhere. And whether item-boosted Lumberjacking satisfies the “= 100” condition is not stated either — which matters, because there is an item that gives +5 (see below).

Harvesting: ten logs, a twenty-minute clock, sixteen hundred stones

Double-click an axe or hatchet, target a tree. uo.com publishes the three numbers that govern a harvesting session:

Fact	Figure
Logs per successful chop	10
Tree respawn	20–30 minutes
Pack animal capacity (pack horse, llama or giant beetle)	1600 stones

Logs become boards by double-clicking the axe and targeting the logs — a second click that the Harvester’s Axe removes entirely by converting automatically.

A racial note uo.com does not carry: humans receive one extra log [!] per chop, or two in Felucca [!], while elves instead get an increased chance at the special lumber types [!].

The seven woods and their skill gates

uo.com publishes the ladder:

Wood	Lumberjacking required
Normal Wood	0
Oak	65
Ash	80
Yew	95
Heartwood	100
Bloodwood	100
Frostwood	100

Compare that to the Mining ladder, which has eight separate steps between 65 and 99. Lumberjacking has only three intermediate woods and then a wall: the entire top tier is a single threshold at 100. A lumberjack at 95 can cut Yew and nothing better; a lumberjack at 100 can cut everything in the game.

What each wood is worth

This is the part that makes the skill matter to people who never touch an axe. The wood a lumberjack cuts sets the properties on Carpentry and Bowcraft & Fletching output. uo.com’s Material Bonuses page publishes both tables.

Armour:

Wood	Phys	Fire	Cold	Poison	Energy	Durability	Luck	Lower Req.	HP Regen	Lower Weight
Oak	3	3	—	2	3	50	40	—	—	—
Ash	2	—	4	1	6	—	—	20	—	75%
Yew	6	3	3	—	3	—	—	—	1	—
Heartwood	2	3	2	7	2	—	—	—	—	—
Bloodwood	3	8	1	3	3	—	—	—	2	—
Frostwood	2	1	8	3	4	—	—	—	—	—

Weapons:

Wood	Damage Inc	Swing Speed	Hit Chance	Cold Dmg	Durability	Luck	HP Regen	Hit Life Leech	Lower Req.	Lower Weight
Oak	5%	—	—	—	50	40	—	—	—	—
Ash	—	10%	—	—	—	—	—	—	20	75%
Yew	10%	—	5%	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Heartwood	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Bloodwood	—	—	—	—	—	—	2	yes	—	—
Frostwood	12%	—	—	40%	—	—	—	—	—	—

Read the two tables together and the ladder makes sense. Oak is the durability-and-luck wood. Ash is the speed wood, at 10% Swing Speed Increase, with a 75% weight reduction attached. Yew is the only wood with a Hit Chance line. Bloodwood is the fire and regeneration wood — 8 fire on armour, hit point regeneration on both. And Frostwood is the headline: 12% Damage Increase and 40% cold damage conversion on a weapon, the largest single damage figure on the wood table, and 8 cold on armour.

[!] Two gaps in uo.com’s own table. Heartwood’s weapon row carries no fixed values — its weapon effect is published as random rather than as a fixed bonus, so no number can be substituted. And Bloodwood’s Hit Life Leech has no published numeric value; the property is listed, the amount is not.

The six Grandmaster resources

uo.com: “When you reach Grand Master skill you have a chance of finding strange, rare resources”. It names six — Bark Fragments, Luminescent Fungi, Parasitic Plant, Switch, Brilliant Amber and Crystal Shards — and places all six at skill 100.

[!] One of them is not settled. An unpublished figure of 80 skill [!] exists for Crystal Shards, Ter Mur only and expansion-gated; uo.com’s 100 is the documented one.

Crystal Shards is the one worth caring about, because it has a published downstream use: the Arcanic Rune Stone is a Tinkering recipe at 90.0 Tinkering and 80.0 Magery, consuming 1 Crystal Shards and 5 Power Crystal. If the 80 figure is right, a lumberjack can supply that recipe twenty skill points earlier than uo.com’s page implies.

[!] uo.com publishes no drop rate for any of the six, nor a yield per chop. uo.com says “a chance” and stops.

The three lumberjack items

uo.com names three, and they solve three different problems:

Item	Published effect
Melisande’s Corroded Hatchet	+5 Lumberjacking bonus
Lumberjack’s Satchel	50% weight reduction — from the Huntmaster’s Challenge
Harvester’s Axe	Auto-converts logs to boards — from the Huntmaster’s Challenge

Melisande’s Corroded Hatchet is the only item in the game that raises Lumberjacking when equipped [!]. That makes the unanswered question above sharper rather than softer: [!] a character at 95 real skill wearing it shows 100, and uo.com does not say whether that satisfies the “Lumberjacking = 100” condition for the extra 10% or for the Grandmaster proc.

In PvP

Lumberjacking is a genuine PvP combat skill, which is unusual for something in the trade list. A Swordsmanship character holding an axe gains, per uo.com, Lumberjacking ÷ 5, plus 10% at exactly 100, plus a 10% chance per swing of a 100% bonus from base weapon damage.

• That is why “GM Lumberjack axer” is a recognised template shape rather than a crafter’s afterthought.
• The cost is equally clear: 100 skill points that do nothing at all for any other weapon class. Put down the axe and the entire investment is idle. There is no version of this bonus for a fencer or a mace fighter.
• Indirectly, it supplies the boards behind every arrow and bolt fired in PvP, and the Frostwood, Bloodwood and Heartwood stock behind high-end crafted bows and shields.

In PvM

The same damage mechanics apply, and the proc matters more here because PvM fights are long enough for a one-in-ten roll to average out. Beyond combat:

• Boards for Carpentry and Bowcraft & Fletching — furniture, house add-ons, wooden armour, shields, bows and ammunition all start here.
• The wood bonus tables above are how a crafter reaches high resistances and high Damage Increase or Swing Speed Increase on wooden gear, before Imbuing is applied.
• The six Grandmaster resources are recipe ingredients for high-end crafted goods — Crystal Shards into the Arcanic Rune Stone most visibly.
• Pack animals at 1600 stones and the Lumberjack’s Satchel at 50% weight reduction are what make a harvesting run worth the trip.

Caps, stats, and an unsettled primary stat

Lumberjacking caps at 100.0 real skill. It is not on uo.com’s Scrolls of Power list, which names only Blacksmithy and Tailoring among the crafting skills with dedicated scrolls. No Lumberjacking Power Scroll exists. It counts against the 720 total skill cap, and there is no Lumberjacking mastery.

[!] The primary stat is not fully settled. uo.com’s Skills, Stats & Attributes table gives Str primary and Dex secondary, and that is the documented answer. An unpublished figure gives Dex as the primary stat [!].

This is not cosmetic. When a skill gain produces a stat gain — a 1 in 20 chance — the primary stat rises 75% of the time and the secondary 25%. So the two answers predict opposite outcomes for a character training Lumberjacking from scratch. uo.com’s own table is the official one.

One more item note: Melisande’s Corroded Hatchet’s +5 is an item bonus over real skill, and as above, uo.com does not publish whether it counts where the game checks for exactly 100.

Training - which uo.com does not publish at all

[!] Stated plainly: uo.com publishes no stepped training path for Lumberjacking. Its page says the skill trains by chopping and offers nothing else — no ranges, no recommended items, no quest, no estimate. That is a real gap for a skill with a hard 100-point target and no scroll past it.

There are two methods, and the second is the one worth surfacing:

1. Chop trees. The obvious route.
2. Fight with an axe. Attacking creatures with axes — using Swordsmanship, or a weapon with the “Use Best Weapon Skill” property — raises Lumberjacking [!]. An axe-wielding fighter trains the skill passively, without ever touching a tree.

That second method is the reason the “GM Lumberjack axer” template is not as expensive as it looks: the skill goes up while you do the thing the skill makes better.

The Guaranteed Gain System is the backstop: a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, which on a 700-point character runs 18.6 hours at 85.0–89.9, 22.6 hours at 90.0–94.9 and 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9. A Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes. Those are the general figures; [!] no Lumberjacking-specific gain rate is published anywhere.

What is not published

• [!] Any success-chance formula for harvesting a given wood at a given skill. uo.com gives minimums only.
• [!] Whether the “Add 10% if Lumberjacking = 100” bonus is 10% of the damage or 10 percentage points.
• [!] Whether item-boosted Lumberjacking satisfies the “= 100” condition for that 10% or for the Grandmaster proc.
• [!] Any fixed weapon bonus for Heartwood — uo.com’s weapon row is blank by design.
• [!] Any numeric value for Bloodwood’s Hit Life Leech.
• [!] Any drop rate or yield for the six Grandmaster resources.
• [!] Any training path on uo.com, and any official gain rate.
• [!] Unpublished alternatives to two uo.com figures: Dex as the primary stat [!] (uo.com gives Str) and 80 as the Crystal Shards threshold [!] (uo.com gives 100). uo.com does not address either.

Where these come from

uo.com Lumberjacking · uo.com Material Bonuses · uo.com Tinkered Craftables · uo.com Scrolls of Power · 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.