Ultima Online Taste Identification - undocumented by uo.com, and walled at 75

The two things it does

The skill does two things [!]: it identifies the contents of an unknown potion keg, and it tells you whether food has been poisoned. There is not a third.

• Identify the contents of an unknown potion keg. The practical use — an unlabelled keg from Alchemy is otherwise a guess.
• Detect whether food has been poisoned, the Poisoning side of it.

[!] No potion-identification threshold is published anywhere. Nothing states which potion types need which skill level, or whether a stronger potion is harder to taste than a weaker one. This is the obvious first question about the skill and there is no published answer to it, so no number is given here.

[!] No success-rate formula is published for poison detection either, and no figure for how detection scales with skill or with the poison’s level. So of the skill’s two functions, neither has a published number attached to it at any skill value.

The wall at 75

This is the one part of Taste Identification with any detail — all of it unpublished [!] — and it is a dead end.

Skill	Unpublished detail [!]
0–30	Trainable from an NPC Baker or Cook
0–75	Gains from tasting poisoned food — typically fish steaks. A single piece of food can carry you the whole way
60	Gains begin to slow
75	There appears to be no way to gain above 75 by normal methods: from 75 on, everything you can taste is too easy to give a gain, even a Guaranteed Gain System one

Read that last row carefully, because it is a stronger claim than a slow grind. The Guaranteed Gain System is the floor underneath every other skill in the game — the mandatory 0.1 that arrives when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window. The claim is that for this skill the qualifying use does not exist above 75, so the backstop never fires. Nothing available to taste is difficult enough.

The unpublished workarounds go around the skill rather than through it: Scrolls of Alacrity help on the way up to 75, and past it players use the satyr trick and Scrolls of Transcendence [!], which add skill points directly rather than by use.

[!] No explanation of the wall is published, and no official acknowledgement of it exists. It is an observed state of the game, not a published rule. uo.com, having no page, says nothing.

Caps, stats, mastery

It stops at 100 as an ordinary skill: Taste Identification 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. In practice the ceiling that matters is the 75 above.

Primary stat Int, secondary Str. That secondary is a genuine oddity — it is the only one of the four Miscellaneous skills with Strength as its secondary stat, the other three being Dex/Int and Int/Dex. Since stat gain follows the primary 75% of the time and the secondary 25%, with a 1 in 20 chance of any stat rising per skill gain, training this skill is a small and unusual source of Strength.

No mastery — it is not among the 19 skills on uo.com’s Skill Masteries page. No published PvP use of any kind: the obvious one, spotting poisoned food before eating it, has no published PvP mechanic attached to it. No PvM use in the combat sense.

What it connects to

Four connections are known, and all four are thematic rather than mechanical — no formula links this skill to any other:

• Alchemy — potion kegs are what the identification function reads.
• Poisoning — poisoned food is what the detection function reads.
• Cooking — NPC Cooks and Bakers are the trainers for 0–30, and the objects you train on are food.
• Fishing — fish steaks are the named training food.

[!] No other interaction is published, and none should be assumed.

What is not published

Set out plainly, because the absence is the story here:

• [!] uo.com does not document this skill at all. No page, the skills index omits it, the expected URL 404s, and the only official trace is a row in the stat table.
• [!] No potion-identification thresholds — the skill’s main function has no published skill requirement at any level.
• [!] No success-rate formula for poison detection, and no scaling with skill or poison level.
• [!] No publish number or date for any change to the skill.
• [!] No explanation of why gains stop at 75, and no official acknowledgement that they do.
• [!] No official statement on the skill’s future. uo.com’s 2013 Ask & Answer No. 16 mentions “Taste Identification” only inside a submitted list, with no official comment on the skill.

This is the thinnest published record of any skill covered on this site. Two sentences of function, a training note, and a wall that nobody has explained.

Where these come from

uo.com Skills index · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skill Gain Systems · uo.com Ask & Answer No. 16. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.