Gathering Overview
Four gathering skills pull raw materials from the world of UO Sagas, feeding every craft:
- Mining — ore and gems from mountains and caves.
- Lumberjacking — logs from trees.
- Fishing — fish and rare sea catches.
- Skinning — hides and leather from creature corpses.
Mining, Lumberjacking, and Fishing share the same underlying system, described here; each skill's page covers what is specific to it. Skinning works a little differently but uses the same material tiers and bonuses.
How harvesting works
The land is divided into invisible resource cells. Each cell holds a limited pool of resources and has a vein — its material tier. When you swing your pickaxe or axe:
- Your tool must have uses left and the spot must be a valid, in-range target.
- The cell must still have resources — if someone emptied it, you get the "someone got here before you" message and must wait for it to respawn or move on.
- The vein's material is rolled. If your skill is too low for the vein's tier, you may get the tier below instead.
- Your gathering skill is checked. On success you get the material (plus sometimes a bonus find, like gems while mining); on failure nothing is produced, but the tool is not worn either.
- Each successful harvest consumes one tool use; at zero the tool breaks.
Emptied cells refill after a few minutes with a freshly rolled vein, so moving between spots beats hammering one dry patch.
Auto-targeting: click yourself
You do not have to click the exact tile. Use your tool and target yourself, and the game finds the nearest valid target within 2 tiles and starts harvesting it.
It searches outward ring by ring from where you stand, so it always picks the closest option, and it works for every gathering skill:
| Skill | Tool | What it finds |
|---|---|---|
| Lumberjacking | Axe | The nearest harvestable tree tile |
| Mining | Pickaxe or shovel | The nearest ore or cave tile |
| Skinning | Knife | The nearest uncarved creature corpse, in line of sight |
| Fishing | Fishing pole | The nearest fishable water tile |
If nothing is in range you get "There is nothing you can harvest nearby." (or "…you can skin nearby."), and nothing is consumed.
Two things worth knowing: player corpses are deliberately excluded from the skinning search, so auto-targeting can never make you a criminal by carving one; and staff can switch the whole feature off, in which case you are told "Automated harvest targeting is currently deactivated."
Material tiers
Harvested materials come in six tiers, the same ladder used by crafting:
| Ore | Logs | Hides | Tier | Skill required to obtain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
Regular / Iron | 0 |
 |
 |
 |
Shadow | 60 |
 |
 |
 |
Copper | 80 |
 |
 |
 |
Bronze | 100 |
 |
 |
 |
Verite | 110 |
 |
 |
 |
Valorite | 120 |
Each tier maps to a colored ore, log, or hide and — once crafted into weapons, armor, or bows — a magic level from Ruin up to Vanquishing. See Resources for the full material reference.
Where the good veins are
Vein tiers depend on where you gather. Approximate chances per vein:
| Material | Overland | In town | Dungeon level 1 | Dungeon level 2 | Dungeon level 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular | 75% | 100% | 40% | 25% | 10% |
| Shadow | 15% | — | 30% | 33% | 31% |
| Copper | 9.3% | — | 21.6% | 30.2% | 42.5% |
| Bronze | 0.4% | — | 4.2% | 5.9% | 8.3% |
| Verite | 0.2% | — | 2.8% | 3.9% | 5.5% |
| Valorite | 0.1% | — | 1.4% | 2% | 2.7% |
Towns yield only regular material. The deeper the dungeon, the better the odds of high tiers — gathering in dangerous places is how you find Valorite.
Luck upgrades
Positive Luck gives a chance to bump a rolled vein up one tier before you harvest it:
| Upgrade to | How likely |
|---|---|
| Shadow | The best odds of any upgrade — a well-lucked gatherer sees these often |
| Copper | Common enough to notice over a session |
| Bronze | Occasional |
| Verite | Uncommon |
| Valorite | The rarest upgrade, and it needs 50+ Luck before it can fire at all |
Every step up the ladder is harder than the one below it, and each one improves with more Luck up to its own ceiling.
Luck upgrades never trigger in guarded towns. When one fires you see a green message.
Tools
Every gathering tool has limited uses; each successful harvest consumes one, and the tool breaks at zero. Tools crafted from higher-tier materials carry more uses, so a well-equipped gatherer buys or commissions colored tools.
Town and citizenship bonuses
Citizenship can boost your gathering:
- Increased gathering yield — while in the right town's bonus region, a chance to double each harvest.
- Increased skill gain — a boosted chance to gain gathering skill from each attempt.
Both scale with the town bonus strength (+10/20/30%). Towns also run gathering quests: with quest gathering enabled, harvests matching an active citizen quest count toward the quest instead of going into your pack.
Skill masteries
Mining, Lumberjacking, and Skinning each have a Skill Mastery with gathering perks: chances to double your yield, to save a tool use, to upgrade the harvested material a tier, and a rare proc (Motherlode, Old Growth, Flawless Harvest) that can grant rare drops or triple output. Successful harvests earn mastery experience, weighted by material tier.
Good to know
- Stealth gathering — a hidden character with high Stealth can stay hidden while mining or chopping; failing the stealth roll reveals you.
- Mounted mining — unlike classic UO, you can mine from horseback on Sagas.
- Skill gain speed differs per skill — Fishing gains a bit slower, Skinning notably faster, and harder (lower-chance) attempts always teach more.