Starting Out

My recommendation for starting attributes:
Strength – 45
Dexterity – 25
Intelligence – 10

My recommendation for starting skills:
Carpentry – 50
Tinkering – 49 *
Lumberjacking – 1
* or Blacksmithing or Tailoring, depending on your personal preference

Strength is by far the most influential attribute for a carpenter. Both Carpentry and Lumberjacking are based heavily on Strength, and the higher your strength the more wood you can carry. Start with at least a 15 so you can wield a practice hatchet. Strength will raise quickly once you get above a 65 or so in Lumberjacking and/or Carpentry.

Dexterity is secondary, but a high Dexterity will help you run further before you stop from exhaustion. Since carpenters spend a great deal of time out in the forest (with the brigands and creatures), this is a useful ability.

Intelligence is probably the least useful attribute for a carpenter, unless you want to invest in Magery.

Carpentry, obviously, will be your primary skill. I highly recommend starting with a 50 in Carpentry. At this level, you can make Wooden Shields, which are the best-selling Carpentry items.

Lumberjacking is also very important, but it is easy to raise. There's no harm in starting with a low Lumberjacking, but take at least 1 point in this skill. That will get you a newbie hatchet, which is a wonderfully useful item. It chops logs as well as any other axe, and it will never get lost when you die, worn out (unless you try to fight things with it, or play on Siege Perilous), or stolen. If you don't have patience to raise your Lumberjacking the hard way, you can start with a higher level at the expense of your third skill, or make a few wooden shields and buy training from a NPC Carpenter.

For your third skill, you have a wide variety to choose from. A few common ones are listed below. Some of these skills, at high levels, can be combined with Carpentry to make house add-ons or other items. See the Master Carpentry Item List for details on what you can make, and the skills required.

Tinkering is great because you can make a lot of money selling lockable treasure chests. It's also cool because you can make various house decorations (clocks, silverware, etc.) to sell along with your furniture. You can also make new carpentry tools when your old ones wear out, and with a higher skill your tools will last longer.

Tailoring is a great way to make money, and can be used for a number of popular house add-ons.

Blacksmithing is also a popular skill for carpenters. I rate it second to Tailoring simply because you need a source of ingots to make anything. This will either be time-consuming (if you mine) or expensive (if you buy them).

Fighting Skills are always useful. You'll spend a great deal of time out in the forests chopping logs, and doing some hunting on the side can help break up the monotony. It can also make you some serious cash if you have a decent Tailoring skill and can make boots or armor from the hides of slain animals.

Magery is a choice for some carpenters, but for most it's something they develop late in their careers. It is expensive to raise (due to the cost of reagents), and will only be useful for add-ons when you become a Grandmaster Carpenter. But the high prices for Pentagrams and Abattoirs can be quite tempting.

Carpentry Tools

There are a lot of different carpentry tools available. You start with a random one when you create your character, and you can buy new ones from any town Carpenter. The various tools are:

• Dovetail Saw
• Froe
• Inshave
• Hammer
• Joining Plane*
• Moulding Plane*
• Nails
• Saw
• Scorp
• Smoothing Plane*

You can make the items marked with a * out of wood, if you have Tinker Tools and a decent Tinkering skill. The others require ingots to make.

None of the tools seem to work better than the others, but with the recent Tinkering changes, your tools will last longer if they are made by a Tinker with a high skill and thus can be of exceptional quality.

In the Forest

To make anything as a carpenter, you need logs or boards. Lots of them. Logs weigh 2 stones apiece, and boards weigh 1. It is difficult and expensive to buy logs in bulk so professional player Lumberjacks are few and far between. Most carpenters, therefore, chop their own wood. Fortunately, there is no shortage of trees in Britannia. Use your axe (it must be equipped) on a tree, and after a few seconds you will see one of four messages:

• There is not enough wood here to harvest - Move on to another tree. This one's tapped out.
• You hack at the tree for awhile, but fail to produce any usable wood - You failed your skill check, but can try again on the same tree.
• You put some logs into your backpack – Congratulations, you've just chopped 10 logs from the tree. You can continue trying to get wood from the same tree until you get the 'out of wood' message.
• You can't fit any more wood in your backpack! - You're overloaded. Time to carve those logs into boards or make something out of them.

Once you have the logs, you can make something out of them, or carve them into boards (which are just as good as logs but lighter). To carve logs into boards, just click on your carpentry tool. Boards are under the "Building Materials" sub-menu.

Some wooded areas are safer than others. Yew and Britain are good towns to start in, since there are tons of trees around them in the guarded zone. Yew has more trees, but it has no blacksmith, tailor or provisioner. Skara Brae is good too, but its forests are not guarded. Be advised that the woods immediately outside of town are almost always picked clean. Wander further away to find trees with wood on them.

I've known many other carpenters who invest in pack horses to help carry logs and furniture items. I have not had good luck with pack horses, so I don't use them. They are expensive, they run off and attack monsters, they slow you down, they don't always follow your commands, and they are tempting targets for creatures and murderers. If they work for you, great, but I prefer to save my money.

Crafting Items

Once you have some logs in your pack, double-click on your carpentry tool and you'll get a pop-up window showing items that you can make. As a carpenter, there are a LOT of things you can craft. The Master Carpentry Item List shows the number of logs and skill level each item requires.

Boxes, crates, chests and armoires can all be lockable. When you create one of these containers, it automatically checks your Tinkering skill. If successful, the item is lockable and will have a copper key inside. If your Tinkering check fails, the item is not lockable and never can be. Items that require a high Carpentry to make (i.e. treasure chests and armoires) also require a high Tinkering to make them lockable. The higher your Tinkering, the harder it is to pick your locks.

House Add-ons (as well as certain special items like fishing poles) not only require a high level in Carpentry, but also a secondary skill and alternate resource (ingots or cloth). For example, a Spinning Wheel requires Carpentry and Tailoring. If you have both skills at the right levels, you need wood and cloth to make one. When you make an Add-on, a deed will be placed in your backpack. You can only place add-ons one in a house that you own, but the deeds can be given to other players and used by them (they can also be looted or stolen).

Making a Living

Furniture is nearly worthless for making money. With most furniture, you would make more gold if you just sold the logs! On the up side, furniture is light (most items weigh 1 stone apiece), so at least you can carry a ton of it. You can sell furniture to any NPC Carpenter. If you happen to be the lucky owner of a furniture dye tub (which came as a price in the Clean Up Britannia campaign; you cannot buy them at an NPC or craft them) you may try selling dyed furniture.

Fortunately, there are a few things carpenters can make that sell for a decent price. A wooden shield costs only 9 wood to make, and sells for 20-40gp (depending on its quality and other economic conditions) to a NPC blacksmith/armorer. Shields are heavy, which means you can't make too many of them before you have to go back to town and unload. Even so, they are by far the best items to make if you're after gold.

When you get a high enough skill, you can begin making staffs. These command a decent price from a NPC blacksmith/weaponsmith, and don't weigh as much as a shield (so you can stock up on a lot of them before you have to head back to town). They are also really great for raising your skill.

Other good items to make are boxes. They raise your Tinkering as well as Carpentry, and this will be important later when you want to make lockable treasure chests. Lockable boxes/crates are also good because you can sell the key to the NPC provisioner. Note that a NPC carpenter won't buy the box if the key's still inside it. Sell the keys, then go sell the boxes.

Eventually, you can make house add-ons and other misc. decorations (like music stands and easels). NPCs will not buy these things, which means you'll have to get a vendor or hawk your wares at the bank. Most add-ons sell for 1k or higher, so they can be quite profitable. The exceptional quality tools you make last longer than regular tools, so you may try to sell those too. Experiment and see if you can make a profit making and selling those.

If you choose to throw away your items rather than selling them, please be considerate to your fellow woodsmen and don't leave a trail of easels or tables behind you in the forest. You can destroy most furniture (as well as easels and music stands) by using an axe on the item. Houses now have the wonderful "trash barrel" option, and rabbit corpses are popular for disposing of unwanted craftables.

If you are interested in running a vendor, I strongly suggest you check out Zamboni Driver's Wonderful World of Vendors and Merchants. It is a great resource on vendors in general. In my experience, the following items are good to sell on a carpentry/tinkering vendor:

• Lockable Treasure Chests
• Potion Kegs
• Fancy Thrones
• Yew Tables
• Small Brown Tables
• Benches
• Candelabras
• Beds
• Ovens
• Forges & Anvils
• Pentagrams & Abattoirs

Other items sell, just not nearly as well. Some particular duds are crates, easels, music stands, flour mills, and training/practice dummies. I almost never sell any of those items.

Mastering the Art

I am not fond of number-crunching, but here are some very rough estimates on what to make in order to raise your skill at the various levels. They are based on my experience, and may not be the absolute fastest path to Grandmaster.

up to 50	Mostly small boxes and crates, alternating with a few of the hardest item you can make at your skill level.
50-65	Wooden shields mostly, alternating with a few large crates, plain thrones, and benches
65-75	Same as 50-65 but add writing desks and large tables
75-85	Gnarled Staffs and Quarterstaffs mostly, alternating with a few music stands, fancy thrones, and treasure chests
85-95	Gnarled Staffs mostly, alternating with a few easels, armoires, and Yew tables
95+	Gnarled Staffs mostly, alternating with a few easels, beds, and water troughs. At this level, skill gain is extremely slow. Don't be discouraged if you go days at a time with absolutely no skill advancement. Just be patient, try some variety every so often to keep yourself sane, and you'll eventually get there.

In general, make a lot of the items that require little wood and get you decent money (staffs and shields), and throw in some of the "hard" items (i.e. the most difficult ones you can make at your current skill level) for some variation.

Placing Furniture

As a carpenter, you'll deal a lot with furniture so I thought it worth mentioning the trick to arranging furniture in UO. Let me preface this section by quoting from the RPG bugbase: "FURNITURE IS THE MOST EXCRUCIATINGLY PAINFUL THING IN THE WORLD TO PLACE!!!!" If you can hire an interior decorator for your new house, save yourself some migraines and do so.

If you get stuck doing it yourself, however, know the cardinal rule: Furniture always faces in the direction it was last moved. So if you want your bookshelf facing to the East, put it West of where you want it then drag it into its destination square. If you want it facing South, put it North of where you want it then drag it into the its destination square. It is often useful to turn your Circle of Transparency on when attempting this.

The real pain is when you want a chair with it's back up against the wall. This may sound weird, but here's how you do it:

• Walk to the opposite side of the wall where you want the chair to go, even if this is outside your house.
• Put the chair down.
• Pick it up and put it into your backpack.
• Walk back to the desired spot, and put the chair down where you want it.

If you do this right, the chair will be up against the wall, facing the right way.

An alternate mechanism is to put the chair into a crate. If the chair faces the right direction in the crate, you can put the crate on the floor and destroy it (with an axe). The chair will pop out and be facing the right direction. This is often easier than the "walk outside" method, but you can go through a lot of crates this way.

Note that fancy thrones cannot face north or west (I don't know why), so they do not make good "dinner table" chairs if you want seats all the way around a table.

When placing add-ons, double-clicking on the deed will bring up a targeting cursor asking where you want to put the item. Once placed, an add-on cannot be moved. Your only choice is to destroy it (with an axe) and get another one.

Note that Add-ons and some decorative items (clocks, music stands) have a fixed facing, either South or East (though the South Water Trough is misnamed "West" for some odd reason). You cannot change the facing on such items. See the Placing Addons Guide for details on the addon facing and placement.

Furniture Dye Tub

Having a furniture dye tub (first introduced as a prize in the Clean Up Britannia campaign) can really increase your profits when selling furniture. However, there are a couple of things you should know before investing a lot of money in one of them:

• Only the owner of a house may use the dye tub.
• An item must be locked down to dye it.
• Addons (including BEDS) are not dye-able.
• Some non-furniture carpentry items (music stands, dress forms) are dye-able, others (easels, gnarled staffs) are not.

In general, if you don't own a house, the tub is worthless. Also, you can't lock it down and let other people dye things whatever color they want, because the furniture has to be locked down in order to dye it. This makes it difficult to fill orders for a specific color.

Despite the drawbacks, it's really cool to be able to dye furniture. Particularly potion kegs (which you can color-code according to the type of potion) and those ugly orange boxes (which you can now dye an assortment of nice colors).

Summary

I love playing a Carpenter. Particularly in conjunction with Tinkering, you can make just tons of cool stuff. It's not the most profitable skill in the game (I use tailoring whenever I need gold), but it can be great fun. So get out there, chop some logs, and have fun!

- Kalle, GrandMaster Carpenter (Europa)