UO Animal Lore Skill Guide
Animal Lore allows players to examine creatures and gain detailed information about their stats, skills, loyalty, and more. It is essential for any Tamer and useful for Veterinary. At higher levels, it’s required to command and train high-slot pets.
Animal Lore is a taming skill in Ultima Online, rated as Beginner difficulty to train. This guide walks you through everything you need to raise Animal Lore from 0 to grandmaster, including the most efficient training methods, the targets and items to use at each skill range, and the gains you can expect along the way. Whether you are building your first character or optimizing a finished template, the breakdown below will help you train Animal Lore as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Below you will find an overview of what Animal Lore does, a step-by-step training guide, recommended skill ranges, any bonuses Animal Lore provides, and the templates that pair well with it. If you would rather skip the grind, UO King can deliver a ready-made character or the gear you need to support a Animal Lore build on your shard.
Animal Lore is the knowledge skill that lets you inspect and understand creatures rather than capture them. Using Lore on an animal opens its profile — strengths, resistances, damage, hit points, control difficulty and other traits — giving you the information you need before deciding whether to tame it, fight it, or avoid it. On the shared Stratics taming page it works hand in hand with Animal Taming: the difficulty calculator asks for both your Lore and your Taming values, because a competent tamer is expected to read a creature before attempting to bond it.
You gain skill by using Animal Lore on animals or pets. The higher the creature's control slot or taming difficulty, the better the chance of gain.
| Skill Range | Training Method |
|---|---|
| 0.0 – 30.0 | Buy from an Animal Trainer or Ranger NPC |
| 30.0 – 70.0 | Use Lore on tameable animals like horses, bulls, or timber wolves |
| 70.0 – 100.0 | Lore high-control-slot pets like nightmares, drakes, or rune beetles |
| 100.0 – 120.0 | Use Lore on your fully trained pet repeatedly (e.g., Cu Sidhe, Greater Dragon) |
0.0 – 30.0
30.0 – 70.0
70.0 – 100.0
100.0 – 120.0
Lore is rarely trained in isolation. It forms the informational backbone of the tamer template and supports several related pursuits:
- Animal Taming — its constant partner; you cannot effectively command high-end pets without matching Lore.
- Veterinary — the trio of Lore, Taming and Vet is the classic foundation for keeping and healing pets.
- Herding — benefits from the creature insight Lore provides when directing animals.
- Combat planning — even non-tamers use Lore to preview a monster's resistances and threat level before engaging.
Because Lore governs how well you interpret and ultimately control a creature, it scales alongside the taming requirements shown below: the same beasts that demand high taming skill also demand high Lore to be handled reliably. The reference sample lists creatures against the taming floor they occupy, which mirrors the tier of Lore you should carry when working with them.
| Creature | Minimum Taming Skill |
|---|---|
| Chicken / Rabbit / Cat / Dog | 0.0 |
| Timber Wolf / Grey Wolf | 0.0 |
| Black Bear / Brown Bear | 0.0 |
| Pig / Sheep / Goat | 11.1 |
| Llama | 11.1 |
| Horse | 29.1 |
| Grizzly Bear / Polar Bear | 41.1 |
| Walrus | 41.1 |
| Desert Ostard | 53.1 |
| Panther / Snow Leopard | 53.1 |
| Scorpion | 53.1 |
| Giant Serpent | 59.1 |
| Dire Wolf | 59.1 |
| Frost Spider | 59.1 |
| Forest Ostard | 71.1 |
| Bull | 71.1 |
| Ridgeback | 71.1 |
| Savage Ridgeback | 79.1 |
| Drake | 83.1 |
| Frenzied Ostard | 89.1 |
| Unicorn | 90.1 |
| Dragon | 93.9 |
| Nightmare | 95.1 |
| Ki-Rin | 95.1 |
| White Wyrm | 96.3 |
| Cu Sidhe / Hiryu | 98.7 |
| Rune Beetle | 100.9 |
Values are representative reference figures for the classic difficulty scale; exact numbers can shift with publishes and creature variants, and paragon or region-specific versions run harder.