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Lumberjacking

Lumberjacking chops logs from trees. Logs are cut into boards, the raw material for Carpentry and Fletching. Like ore, wood comes in six colored tiers, with the rarest found deep in dungeons. Lumberjacking also gives a real damage bonus with axe weapons, which makes it a popular warrior skill.

Lumberjacking is one of the four gathering skills — the Gathering Overview explains resource spots, respawns, luck and town bonuses shared by all of them.

Getting Started

  1. Get a hatchet — on UO Sagas, only the hatchet can chop trees. No other axe works.
  2. Equip it. The hatchet must be in your hands, not just your pack — "The axe must be equipped for any serious wood chopping."
  3. Double-click the hatchet and target a tree within 2 tiles.

Each successful chop yields 3 logs and consumes one of the hatchet's 50 uses (failed chops cost nothing). A tree bank holds a limited pool of wood and refills about 8–15 minutes after being chopped bare. Beyond ordinary forests you can also chop the snowy trees, swamp trees and even some dungeon trees.

Unlike Mining and Fishing, chopping gives no bonus drops and spawns no creatures — just wood.

Auto-targeting

Auto-targeting: click yourself

You do not need to click the tree itself. Double-click your axe and target your own character and the nearest harvestable tree tile within 2 tiles is chopped instead. The game searches outward ring by ring and takes the closest one, in line of sight.

If there is no tree in range: "There is nothing you can harvest nearby." — nothing is used up.

See Gathering Overview.

Wood Types

Six tiers of logs (Frostwood does not exist on UO Sagas):

Wood Skill to chop
Regular log Regular 0
Shadow log Shadow 60
Copper log Copper 80
Bronze log Bronze 100
Verite log Verite 110
Valorite log Valorite 120

"Skill to chop" is the minimum to get that wood at all; success chance keeps climbing well past it.

Where the Good Wood Is

Every patch of trees has a hidden vein type. Odds by area:

Wood 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% 2.0% 2.7%

Trees inside dungeons (and their entrances' forests) are where colored wood really comes from — overland is almost all Regular.

Positive Luck can bump a vein up one tier before you chop it — "You found a better-quality tree out of sheer luck" — with the same scaling chances as Mining (never in towns).

Logs into Boards

Crafting uses boards, not logs. Use an axe on a stack of logs to cut them into boards of the same tier — but colored wood is harder to work:

Log Board Tier Skill to cut into boards (Carpentry or Lumberjacking)
Regular log Regular board Regular 0
Shadow log Shadow board Shadow 50
Copper log Copper board Copper 65
Bronze log Bronze board Bronze 80
Verite log Verite board Verite 95
Valorite log Valorite board Valorite 110

Below the requirement you'll ruin the wood — "You cannot work this strange and unusual wood." Either skill counts, so a lumberjack can cut their own boards without any Carpentry. Boards weigh a quarter of what logs do, so cut them in the field. Boards feed Carpentry, Fletching and more.

The Axe Damage Bonus

Lumberjacking is also a combat skill of sorts:

  • Extra damage with axes: any axe-type weapon deals bonus damage that scales with your Lumberjacking — roughly +20% at Grandmaster (100) and about +24% at 120 against monsters. In PvP the bonus is half as strong (+10% at 100, +12% at 120).
  • Hatchet accuracy: the hatchet itself swings using your Lumberjacking skill for accuracy, so a pure lumberjack can defend themselves with it.

See Weapons for how this fits into weapon choice.

Tips

  • Stealth chopping: a hidden character with Stealth 120 has a 50% chance per tree bank to find a hiding spot and keep chopping without being revealed. Below 120 Stealth (or on a failed roll) you're revealed immediately.
  • Town citizenship bonuses can double yield and boost skill gain in assigned regions — see Citizenship. Gathering citizen quests can be filled directly via the hatchet's Quest Gathering context-menu toggle.
  • Lumberjacking has its own Skill Mastery with perks for double yield, hatchet preservation, wood-tier upgrades and the Old Growth proc.

Town Quests for lumberjacks

Your logs are worth citizen points

The town Lumberjacker posts gathering town quests for a quantity of one wood tier — regular logs up to verite logs, the rarer tiers on the longer quest periods. They pay citizen points, town score and reward currency, and count toward Town Exports.

Switch it on first. Left-click your equipped hatchet and choose Turn on Quest Gathering. While it is on, logs of the requested tier go straight into quest progress instead of your pack; every other wood type still lands in your backpack as normal.