Stealing

Stealing is the skill of removing items from the packs and chests of others — monsters, NPCs, pack animals, lockboxes, and (in the right facet) other players — without their consent. It is the cornerstone of the rogue archetype and the only path to several artifact classes that no slain corpse will yield. The discipline rewards patience, planning, and a willingness to make Felucca your home.

Mechanics

A successful Stealing attempt requires both hands free, takes ten seconds before another skill can be used, and reveals the thief if hidden or invisible. The maximum weight of any single item that can be lifted is the thief's skill divided by ten — a Grandmaster (100 skill) can take items up to 10 stones; a Legendary thief at 120 skill can take up to 12. Items that are Blessed or Insured cannot be stolen at all, and an attempt to grab a random item from another character's pack will pick from the entire inventory and fail automatically if the choice happens to be too heavy or protected.

Stealing reduces karma. The skill does not, by itself, flag the user as a criminal — but stealing from another player is always a potential crime, with the chance of being caught scaling against skill, target weight, and the number of witnesses in range. A thief who escapes notice retains Innocent (blue) status; one who is seen turns Criminal and becomes free game for guards inside town and for any nearby player anywhere else.

To steal from another player at all, the thief must join the Thieves Guild and be standing within the Felucca facet. Player-owned characters and pets cannot be Snooped outside Felucca either, except by guildmates. In every other facet, the only legal targets are monsters, NPC packs, and the world's chests and pack animals.

Companion skills

Stealing is rarely trained alone. The traditional rogue template combines:

• Hiding — drops the character from view at rest. A prerequisite for Stealth.
• Stealth — moves the character while hidden, without footstep sound. Requires at least 30 Hiding to activate; safe-step count scales by 1 per 5 points of Stealth.
• Snooping — opens the pack of another character or pack animal so a specific item can be targeted, rather than blindly grabbing whichever item the random roll selects. Without Snooping, every theft from a player is a lottery.
• Detecting Hidden — defensive; spots other rogues. Optional but useful in PvP.

Of these, Snooping is the closest thing Stealing has to a hard prerequisite. A thief who skips it can still rob chests, NPCs, and monsters, but cannot meaningfully target items on another player.

Joining the Thieves Guild

The NPC Thieves Guild is the gate to player-pack stealing in Felucca and to the disguise kit. To join, a thief must locate a Thief Guild Master — they appear in random locations across most towns — and address them by name followed by join, e.g. "Elliot join". The Guild Master responds with a quote in gold, payable by dragging coin onto the NPC.

Membership requirements:

• The character must be at least 48 in-game hours old.
• The character must have at least 60 Stealing skill.
• 500 gold pieces (the standard joining fee).

A guild member can leave at any time by saying "<Guild Master name> resign". While the act of attacking an Innocent guildmember is still a criminal act for the attacker, members of the Thieves Guild cannot give or receive Murder Counts and are freely lootable when killed — a permanent vulnerability that comes with the trade.

Disguise kit

Membership unlocks the right to purchase a Disguise Kit from the same Guild Master for 700 gold (say disguise near the Guild Master to confirm price). The kit lets a character assume a randomized alias for a limited time. Logging out while disguised carries the alias forward into the next session — the login screen will show the disguised name, and the client creates a separate uodesktop folder for that character with no inherited macros.

Restrictions and the Felucca rule

The skill respects the same Trammel/Felucca split that governs all PvP-adjacent mechanics. The thumbnail rule:

Trammel-ruleset facets include Trammel itself, Ilshenar, Malas, Tokuno, the Stygian Abyss, and Eodon. Felucca is the only PvP-flagged facet and the only one in which player-on-player theft is even theoretically legal.

Training

Training Stealing is a slow, social skill grind. The standard method uses a pack animal — a Pack Horse, Pack Llama, or Giant Beetle — loaded with stacks of common goods. Anything will do as ballast: empty bottles, wood, leather, gold. The trick is to put exactly the right weight on the animal for the thief's current skill range, then steal from it repeatedly, restacking after each attempt.

If training inside a guard zone, give the pack animal the guard command first. Stealing in town from your own pack animal is not a criminal act, but if the system rolls you as visible to nearby NPCs, the guards will not check whether the target was yours.

The skill can be gained anywhere, but Felucca is the conventional training facet. Buccaneer's Den's blacksmith shop is a popular Trammel alternative when a quieter spot is preferred.

Weight progression

Stack weight 12 stones or more works for any range, but trains slower than tuning weight to the band. Skill above 100 requires Power Scrolls; the cap can be raised in 5-point increments to a maximum of 120.

Success-chance calculations

The full math for stealing from another player in town, in a Felucca-based ruleset, follows three nested checks: the difficulty calculation, the witness check, and (if witnessed) the success roll. Each step is independent, and only the third determines whether the item moves.

Skill modifier

skillModifier = 100 + StealingSkillValue

A Grandmaster thief (skill 100.0, stored internally as 1000) has skillModifier = 1100. A Legendary thief at 120 has skillModifier = 1300.

Targeting factor

The factor of 3 for planned theft makes targeted stealing roughly three times harder than blind grabs — a weighted cost for getting to choose what to take.

Difficulty

difficulty = (itemWeight × targetingFactor × 2000) / skillModifier

All fractions are rounded down. A GM thief making a planned theft of a 7-stone item:

difficulty = (7 × 3 × 2000) / 1100 = 38

Witness check

If no one nearby notices, the theft completes silently. If someone notices — and every nearby NPC and player rolls independently, with the difficulty above and the item's gold value as inputs — the thief moves to the success check. The denser the crowd, the more independent rolls the theft must survive.

Witnessed-success calculation

When witnessed, success uses a different difficulty number:

witnessDifficulty = itemWeight × targetingFactor × 30 + 100

For the 7-stone planned theft:

witnessDifficulty = 7 × 3 × 30 + 100 = 730

The percent chance of success is then:

percentSuccess = (500 + 2 × (thiefSkill - witnessDifficulty)) / 10

For a GM thief (skill stored as 1000) attempting that theft:

percentSuccess = (500 + 2 × (1000 - 730)) / 10 = 104%

Anything at or above 100% is a guaranteed steal even with witnesses present. The math therefore implies a sharp threshold: at GM skill, planned thefts of items up to roughly 7–8 stones are guaranteed in front of witnesses; heavier items begin to fail. Legendary thieves widen the margin further.

Dungeon-artifact stealing

Stealing rare artifacts in dungeons uses an entirely separate, simpler difficulty curve that ignores witnesses and follows a linear progression by item. The numbers above apply to player-pack and NPC-pack theft only.

Stealable rare-item categories

The skill exists chiefly because several artifact classes can only be obtained through it. Three are major.

Doom Stealables

A set of fixed rare items hidden inside the Gauntlet of the Halls of Doom. The artifacts spawn on cycles in their own positions; a thief with high Stealing and Stealth can extract them without engaging the dungeon's bosses. They are the genre standard for high-end stealable rares.

Monster Stealables

Introduced in Publish 57, this category lets a thief extract a special item from a monster's pack independent of what the monster is carrying — a rolled drop that fires only on success. The system message "You successfully steal a special item from the creature!" (with a magical chime) confirms a hit; "You reach into the backpack...and try to take something." signals a miss.

Eligibility:

• The monster must be in a Felucca-side dungeon, or part of any Champion Spawn (in any facet).
• The thief must have at least Grandmaster (100) Stealing.
• A given monster may only be successfully robbed once per spawn.

Theoretical odds (success chance per attempt):

A fame bonus stacks on top:

A theoretical maximum of 15% (Legendary thief, level-40 monster) is rarely realised — even the Harrower does not have that much fame; only certain high-end Paragons sit at the top of the curve. In practice Legendary thieves report 70–80% success rates against typical Champion Spawn monsters, with 20–30% non-rare returns and 10% outright failures, suggesting the real odds run higher than the documented numbers.

The items themselves are mostly Balms and Lotions — single-use or short-duration consumables that are un-insurable, un-stackable, and mutually exclusive (one balm or lotion at a time):

Additional balms and lotions in the same family include Balm Of Wisdom, Balm Of Swiftness, Lotion Of Translocation, and Lotion Of Cleansing Winds — all sharing the same un-insurable, mutually-exclusive ruleset.

Dungeon rare-item stealables

Beyond Doom and the Monster Stealables system, several individual dungeons spawn fixed rare items in static locations that a thief can extract with the right skill check. These tend to be flavor pieces — paintings, books, props — rather than mechanical upgrades, but they trade for substantial gold among collectors.

Strategy notes

A Snooping-Hiding-Stealth-Stealing template is the shortest path to a functional thief, but it leaves no headroom for combat skills; most rogue players add at least Magery (or Mysticism) for recall, gate, and cleansing winds, plus a defensive skill. The following points are conventional:

• Walk, don't run while in Stealth — running halves the safe-step count and guarantees a failed stealth check on the next move.
• Stay light. Stealth penalises heavy armor; nothing heavier than Leather Armor or Mage Armor is recommended.
• Snoop first, steal second. Targeted theft is mechanically harder per the difficulty formula, but the alternative is grabbing whichever item the game rolls — and that roll can land on a 50-stone keg or an Insured wedding band.
• Pick your facet for the act, not the training. Skill gain is uniform across facets; player-pack theft is Felucca-only.
• Time the cooldown. The 10-second post-Steal lockout applies to every other skill, including Hiding and Stealth — a thief who rushes the next action will be standing in the open with the item still in their pack.
• Mind the witnesses. The witness check fires per-NPC and per-player. A bank crowded with twenty characters is twenty independent rolls; a quiet alley is one or two. The math favors solitude.

See also

Snooping, Stealth, Hiding, Detecting Hidden, Doom Stealables, Monster Stealables, Thieves Guild, Felucca, Buccaneer's Den.