"It is better to conceal one's knowledge than to reveal one's ignorance."
– Spanish Proverb
Detecting Hidden (DH) is a skill that allows you to reveal the presence of hidden players (anywhere in Felucca, but only in your house or a house you're friended to in Trammel). It also allows you to see traps on dungeons floors and when successfully used on chests, it will inform you whether or not the chest is trapped.
This skill is essential if you wish to learn the Remove Traps skill. To learn Remove Trap, you need at least 50 points in both Detect Hidden as well as Lockpicking. With the advent of Samurai Empire and the proliferation of Ninjas along with the new Stealth skill changes, Detect hidden has once again found its place among the important skills list.
There is no real way around this. All you have to do is detect, detect, and detect some more. Since it's a slow and painful skill to train, you should start with 50. Worse case, you can train DH by trying to detect a GM Hider from 0 to 50. After that you won't gain much at all due to the anti-macro code. Then it's time to move on to GM made Trapped locked boxes. You will need about 200 to 300 of these boxes. You can also gain detect hidden through passive skill gain by using Lockpicking skill. Another method is to go to fel banks and use detect hidden on their boxes in the bank. A favorite spot is the Vesper bank.
Have a tinker make 200+ trapped boxes. Lock them to activate the trap then detect hidden on each of them. Cycle through them, the go right back to the first one. Gains will be quick at first and will gradually slow down. If you do not have UO Assist, I strongly suggest you get it to train this skill because it is extremely boring. Set a macro to detect hidden each box with a pause of 12000 ms after each target line. Remember that each UOA macro cannot exceed 200 lines so each macro will only allow you to use DH on a maximum of 66 boxes. So for 200 boxes, you will need 3 macro slots.
Finding Hidden People
You can only detect people within a certain radious from where you stand. The radius is based on your Detect Hidden skill and will increase accordingly, up to almost the full screen at grandmaster level. The higher the hiding skill, the harder it will be for you to detect them.
House owners will ALWAYS be able to instantly reveal anyone hidden in a house they own or are friended to, regardless of skill level of the hider, and regardless of the Detect Hidden skill of the home owner, even if they have none. The logic is that they know their house better than any stranger. To detect within your house, use the skill and target any floor tile within your house. Anyone hiding inside, on any floor, will automatically be revealed.
The Detect Hidden skill also helps you when you are using the Tracking skill and when you use the Reveal spell.
Trapped Containers
Boxes, Chests, Crates, Barrels, Kegs and Fruit Baskets can be trapped, the rule of thumb being that any container can be trapped. There is an easy way to verify that a container is trapped: try to trade it to another player. You may NOT trade trapped containers. The other way is to place the container on the floor and use the Detect Hidden skill on it. If it is trapped and you successfully used the skill on it, the words "[trapped]" will appear over the container.
The 3 types of container traps are displayed with a color when detected.
- Purple for explosion traps.
- Blue for dart traps or dart & explosion traps
- Green for poison traps, poison & dart traps, poison & explosion traps or poison & dart & explosion traps (ouch!).
Note: combination traps are currently only used on the Siege Perilous Shard.
Container traps can do up to 150 points of damage. So you might want to use Detect Hidden several times on a container to make 100% sure it is not trapped as you may ahve missed the trap in your initial attempt.
Dungeon Traps
In every dungeon and around champion spawn altar area, the following traps can be found at random locations: floor saw trap, floor spike trap, poison gas trap and exploding mushroom trap. The deeper you descend into a dungeon, the more powerful the traps will be. The closer you get to the Champion altar and the more traps there will be.
All traps in Dungeons and altar areas are invisible until either detected or triggered by someone walking over them, at which point they become visible to everyone. At higher level, a detective will see the message "trap here" appear over an invisible trap. But the trap will remain invisible to everyone else. The trap will need to be revealed by using the Remove Trap skill for others to see it.
Revealed dungeon traps will disappear after a few minutes. Dungeon traps can do up to 60 points of damage.
Thanks to Tristan Beltaine for updating this essay
