Mounts

A player rides a tamed horse, llama or ostard: it walks and runs twice as fast. The stable and the ethereal mounts are built too; the bola is not.

How to ride

1. Get a creature that is yours. Tame it with the taming skill, or a game master gives it with tame. A creature with no owner is nobody’s to ride, a game master’s included.
2. Stand within one tile of it, at about its height (up to 8 levels apart), and double click it. Its owner sits on it; a game master can sit on a creature that belongs to someone else.
3. Walk or run. A rider takes a step every 200 ms walking and every 100 ms running, a rider on foot every 400 and 200. The horse runs, not the rider: running costs a rider no stamina, and an overloaded rider tires as if it walked.
4. Double click yourself to get off, or die: the horse stands again where you were.

The client shows its own text when a mount is refused: you ride already, the creature is more than one tile away, or it is nobody’s or somebody else’s.

A dead rider cannot mount. The paperdoll button of the client still opens your paperdoll while you ride.

What happens to the horse

The horse does not stay alive off the map: it turns into data on the mount item the rider wears on the mount layer (25). The item keeps the template of the horse and its owner, is saved with the rider, and nothing is left behind after a restart or a logout. Getting off removes the item at once and makes the horse again, from its template, on the tile of the rider, with its owner. The horse gets a new serial, and it keeps neither its hit points, its hue nor what it carried; its loyalty and its bond are kept on the mount item and come back with it.

The row of the mount item is deleted before the horse is made, so a crash between the two leaves the rider on foot and the horse in the world, never both. If the horse cannot be made it is tried three times, a second apart, each failure logged; after the third it is lost, and the log line says which template and where.

The mount item cannot be lifted off the rider. A creature that is dying cannot be ridden, nor by a rider whose inventory is reserved, such as while a book attachment is being claimed.

Making a creature rideable

Give its mobile template the tag mount_item, the id of an item template whose layer is mount:

[[mobile]]
id = "horse"
body = 228
[mobile.tags]
mount_item = "horse4"

Children of a template inherit the tag. An empty value, mount_item = "", makes a child no mount, as the ethereal mounts, the nightmares and the other creatures of templates/mobiles/mounts.toml are for now.

What a rider cannot do

A rider cannot mine with a pickaxe, fish with a pole or use the Stealth skill or a snow pile: each is refused with the client’s own text and nothing starts. The axe and the Hiding skill are left alone. A script asks mobile.is_mounted(serial).

Teleporters that refuse a rider

A teleporter item with the prop deny_mounted set to true (as text in a decoration file: deny_mounted = "true") tells a rider to dismount first and leaves it where it is; no smoke and no sound play. A walker on foot goes through. No shipped teleporter carries the flag yet.

[[decoration]]
type = "Teleporter"
item_id = 0x1BC3
props = { point_dest = [5690, 569, 25], deny_mounted = "true" }
locations = [[5827, 593, 0]]

The stable

The animal trainers of the towns, the gypsy ones included (script_id = "stablemaster"), keep a stable. They are vendors as before: the shop and the lessons stay.

1. Stand within 12 tiles and say stable, or pick Stable in the trainer’s context menu. You read the prompt and get a cursor: pick a pet of yours, within a tile of you.
2. The pet leaves the world and its template joins your stable; the fee is taken from your backpack and then your bank (30 gold by default). The trainer answers with the client’s text: your pet is stabled, or you cannot stable that, it is not yours, you have too many pets in the stable, or you cannot pay.
3. Say claim to see the list of your stabled pets, one button each; a button makes that pet again beside you. Claim All in the menu takes them all back.

Only a pet that can be ridden and is yours can be stabled, not one that is dying. A claimed pet is made again from its template, with you as its owner, and keeps neither its hit points, hue nor what it carried; the spawn is tried three times, and a pet that cannot be made goes back to your stable. The stable is the prop stabled of your character (the template ids, joined by ;), saved with it; the prop stabled_loyalty keeps the loyalty and the bond of each pet in the same order, so a claimed pet is as loyal as it was. The limit and the fee are in [ultima.stable].

Ethereal mounts

A statuette of an ethereal mount (a horse, a llama, an ostard, a kirin, a unicorn, a ridgeback, a swamp dragon or a beetle, templates/items/misc/ethereal-statues.toml) lets its owner ride with no creature. Double click it while it lies in your backpack: it is gone and you sit on the ethereal mount. You read the client’s text when it is not in your backpack, or when you ride already. Getting off, or dying, gives the statuette back in your backpack, past its limit of items (its place was freed when you rode), or on the ground where you stand when you have no backpack. It comes back with its hue and its name but a new serial. There is no wait to cast it and no follower slot. A game master makes one with .add ethereal_horse_statue. The statuette is a template with script_id = "ethereal_mount" and the tag mount_item, the template of the mount item that is worn.

Mount stones

A mount stone (templates/items/misc/mount-stones.toml: a horse, a llama, an ostard and a nightmare) is an item that rides a mount for its owner and is never used up. Double click it while it lies in your backpack and you sit on its mount; double click the same stone again and you get off, wherever the stone lies by then. You read the client’s text when it is not in your backpack and you want to get on, or when you ride another mount already. Dying, or double clicking yourself, gets you off too; nothing is given back, because the stone never left your backpack. A game master makes one with .add mount_stone_horse. The stone is a template with script_id = "mount_stone" and the tag mount_item, the template of the mount item that is worn (templates/items/misc/equippable-mounts.toml): to make a stone for another mount, copy a block of the file and change the id, the name and that tag; no script changes. Veterinarians and animal trainers sell them: 6000 gold the horse stone, 7000 the others.

Fighting from the saddle

A rider who attacks plays the actions of a mount: one hand, two hands, bow or crossbow. The animation that tells a blow was taken is the usual one. The ids are those of the client’s animation table; they were not tried with a client.

For scripts

The stable module is what a stablemaster’s script uses (scripts/mobiles/stablemaster.lua):

Function	What it does
stable.attend(player)	True for the stablemaster that serves now; false for whoever asks again within half a second. Several trainers in one square hear the same words, one answers.
stable.pets(player)	The stabled pets as a list of { template, name }, in the order they were left; places count from 1. nil for an NPC.
stable.stable(player, pet)	Leaves the pet in the stable and takes the fee. Gives Ok, NotAPet, NotYours, TooFar, Dying, Full, NoGold, NoPlayer or Failed.
stable.claim(player, place, template)	Takes the pet at that place out and makes it again beside the player. The template must match the place. Gives Ok, NoPlayer, BadIndex or Failed.
stable.max_pets()	How many pets a player may leave (ultima.stable.max_pets).
stable.fee()	The gold one pet costs (ultima.stable.fee); 0 is free.

mount.ride_ethereal(player, statuette) puts the player on the ethereal mount of a statuette in its backpack. It returns false, with the reason told to the player, when the statuette is not in the backpack or the player already rides; false and silent for a ghost or an item that is no statuette. mobile.is_mounted(serial) tells whether a mobile rides.

Not built yet

The bola and the dismount ability of weapons.