Hue Reference

A hue in Ultima Online is a 1-based index into the client’s hues.mul file. Every colored item, creature, and piece of clothing carries a hue number; the client looks that number up to decide how to recolor a sprite.

The important thing to understand is that a hue is not a flat tint. Each hue is a 32-shade gradient — a ramp from shadow to highlight. When the client draws a hued sprite, it walks the sprite’s own grayscale shadow→highlight ramp and remaps each gray level to the matching shade of the hue’s gradient. A near- black pixel becomes the hue’s darkest shade; a near-white pixel becomes its lightest. That is why a single grayscale ingot sprite can become nine visibly different metals while keeping all of its shading and depth.

This remapping is also why this wiki bakes hues directly into PNGs rather than using CSS filter or a color overlay: a CSS tint multiplies a flat color across the whole image and flattens the shading, which cannot reproduce a 32-step palette remap. We read the gradient out of hues.mul and recolor the sprite pixel-by-pixel, exactly as the client does.

(Hue 0 is the special “unhued” value — it means “draw the sprite as-is,” so it has no gradient entry of its own.)

The full palette

Below is every hue in hues.mul, drawn as a grid of small swatches. Each swatch shows a representative mid-tone from that hue’s 32-shade gradient. Gridlines mark every 8 columns and rows for orientation. Reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, the first swatch is game hue 1.

All 3000 hues in hues.mul, one mid-tone swatch each (40 per row).

Notable hues

These are the craft-resource hues defined in ServUO’s ResourceInfo.cs — the colors the crafting system applies to metals, leather, dragon scales, and wood. Each swatch shows the full 32-shade gradient (shadow at top, highlight at bottom).

Metals

Swatch	Hue (hex)	Hue (dec)	Name
	0x0973	2419	Dull Copper
	0x0966	2406	Shadow Iron
	0x096D	2413	Copper
	0x0972	2418	Bronze
	0x08A5	2213	Gold
	0x0979	2425	Agapite
	0x089F	2207	Verite
	0x08AB	2219	Valorite

Leather

Swatch	Hue (hex)	Hue (dec)	Name
	0x0283	643	Spined
	0x0227	551	Horned
	0x01C1	449	Barbed

Dragon scales

Swatch	Hue (hex)	Hue (dec)	Name
	0x066D	1645	Red Scales
	0x08A8	2216	Yellow Scales
	0x0455	1109	Black Scales
	0x0851	2129	Green Scales
	0x08FD	2301	White Scales
	0x08B0	2224	Blue Scales

Wood

Swatch	Hue (hex)	Hue (dec)	Name
	0x07DA	2010	Oak
	0x04A7	1191	Ash
	0x04A8	1192	Yew
	0x04A9	1193	Heartwood
	0x04AA	1194	Bloodwood
	0x047F	1151	Frostwood

Same sprite, every metal

Every ingot color uses the same grayscale art (item 0x1BF2). The only thing that changes is the hue. Below is that one sprite, drawn nine times — plain Iron plus the eight colored metals — to show how the remap turns one piece of art into nine distinct ingots:

Iron, Dull Copper, Shadow Iron, Copper, Bronze, Gold, Agapite, Verite, Valorite — one sprite, nine hues.

To see where these resources come from and how they’re used, visit the Resources gathering guide and the Resources item catalog.