UO Second Age

Hello. I am a player who played a lot about 8 years ago and I'm just starting to get back into it and was hoping for some help and answer on some questions. I have read plenty of guides and build for skill and stat gain, and I'm going to be a tamer/mage. I am concentrating on leveling taming, and every guide told me to get to ice island. I spent almost all day + night trying to find a way to get there, before someone kindly ported me there.

My questins are:

All the animals are pretamed and named. I keep taming them (at 50.3 real skill) and it says "that wasn't even challenging". Does this mean I won't gain skill if an animal was pretamed? And what do I do if the entire island is this way?

Also, is there a quick way to get to ice island that is easily accessed? It took me forever to find a way here. I don't have the spell mark yet, it's so difficult to get back and forth (same question for the lost lands)

Thank you for all help

You won't gain from pre tames.

You don't need the spell mark just quite yet. What you do need is the spell recall. If you have recall find a rune library (a public house with many rune books) and any semi decent rune library should have a rune to the entrance of Deciet. Recall to there, and that's it. You're in Ice island.

Some of the better equipped rune libraries will also have runes marked to entrances to t2a. You can use those to go there too.

Make sure someone does mark a rune for you, so you have a way back home.

Well, as far as ice island goes, just get there once somehow, and stay there until you hit the minimum taming required to tame bulls. Or even hell hounds, if you want.

There's a shrine on the island, so if you die to orcs/PKs, you can just ressurect there. And since you can tame naked, you may as well do so; no sense wasting reagents to recall back and forth, and possibly lose more reagents when dying. There's a lot of murderers that live on that island, who'll kill you for your 10 blood moss and rune. So may as well not have it in the first place.

Once you hit the minimum skill required to tame bulls, or hell hounds, you can Help --> Stuck to a city, or find a friendly player to gate you to one.