Quick Setup Guide: Recommended Account, Options, and Macro Settings

Outlands, and Ultima Online in general, is deep and complex. You have an immense amount of control over your gameplay experience with far more customization options than exist in many other games. Unfortunately, that means helpful settings and options are easy to miss. Many of us have found ourselves hearing about a setting more than a year into playing on Outlands and wishing we had known about it at the start.

Accounts and Shards

Firstly, you can have a maximum of three accounts with your free shard access. Each account can hold 5 characters. This can be extended later in the game with customizations (that cost gold or Prevalia coins, or scrolls), but for most players 15 total possible characters is more than enough.

Here is what your account selection page will look like:

Outlands has two shards, and the selection menu looks like this:

First is the main shard where all your characters reside. This shard is labeled “UO Outlands” in the select shard menu, and it will be where the vast majority of your gameplay will happen.

Second is the test shard where you can log on and test everything you need before spending time and resources on the main shard. Some players use test shard more than others, but you should consider going there any time you are facing a big investment of time or gold. 

Want 50 million gold? You got it!

Want to test a new look? Suits you sir!

Thinking about a radical new build? Give it a test drive. 

The main UO Outlands option is where all of your permanent progress will reside. Test shard is wiped frequently and updated with a copy of your characters from the main shard.

One Account for PVM Characters

As I said before, you can create 5 characters on each account, but the kinds of characters you create for each account can impact your gameplay in a big way, costing or saving a great deal of time and headache.

Later in the game, you will unlock a mastery chain. This chain will give experience and benefits to your character as they farm. This is the important part: mastery chain experience/progress applies to every character on that account. So if you put in the time to unlock several links, any character on that account can acquire a mastery chain and take advantage of that progress.

If you start a character on one of your other two accounts, that mastery chain experience will not carry over, which can represent months and months of farming for most players.

Focusing your PVM chars on one account is important. Avoid the temptation to split PVM characters across multiple accounts.

Personally, I have three PVM characters that I rotate between depending on the situation:

1) Your main character you intend to level up and take part in guild activities and grow stronger over time (This should be the character you intend to play with the guild in boss fights and farming).

2) A character you want to play with, or test out as you go along, or a second main you will focus on (This may be monster hunting, farming mobs/gold or Lochpicking, Boating or T-map hunting).

3) A character for gathering resources like leather, ingots and lumber.

You might also consider the following characters on your main account but these are not nearly as critical to have on your main account as the PVM characters:

4) Create a character for crafting (if you want to!). More about why crafting characters are useful on every one of your accounts will come later.

5) A PVP character for, you know, killing reds.

You do not need to make all of these characters right away. We are simply trying to help you avoid mistakes that we made when we started on Outlands.

Not to make this guide too complicated, but there are use cases where your mastery chain experience can be useful for crafting and PVP. For example, the artisan aspect is a benefit for both crafting and PVM, and some mastery chain links can provide benefits like bonus stealth steps, which is pretty useful if you are a stealth PVPer or a thief. The benefits of your mastery chain will be disabled when you flag for PVP, but it’s still helpful for the time before and after a battle.

The Three Crafter Hustle

On Outlands, society jobs – weekly quests/challenges for each player type – are critical to progressing your character. The points you earn from societies will fund some of your biggest upgrade purchases, like mastery chain links and strongbox deeds (more about societies here). Since crafting societies are often the least time-consuming societies to complete, many players put one crafter on each account to maximize the amount of society points they can earn each.

Tailors are the default crafters for this approach because leather is the cheapest resource and the gatherer that we talked about in the previous section can either help you earn enough gold to fund the skill-up of your tailors or enable you to gather the resources you would otherwise have to buy.

In addition to tailoring, I recommend alchemy. It’s more expensive than tailoring, but all of the materials you need are available on NPC vendors (spell reagents and bottles) and alchemy in general is a useful skill to have on hand to cover all of your potion needs. 

You don’t have to do alchemy on every account if you don’t want to. Many players mix in inscription or dedicate some portion of their weekly societies to monster-hunting, but you should know that the other crafting skills – inscription, blacksmithing, tinkering, carpentry – are more expensive to level and the materials you will need each week will be more expensive as well.

For Societies, use https://www.outlandsbutler.com/ to sort what will be the most payout for each job. The two cheapest crafting skills to GM for societies are:

• Tailoring – 208K gold worth of leather

• Inscription – 208K gold worth of blank scrolls

Create a “Societies / Crafting” character on each of your three accounts and complete 10 tailoring and inscription societies each week. You’ll get anywhere from 3 to 12 society points each completed task. Once you get 25 points, you can get a Bronze Mastery Chain Link Reforging Tool, worth 100K. You can earn anywhere from 300K to 800K per week doing this.

Tailoring Training Guide:

Outlands Butler Video: https://youtu.be/fyYpu9HtsEk?si=Egk0q4qmFY8QuCEo

Pwnstarr Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIli4hsiq-Y

Accounts Two and Three

Typically, your second and third accounts are for alternate or support characters. Having a PVP character on your second account, for example, can be useful if you need quick access to a combat-ready character. 

Let’s say you are doing a treasure map and a PK kills you. Instead of jogging to a healer, resurrecting, recalling to the guildhouse, regearing, and then recalling back to the treasure map to die again (because your PVM character will be bad at PVP), you can tab into your second Outlands window right away and head to the treasure map to restore your honor and hopefully recover your gear.

Some players build their gatherers on these accounts so that they can macro them while they hunt with their main. “Multiboxing” (playing multiple client instances simultaneously) is not for everyone, but it’s not unusual for a player to mine and dungeon crawl at the same time or to run three lumberjacks at once to maximize returns.

Again, that’s not for everybody, but the option is available to you.

Quick Setup for Settings

So, you have got the best possible start for the future of this long-term game, and now you are wondering about the best settings that will see you on your way and prevent any embarrassment from players asking silly questions like “Why have you not accepted the party invite?” 

Huzzah! Do not worry, it could be worse. People could ask you, “Did you even read the quick start guide?!”

Anyway, several of my recommendations can come down to personal preference. It’s no problem if you choose something different for your setup, but knowing you have these tools is still important. To help distinguish the importance of settings, I will rate each recommendation with the following:

1. Optional – This setting can be helpful but what you ultimately choose comes down to your own preference.

2. Highly Recommended – For most players, these settings are a good idea, so you should probably start playing with them on and then decide if you want to keep them or not.

3. Mandatory – Ignoring these options will put you at a disadvantage relative to other players or significantly hinder your Outlands experience.

Prevent Criminal Looting and Healing

Priority: Mandatory

One of the most common ways new players die is by accidentally committing a criminal act, which turns you gray and makes you freely attackable to other players. Fortunately, Outlands gives you easy options for keeping this from happening to you.

The fastest solution:

• Type [preventcriminallooting in your in-game chat and hit enter.

• Type [preventcriminalhealing in your in-game chat and hit enter.

You have several settings you can adjust this way by clicking HELP on your paperdoll, navigating to commands, and then selecting “Mechanics” at the bottom. At some point, reading through these to familiarize yourself with your options is a good idea.

The General Tab

General

To open your options, you can use the shortcut CTRL+O or you can selection OPTIONS from your paperdoll. We’re going to start with the General tab, and my settings look like this:

• Always Run (Highly Recommended) – In traditional UO, you can make your character walk or run by varying the distance of your cursor from your character. This setting makes sure that you are always moving as quickly as possible, which is handy when you need to quickly escape a bad situation and every second counts.

• Auto Open Doors (Mandatory) – Manually clicking every door in this game to open them is miserable. With this option, simply walking into the door auto opens it.

• Auto Open Corpses (Optional) – When you are within range of a corpse, this option will automatically open them. This setting is dangerous to have on if you have [preventcriminallooting toggled off, but it is generally handy for checking corpses without having to manually click each body. In hairy situations, sometimes the “action” of opening a corpse can delay a more important action, making this optional.

Note: All of the above options are off by default.

Mobiles

• Aura Under Feet (Optional) – Quickly identify whether a player/mobile is an innocent, a criminal, a murderer, invulnerable (likely for an event), or a party member. 

• Custom Color Aura for Party Members (Optional) – I like to set Party Aura Color to purple so that I can easily distinguish between guild members and party members.

Note: All other settings for this section that you see toggled on are toggled on by default, so no need to change anything here as all of these defaults are incredibly useful.

Gumps & Context

• Show Gump for Party Invites (Mandatory) – You will join hunting parties frequently, and the default system message is very easy to miss. Turning this on saves a lot of time for you and everyone you’re playing with.

• Grid Loot Set to Both (Highly Recommended) – Traditional UO looting is opening a corpse and dragging the items from the corpse gump to your backpack. Grid loot neatly organizes the objects on the corpse and turns looting into a single click for each item. Both means that the grid loot window will open as well as the classic corpse window, which is handy if there are a lot of items to sort through.

• Auto Close Grid Loot When No Items (Highly Recommended) – Saves you a good bit of time and hassle managing menus when you’re dungeon-crawling.

• Use Outlands Theming for Grid Loot (Optional) – I think it looks nice.

Note: The other settings here are on by default but take notice of the “Hold ALT Key + Right click to close Anchored gumps.” This is how you close a health bar attached to another help, which is something you will do a lot, making it frustrating to not know how.

Miscellaneous

• Enable circle of transparency (Optional) – This setting surrounds your character with x-ray vision (so to speak), allowing you to see items that would be hidden “behind” walls or other objects because of the isometric view. Some players leave this on all the time and others toggle it on and off as needed.

• Show target range indicator (Optional) – This will make it easier to judge distance for your ranged attacks. Handy if you are a mage.

Note: The rest of these options are on by default.

Health Bars & Drag Select

Customize the Select Options (Highly Recommended) – To quickly get a bunch of health bars, you can click and drag (like you would if you were selecting multiple items on a Windows PC). While that’s useful, you most often want enemy health bars only because we don’t care how much health Vikki’s Earth Elemental has left. 

The options above are set do the following:

• Select All Modifier – By holding ALT when I click and drag, I can open every health bar within my selection.

• Select Players Modifier – Holding CTRL when I click and drag will filter that selection to only grab player health bars

• Select Monsters Modifier – Setting this to NONE lets me click and drag all enemy health bars. Since this is what you will be doing most often while hunting, this set up saves you the effort of finding ALT and CTRL over and over and over.

Exactly how you lay these options out for your own playstyle can vary entirely by your preference, but you probably want to have some customization here to make your life easier.

The Video Tab

Light Level set to 30 (Mandatory) – Outlands does not have a nightsight spell or potion, and poor visibility will make it harder to play. Setting your Light Level to 30 will be much easier to play.

Note: Everything else in this section is up to your preference. You probably won’t adjust anything else here ever.

The Speech Tab

Active Chat When Pressing Enter (Optional) – Since many of your macros and hot keys will use keys that you would use for in-game messages, you can easily trigger an action by accident if you are having a conversation in the game. This option leaves chat off by default and requires you to press ENTER to enable the option to type a chat message. Some people never bother, though, so if you see players repeating a bunch of random characters, you are probably just seeing their most used hot keys.

Note: Everything else here is preference, but you may want to change your Speech Color away from the default blue simply because you think another color represents your character and style better.

The Combat Spells Tab

• Query Before Attack (Mandatory) – This will be on by default, but you may want to turn it off if you plan on attacking innocent people on a regular basis.

• Query Before Performing Beneficial Acts on Evil Things (Mandatory) – Turn this on for an extra layer of defense against accidentally committing a criminal action.

Note: No other actions need to be taken on this tab.

The Counters Tab

Enable Counters (Mandatory) – The grid you see in the screenshot above are my counters, and by checking Enable Counters I can have these displayed on my screen at all times. You can track all of your main items here so you can easily see your current supplies. You are much better off, for example, noticing when you only have 3 Healing Potions left and planning accordingly than you are discovering you are out of Healing Potions as you desperately mash the hot key in a bad situation.

I’ve added several custom icons to mine for things I like to track. Also, I kind of like gems. A little bit.

To enable your own counters, check how many rows and columns you’d like to have, then drag the item you want to track into an empty counter box to begin tracking it. 

Additional tip that has helped me: I order my counters to correspond with my hot keys, so my 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 keys correspond to my potions. 1 is Greater Cure. 2 is Greater Heal. And so on.

If you aren’t sure what to track, take a look at your shelf loadout and track any consumable items that are critical to your success. For mages, that’s reagents and potions, for dexxers its bandages and potions, and on and on. 

The Info Bar Tab

Show and Lock Info Bar (Optional) – The Info Bar – which you can see an example of in the above screenshot, the string of text beginning with my name followed by Hits etc – gives you a quick way to track your key stats. This is vital information in bad situations, so this should be on your screen at all times.

If you don’t like the Info Bar view, you can get the same quick-glance convenience by double clicking your own health bar, expanding it to show these individual stats, like so:

The Cooldowns Tab

Relevant Cooldowns (Mandatory) – In this tab, you can create custom cooldown bars for actions, abilities, and items that have a forced delay before they can be used again. With cooldown bars, you can easily see how much time you have left before you can repeat that action. While you could do this by feal, the cooldown bars help you to maximize your character by using all of your abilities as often as you can or need to.

Every build and player will have their own preference for cooldowns, but the rule of thumb is that if you often see a system message telling you can’t do that thing again just yet, it needs a cooldown bar.

The screenshot above is a super simple set of mage cooldowns. The “Shroom” bar is tracking the delay between eating magic mushrooms, a common way to restore mana. Then they are tracking how often they can use the Meditation skill, and how long they have between spell bonuses for casting Magic Arrow and Harm (which are buffed by the Wizard’s Grimoire).

To set a cooldown, you need System Message text to trigger it, and you can see the string of text that is used for the magic mushroom cooldown in the screenshot above. You can also use Overhead Messages, but if what you want to track isn’t accompanied by either of those, you’re out of luck.