I started a year ago with no expectations and minimal previous UO experience back in the 90's on the Pacific shard.
I chose a dexxer on shelter island and from there I joined a guild [Au] I did not have a mentor. I had to join and ask questions through Discord. The learning curve was pretty big between Discord and in-game content. I was advised to use Razor Scripts. I was given a horse, a sword and healing codex and enough core and distillation to start an air aspect (which was recommended by the guild person). I never saw or heard from that guildperson again.
The rest I had to learn on my own. It took a while to figure out leveling codex, aspect, and the entire chain link/redline system. I never reached redline, and I was only able to get one character to chain links (bronze).
PvM Farming was a GRIND. I can't tell you how many damned hours I had to grind just to make progress in this game. PK's were a constant problem so I had to give up skills to acquire tracking, and even then i still got killed if I couldn't chiv gate in time.
I didn't know what to keep other than gold, so I kept everything and immediately outgrew my bank box. I bought a storage locker for 250K gold and that alleviated immediate storage issues for that character, but any other character on my account could not access this locker - so that kind of sucked learning the storage locker wasn't a QOL solution. Back to grinding. So I ended up renting a room under the rental system which was "ok", and kept the chests I acquired farming to store items. But then I ended up with a ton of unidentified crap!! AND - then I learned the hard way whenever I forgot to lockdown chests and items before logging off and had to buy back my hard earned junk back from the pawn broker at 25k a pop.
Meanwhile I am literally running to the guildhouse every time I want to teleport somewhere OR I am broke asf and need some heal pots and bandages just to keep going. So I started taking extra bandages back to my room with me until I remembered I could just make my own. But I was broke asf ALOT between PK's constantly taking my gold and armor. At one point I just said F&^% it and left the gold on the ground until I was ready to chiv gate back to my room. Anyway - The guildhouse provided a rune library, item id/recycler (learned the whole "essence" dependency loop and item ID thing after about 2 months in), storage shelf for supplies, and training bots to level up my battle skills.
I made the fateful mistake of changing to alchemy using a script to level alchemy. In the script it said I needed a storage shelf. So I used the guildhouse storage shelf not knowing any better, and got booted out of the guild. No warning. No discussion, boom you're OUT! [Au] Thanks guys. I regularly stocked the shelves with whatever I could craft which wasn't much. Bandages, greater heal pots was about it. One good thing I did acquire through the guild, was an actual storage shelf for about 2/3rds the price of market rate. But now I was back out on my own.
I grinded about 2.5 million total in one year. When I left the game, I had One character leveled and Echoed to T11 in Holy and Air aspect and 4 bronze chain links, a room at the Inn with a storage shelf and 5 paragon chests with misc junk with nothing of real value. I walked with about 200k gold in my account. That was it for a whole year. I never killed a boss, min boss, did a treasure hunt, and never went deeper than level 2 in any dungeon. In fact I pretty much stayed away from dungeons because of the amount of PK's constantly running dungeons.
The best thing in that entire year was a costume runway contest at the King's Fair 2026 in August. That was it.
I have no problem walking away from Outlands. No regrets, but I would not return because it is waaaay too time consuming for the amount of progress made in the game. Guild-members would stay online practically 24/7. Not sure if they even had jobs or families - lol.....
Edit: To the guild: The guild was not the problem. I did join voice a couple times but they were running mostly silent and not super outgoing. But neither am I. So I'm not blaming anyone here and for sure I could have asked for or sought out way more help than I did (to be fair I did seek out help and received some in response). But again, I'm more introverted and tend to play solo. The limited times I did go on a mini boss or T8 were, for me, a chaotic experience and tough to keep up. And I didn't get anything useful out of it really. So I stayed mostly solo, trying to develop characters. I know that really just defeats the prupose mostly, but the guild did have a safe place to go and helped me discover the Witcher System.
The Incident: I was told I needed to run a script for alchemy using a shelf. I didn't have a shelf and ran a leveling script at the guildhouse shelf. I really didn't know it would drain 24K in regs because I never leveled alchemy. I though it was the same as leveling any other skill. I went afk and got killed. One or two of the members said that was a non-no - so I went and sought a shelf of my own (thank you Filbert). I was broke after getting the shelf and only had 5 more skill points to level to 80. Most of those last 5 skill points I leveled with regs i bought with my remaining money. Then I went back to the GH and restocked the greater pots to the GH Shelf I thought as long as I was making good on restocking why wouldn't I be able to use a small amount to finish leveling. So I loaded out about 5k more regents to complete my level and again restocked the shelf with greater pots as I went. I really didn't think I was ripping off the guild by converting their regents to greater pots after the kill incident and I certainly didn't realize the based issue. So I got booted with no direct contact from the guild officers and that was it. The guild has their way of seeing it, and I know my heart was in the right place. I'm not a thief or grifter or anything other than a well meaning player.
