First off, welcome to Excelsior. This place takes UO to a whole new level, with new customized content, and brings it to you for free. Donations are always welcome to help the development of new and exciting content, and are generally rewarded with in game items. Starting in a new world can be fun, but intimidating at the same time. I’ve only been around for 11 days now, but I thought I would share what I have learned during my short stay here to help you get started, in hopes that you won’t get too overwhelmed with all the new content and try to leave us! Hang in there, it’s worth it! Let’s get started.
First off, get familiar with the UO Excelsior Wiki page. While I advise reading the whole thing ASAP, lets be honest, who wants to read a whole wiki page right away? Know it’s there, how to get there, and that a lot of times people will refer you there when you have questions. They refer you there for a good reason, it has answers. Try to read it all at least once in your first week here. All the new content is fun and exciting, but if you don’t know what you are doing, it can get frustrating. One more time for good measures, read the wiki page within the first week.
Alright, so you read the wiki page (or at least know where it is), lets get into the world. Account creation is simple, follow the instructions to download and install the Excelsior client. Then open the program with the Excelsior shortcut on your desktop. Account creation happens the first time your IP goes to sign into an account. So choose your account name and password and then sign in. It’s that simple. Once you create an account, that account is IP bound, so if you try to create another one you will get a “There is some problem communicating with Origin” error. Create a character, choose your professions, and log in. Some tips on character creation are to follow.
First off, skill gain here is super fast. So when picking skills, you want to choose skills that take a while to level. So don’t go picking 50 med and 50 magery, these skills level way to fast to waste on starting skill points. What I found after I created and abandoned my first character is that you want to start with 50 Animal Taming, and then 50 of another skill, I chose provocation, because I plan on being a taming bard. But it’s up to you, but you should try to start with 50 taming. Also, stat gains are different here. You only gain 1 stat point every about 15 minutes. So don’t leave one stat to low or it is going to be a pain to raise. Generally, in the end you are going to want 125 STR 125 dex and 50 int. So pick your stats according.
OK, so now you are in the game. First thing to know is you get a stat ball. The stat ball will be in your bank. This ball grants you 60 skill points in any skill. This is awesome, but don’t get to excited and burn it right away. Think about what skills would be the hardest to train. Macroing is legal here for skill gain, so you don’t want to use it on a skill you can just macro up over night. Most people I spoke with said they used it on Taming, and after I prematurely used mine on stealth, I deleted that character and used it on Taming. If you can get your skill up to at least 40, with the skill ball you will be GM. So use this on a skill that will be hard to train, I highly recommend Taming. In case you missed it, I recommend using it on taming lol. Also a side note, if you use a power scroll, lets say 120 taming, you can reach 120 taming if you use the skill ball at level 60. But you can only gain up to your skill cap, so don’t go wasting it on a skill that is at level 80, that will waste 40 skill points. No bueno. Save the ball if you are unsure about using it right away, or have more questions. Better to save it then waste it.
OK so now that you understand your stat ball, first thing is first. Training. You want to hunt and go kill stuff, make money collect loots. This will come, but not before grinding out some skill and stats. This part is a little time consuming, but it will pass as long as you know about Easy UO and Razor, these will be explained later, first lets just get to the training room and start training some basic fighting skills. To get to the training room, you have to use the portal system. These are the red chaos shields on the ground. Once you walk through, you will be prompted with a familiar (if you have played UO before) menu to choose a place to port to. You want to select the “Custom” category. Then choose the “Training Room”. Once in here you will see two tables on the south and east wall, on them are green “training” dirks. Choose the dirk with your specific fighting skill that you want to train, equip it and then attack a red NPC. You cannot damage them, and they can’t damage you, so this is a good place to train to gain stats later on, you will become familiar with this room so don’t worry. While here, this is a good time to get to know the people on the server. You can world chat by typing [c then your message. So that is “[c hello world, I am new!” Here you can train up all your fighting skills, and even better, you can unattended train fighting skills here. Please note that you can only gain skill up to 75 in here, so once you hit that cap, move on. Unless you are just going for stat points, which are not related to skill gain. So training lets say wrestling to 75 will cap you in this room, but every approximately 15 minutes you will still gain a stat point, even though you are not gaining any skill.
Now that you are beating up on a NPC, instead of staring at the same pixels moving over and over, lets start to get you set up with Easy UO and Razor. These two programs are extremely helpful and I would not recommend playing without them, or at least one. You can if you want, but lets play smarter, not harder. These will make life simple, while increasing the fun factor by 2837% (percentage may not be exact). OK here we go.
Easy UO – This program is a simple macroing program. You can find out how to download it http://www.easyuo.com/. There are multiple scripts on the forums http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=39. I also visited the easy uo site to download more scripts. There are different scripts for different skills or objectives, browse around and find some that you like. The one that I recommend, and used to GM about 7 or 8 of my skills is The Ultimate Multi-Skill Trainer by Guadah. All you have to do is find the file, save it, and then open it in Easy UO. Once its open hit play. A new Gump will pop up, read it. Select the skill you want to train, and it will explain everything you need, and the set up required to proceed. Once you have it all set up, just hit start, and go outside and play with your dog or do whatever you want. The script will run and adjust itself depending on your skill level. This is how all scripts in Easy UO are set up. Open, and then play. You can run multiple scripts at once. Another great script is [healing script name]. This one will auto heal you so no more pressing a macro, just press play and every time your life gets below a predetermined, you will apply bandages. This program is that awesome.
Razor- For those of you who played on the pay to play servers, you might remember UO Assist. Razor is UO Assist, but better. This program takes a little effort to make sure its running properly, but once its set up, you will be thankful. The options and features are pretty self explanatory. The only thing that may be a little confusing is the macro system. You can play around with it and set up a few practice macros, and it will become clear. Just create a new macro, then record. You can activate skills, target things, move or type stuff. Once you are done just hit stop. If you loop the macro it will run until you tell it to stop. If you just set it to run once, well its going to just run once. This can be downloaded http://www.uoex.net/wiki/Razor . Make sure to read the instructions on installing and getting it set up correctly.
Once these programs are installed, start training your skills like crazy! If you put off training, you are going to have a hard time hunting and making money. You want to hunt harder monsters, for better loot. It is perfectly acceptable to go out and hunt to train some skills, but be careful. With low skills and stats you are likely to meet Mr. Mayhem (die) if you try to attack things way out of your league. Trust me, we all get it, training isn’t the highlight of our day, but it’s required.
Hopefully these few things help you out. I came into the server not knowing any of this, but very quickly found out that people are willing to help you, as long as you are polite, courteous, and most importantly DO NOT BEG for stuff. People will go out of their way to help someone who is looking for help, as long as they are not just looking for handouts. Just remember, don’t get frustrated if someone tells you to look at the wiki page for an answer. Most of the time if they refer you there, it’s because your answer is spelled out in black and white right on that page. If you made it through all of this, you will do fine here. Just read up and pay attention to world chat as much as you can. Questions get answered all the time in there, and even if it doesn’t pertain to you at that exact moment, you might have that same question later, so pay attention and try taking note of the answer. Might just be the question you would have asked a little down the road.
Also, look for Succubuss (me) in game or in world chat if you have questions, I will try to help as much as I can. But don’t be mad if I refer you to the wiki page
