Greetings adventurers! Avalon Alduin, Chancellor of the Academy of Arcane Arts here, bringing you a comprehensive guide to customizing your Ultima Online user interface (UI) on Outlands. Enhance your gaming experience by decluttering your screen and organizing your adventure for optimal gameplay.
This guide provides a detailed walkthrough of essential UI customization options, drawing from discoveries to help you personalize your gameplay. For those who prefer visual learning, Pwnstarr Gaming has created an excellent video companion to this guide, showcasing many of these features in action: UO Classic Settings for the Perfect UI
Share Your UI!
If you’ve crafted a UI setup you’re proud of, please share a screenshot below! Inspire fellow adventurers with your personalized interface.
Below, you’ll see a visual comparison. On the right, a cluttered interface with numerous options enabled – tree stumps, circle of transparency, auras, nameplates, and health bars. On the left, a cleaner setup, which is my preferred style for general play. I toggle specific elements on or off as needed, such as disabling trees to see behind structures. Let’s explore the myriad customization features available, accessible through the Options menu on your paperdoll (default shortcut: Alt-P).
This guide covers the following topics, use CTRL-F to jump to a specific section:
- The Menu Bar
- Paperdoll
- World Map
- Journal
- Your Backpack
- Resizing Your Game Window
- Anchored Gumps
- Grid Counters
- Infobar
- Status Bar & Healthbars
- Buffbar
- Gridloot
- Codex, Chivalry, Necromancy Hotbars (and persistence settings)
- Custom Macro Buttons
- Miscellaneous General Options (Auras, Nameplates, Trees to Stumps, Tile-based Fields, and more!)
Let’s begin our UI customization journey!
The Menu Bar
The Menu Bar is a familiar element, providing quick access to essential functions. While useful for initial setup, I personally prefer to disable it for a cleaner interface. You can collapse it using the green arrow, accessing it only when necessary. It offers shortcuts to the Paperdoll, Inventory, Journal, and World Map. Disable it within the options menu for a streamlined look.
Paperdoll
The Paperdoll allows you to visualize your character and manage equipment. Discover the enhanced gear list by clicking the arrow at the bottom of the paperdoll for a detailed view of your character’s equipment. Important shortcuts: the QUESTS button opens the Societies list, and the Virtues symbol at the top accesses your Aspect menu.
World Map
Keep the World Map accessible for navigation. It displays GPS-style coordinates in the top left, showing your precise location. Right-clicking the map reveals options including party functions and party member health bars, aiding group coordination. Utilize Map Markers to locate points of interest in towns and the wilderness – Healer Caravans are particularly useful.
Journal
The Journal is an invaluable tool to keep open. Customize the tabs at the top of your main window to display desired information. Detach tabs by right-clicking to create separate windows for simultaneous viewing. Right-click within the main journal area (below headers) to access journal options. Configure font size, brightness, colors, styles, and enable journal logging to file upon exiting the game.
Your Backpack
Your Backpack, or inventory, is essential for every adventurer. Double-click to open and view its contents. Notice the colored backpack in the image below?
Enable “Match Container Gump to Hue” in interface options to color your backpack – mine is monster hunter red, while the inner backpack remains un-hued. Explore other useful options like different reagent and gem sizes, new sails (for ship owners), and the Container Scale & Scale Items inside containers for better organization.
Resize Your Game Window
Resize your game window by ensuring it’s unlocked, then drag the blue diamond at the bottom right corner. Adjust it to your preferred size and screen placement. A minimum of 1000×800 resolution is recommended, rendering 18 tiles of viewable distance, which aligns with server-side visibility.
Anchored Gumps
Anchored gumps are interface elements like spell icons and macro buttons that can be locked together into movable clusters. These clusters can be repositioned by holding ALT.
Ensure your safety key (ALT) for moving anchored gumps is enabled in settings. Drag spell icons from your spellbook and touch them together to create anchored clusters.
Holding ALT displays a lock icon on anchored gumps. Click the lock to detach a button, or right-click while holding ALT to remove the entire cluster. Under combat spells options, enabling “ctrl-alt click macro create” allows you to CTRL+ALT+click the ‘+’ on a spell to quickly create a CUO macro and assign a hotkey for instant casting!
Grid Counters
Grid Counters track item quantities. Drag an item into a counter to monitor its count. Enable abbreviated amounts (e.g., 2K+) or set highlights for specific quantity thresholds. Scale the counter size for perfect UI integration.
Grid counters are located here:
Infobar
The Infobar displays your character name and notoriety (e.g., gray thief, red criminal). Customize it to highlight information like weight, with color-coded visuals as you approach maximum capacity. A secondary infobar is now available, allowing display of multiple data points. I use it to monitor mana levels directly beneath my character for spellcasting awareness.
While the Large Status Bar handles most information display, the Infobar offers dozens of customizable options to explore.
Status Bar & Healthbars
Access your Status Bar via a button on your paperdoll. Double-click the small status bar to expand it to the Large Status Bar, and minimize the large bar back to small using the ‘-‘ button in the bottom right corner.
Player health bars can be detached by clicking and dragging away from a character. Utilize drag-selection (click and drag a box) to capture multiple health bars simultaneously, especially useful for managing multiple targets. Custom health bars (left side in the image below) highlight your last selected target in red, like Kael’m Randi in the example.
Healthbar options are found here: Drag Select option are found here: For drag-selecting numerous mobs, enabling “Anchored Healthbars” is recommended.
The Buff Bar
The Buff Bar displays status effects, both beneficial (bless, barding buffs) and detrimental (curse, paralyze). Enable it by clicking the blue diamond beside “Buffs” on the Large Status bar, and customize its appearance via the blue diamond on the Buff Bar itself.
Enable buff timers/durations under combat-spells options.
Grid Loot
Grid Loot, while not a constant UI element, is invaluable for loot management. It displays all mob loot in a grid, allowing single-click looting directly to your backpack. Outlands-themed Grid Loot is on the left in the image, with basic Grid Loot on the right.
Grid Loot options are found here:
Codex, Chivalry, Necromancy Hotbars
Access these hotbars via your respective codex/books, or by using commands: [chivalryhotbar, [necromancyhotbar, and [codexhotbar. The Codex Hotbar is a single bar for stance selection across different codices. Necromancy & Chivalry hotbars are highly configurable (portrait or landscape) via their blue diamonds.
Persistence Tip! Hold CTRL-ALT-SHIFT while opening the options menu to reveal a red pin on these hotbars. Click the rune (Necromancy/Chivalry) or scroll (Weapon & Shield codices) to name and save their position using “get current position”. Enable “remember across client restarts” to permanently save their layout, eliminating the need to resummon them each session.
New commands -savechivbar, -savenecrobar, -savecodexbar offer quick saving of these bars, streamlining the persistence setup.
Custom Macro Buttons!
CUO allows creating custom macro buttons for less frequently used actions. Examples include graphics 11546, 11548, 11549, and 103.
Navigate to the Macros menu in options, create a new macro, and click “Advanced Button Editor”. Enter your desired graphic number, scale it, preview, and create. Anchor it into your UI cluster. Skuli-approved graphics are shown below. UO Fiddler can help discover more graphic options.
Miscellaneous General Options
Let’s revisit some general options, including a useful tip: any Classic UO menu option can become a macro button, like the Healthbar Line example below!
Under Mobiles: Healthbar Line
Auras
Under Miscellaneous: Circle of Transparency
Show Target Range Indicator: Displays distance to target (currently 3 tiles).
Under Terrain & Statics: Hide Roof Tiles, Trees to Stumps & Hide Vegetation
Field Styles: Choose Static, Tiles, or Regular Animated fields.
Under Video: Aura on mouse target: Shows spell aura (hostile/beneficial) on mouseover target.
Under Macros: Nameplates: Toggle nameplates, or use CTRL-SHIFT to toggle them anytime.
This concludes our UI customization lesson. This guide serves as a reference to revisit whenever you need to tweak your interface. If you found this helpful, please give it a like! For future guide suggestions, message me on the forums or Discord. Your ideas might shape the next Academy lesson!
Yours Truly,
Avalon Alduin
Chancellor of the Arcane Academy
Pathfinder
