I just wanted to post up and say hi! I just downloaded Evolution and am very excited to get playing! I'm specifically excited about needing only one character and being able to design my own house.

Any advice or insider tips on what I should focus on first? I'm a UO vet but I've never played on a server with so much custom content.

-GreenMan

My first suggestion would be to use a public moongate and goto New Players -> Training Elementals.
Use the training weapons and train up your combat skills (Rather quick), you can do this naked without any issues. Then hit up the new player dungeon as you can pick up a 100% LRC suit from the dungeon so you can start working on Magery/Necro/Chiv

That sounds like a solid plan, thanks!

If you are not using UOSteam you should give it a try.
Do not use the skillball. It is advisable to use it when you gotten most skills to 100 and use the ball on those skills that you do not want to spend time training. Also join our Discord chat for communication, most people wont notice journal chat because they are doing hunting or champs.
You can also download the app https://discord.gg/QFRJuvX

I started about 1.5 months ago and have really enjoyed being part of the New player guild. It will be a sad day (any day now) when I lose my new player status and must leave the guild. I highly recommend joining. People see the New guild tag and often offer help without prompting. Of course, you get lots of help when you ask as well. It's a great community on this shard. I just only recently started expanding from taming to warrior. I would recommend starting as a warrior with an astro demon suit and 3x leech axe first. This would have made my life easier. Insure important items! Make sure to put a nest egg of gold on your ledger (simply placing gold into your bank box will not work for this) as your item insurance deducts from your ledger when you die. If you don't have gold on your ledger, your items will stay on your corpse after death and will not appear on your character upon resurrection. I also recommend searching the forums here as there are several great new player guides. Happy hunting!

Thanks for the advice, guys!
I currently use Razor but may try UOsteam. So the skill ball can take a skill from 100 to 120 with the appropriate power scroll?
Also, what's up with the loot bag?

I find that uosteam is much more user friendly than razor but not the reason you probably think. Razor is much easier for a newbie to make their own custom scripts. However, uosteam has a vast library of scripts posted by others across the internet. Uosteam also seems closer to traditional coding platforms which might explain why there are so many scripts out there. Basically, Razor is a good newbie macro manager with very limited capability while uosteam has a bit more of a learning curve but possess way more capability. As i mentioned, uosteam has hundreds of published scripts which can be readily copy-pasted into the program directly. The process for utilizing published razor scripts (about 1/10 the number of uo steam scripts) is a hassle.

You need a skill scroll to increase a skills cap past 100. I would only use the skill ball too raise certain stats though. Use skill ball for taming from 30ish (bought 30ish from npc at stable) to 120. Some also recommend this for some other tough to raise skills. However, most skills can be raised without too much hassle past 100 provided that you have a nice uosteam macro setup. I think I trained like 4 skills from 30ish to 115 afk (away from the computer) one night while I was sleeping. It depends on the skill of course. For combat skills just go to the training dummy spot listed as a destination on any public moongate that you enter. You can attack the dummies but make sure to use the red practice weapons located there so you don't damage your weapons. Also take off your armor so that doesn't get damaged either. The dummies can't hurt you so you can whack at them all night with no worries. Great for combat skill gains.

I've been here about 1.5 months and just set my loot bag up this week. To be honest, the loot bag is really for higher end stuff. Once you get a 100% lower reagent cost suit you will have no need for reagent collecting until you get bored with whacking monsters and delve into crafting. I haven't gotten to that point yet. At our level, the gold scavenger on your ledger tool in your backpack is your primary money maker. The loot bag can be set to pickup specific items that you set it for. Just do a search on Google and you'll get a good description of the process. To be honest, until you work high end monsters and champ spawns the stuff you'll come across besides the gold will be garbage. You couldn't give it away. However, your loot bag is worth setting up anyway so it's good to go when you're ready. It takes about half an hour to do.