When I came back to UO 2 months ago, I started on Atlantic. The overcrowding, lack of housing, and finally, the rude and greedy guilds ruined it for me to the point I didn't want to play anymore cause they were ruining my experience.
In a last ditch effort, I gathered all my stuff in my tiny 7x12 house, dropped $20 on the shop and got a transfer token and transferred to Origin.
Origin is probably the extreme opposite of Atlantic, being super low population. But I tend to be a loner so it works for me. The only problem with Origin is the vendor search absolutely sucks, the local market is really bad.
Origin is probably if you want to be super self sufficient, but the trade off is it has nearly endless housing space.
If you want a bit bigger population, others have suggested Baja, Catskills, Lake Superior and Chesapeake. So these are probably all good options.
I would suggest starting a throw away character on each shard, buy a horse with your started guild and run around and explore each shard a bit, check out the vender search etc.
I don't play it personally but I hear Catskills is pretty good maybe even Origin.
Lake Superior, Lake Austin, Napa, Chessy, Sonoma are some of the worst so I would avoid those.
Why would you say those shards are bad? I am legit curious. Would be nice to build a pros and cons list to encourage newer and returning players to spread out and not all congregate on Atlantic.
Some say that Catskills might be a good alternative option to Atlantic... while having less players there is still a decent amount of a players' population and it might still be possible to place a House although, a smaller size one, I would doubt if one wanted to place a Keep or Castle that such room could be found...
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Why would you say those shards are bad? I am legit curious. Would be nice to build a pros and cons list to encourage newer and returning players to spread out and not all congregate on Atlantic.