Arranging Characters Across Accounts

Players are allowed to create one Outlands ID per household, where your Outlands ID is the email address that you use to log in when the game launches.  Your Outlands ID is allowed to create three accounts of five characters each, and this guide describes some ways that you might want to think strategically about dividing your characters across those accounts.
Important Considerations
There are three main things to consider when allocating characters to accounts:

First, one of the game’s big, long-term progression systems, the mastery chain, shares experience across all characters on the same account.  For this reason, we strongly recommend that all of your characters that benefit from mastery chain bonuses be made on the same account.  This primarily includes characters who engage in PvM content, dungeon lockpicking, or treasure map chests, but it can also apply to crafting, gathering, and dungeon PvP to a lesser extent.  To be clear, “account” in this context means one of the three accounts tied to your Outlands ID.  Mastery chain experience is not shared between accounts on the same Outlands ID.  Most players refer to the account that has their PvM characters on it as their “main account”, since it’s the one they’re most commonly playing on to earn mastery chain progress.

The second major consideration is society jobs.  Outlands allows each account to take ten society jobs per week (by default, the number can be expanded to 15 per account).  By strategically spreading characters across accounts, you can maximize the number of society jobs you’ll be able to complete each week, which yields valuable long-term rewards in the form of mastery chain links, fancy clothing, or mount tokens.  Most players keep at least one crafting character on each account for society job purposes.  Tailoring is generally the lowest-cost crafting skill to get started on society jobs, so we recommend starting a tailor on each of your three accounts once you get established.

Finally, the third consideration is account customizations, which includes enhancements, unlocked emotes, and unlocked spell hues.  Like mastery chain experience, account customizations are account-wide, but not Outlands ID-wide.  Some enhancements, like the strongboxes or Jack/Jill of all trades, greatly improve the quality of life for PvM characters, so you’ll likely want them on your “main” account.
Example Allocation
There’s not a singular “best” way to allocate characters to accounts that’s going to work for every player.  It’ll depend somewhat on your goals and play style.  That said, here’s a starting point to consider, with room for you to personalize it to your liking.  Note that there is no need to create all of these characters at once – you can easily get started with just one character and create others as you go along.  This is just meant to help guide your thinking as you create the other later.
Account 1 – “Main” account

PVM Character 1
PVM Character 2
Main crafter
[Main harvester / Dungeon PvPer / PvM Character 3]
…

Account 2

Society job crafter
Organized event PvPer (factions, town struggles, etc.)
[Whatever you want]
…



Account 3

Society job crafter
[Whatever you want]
…





Other Considerations
New players sometimes worry about how to fit characters into their main account because they’re interested in trying many different builds and play styles.  Fortunately, you don’t need to worry – Outlands has a mechanism called echoes that allows a character to swap between different sets of stored skills.  By unlocking echoes, a singular character can switch between many different identities, and because aspect progression is on a per-character (not account!) basis, you may want to focus most of your time on a small set of characters.  In fact, it’s common for veteran players to do nearly all of their PvM content on just one character who switches echoes to accommodate variations in play styles.

We hope that this guide helps you arrange characters across your accounts.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the #newplayer channel in the UO Outlands discord!