UO Expansions

Ultima Online has been expanded for more than two decades. Each expansion is a named release that bolts new content onto the existing game — fresh lands and facets (parallel maps), new playable races, new skills and spell schools, and new systems (combat math, crafting, housing, sailing). An era is the period a given expansion defines: when people say something is “AOS-era” they mean it arrived with, or was reshaped by, Age of Shadows.

This matters for documentation because UO is cumulative. A server doesn’t pick features à la carte; it declares a single expansion level and inherits everything up to and including it. This shard runs Endless Journey (EJ) — the most recent level in the ServUO emulator — so every expansion below is present here. The Lost Lands, all the facets, every race and skill school, custom housing, sailing, Eodon — it’s all live. (See Config/Expansion.cfg: CurrentExpansion=EJ.)

The list and ordering of expansions comes straight from the server’s expansion enum (Server/ExpansionInfo.cs): None → T2A → UOR → UOTD → LBR → AOS → SE → ML → SA → HS → TOL → EJ. The headline additions for each are below.

Timeline

Expansion	Year	Headline additions
Launch	1997	The original Britannia (Felucca map)
The Second Age (T2A)	1998	The Lost Lands; first big land expansion
Renaissance (UOR)	2000	Trammel/Felucca facet split; consensual vs open PvP
Third Dawn (UOTD)	2001	Ilshenar facet; first 3D client
Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge (LBR)	2002	New art and creatures across the world
Age of Shadows (AOS)	2003	Malas; resistances; item properties + insurance; Necromancy, Chivalry; custom housing
Samurai Empire (SE)	2004	Tokuno Islands; Bushido, Ninjitsu; samurai and ninja
Mondain’s Legacy (ML)	2005	Elves; Spellweaving; the Heartwood; peerless bosses
Stygian Abyss (SA)	2009	Gargoyles; Ter Mur; Mysticism, Imbuing, Throwing; the Abyss
High Seas (HS)	2010	Ships and sea combat; fishing overhaul
Time of Legends (TOL)	2015	Valley of Eodon; Myrmidex; skill masteries
Endless Journey (EJ)	2018	Free-access tier — the ruleset this shard runs

Launch (1997)

Ultima Online shipped with a single land: Britannia, the map later known as Felucca. There were no facets, no second map, and the world was a single open ruleset — anyone could attack anyone, anywhere. Everything that follows is built on top of this original world.

The Second Age (T2A, 1998)

The first major land expansion. T2A added the Lost Lands — a sprawling outdoor region reached through cave passages and dungeons, with new towns, terrain, and creatures roughly doubling the explorable surface. It also brought tougher monsters and the iconic dungeons of that frontier.

On this shard the Lost Lands are fully present. Two of its frontier towns are documented in our world section: Delucia and Papua.

• World atlas · Delucia · Papua

Renaissance (UOR, 2000)

Renaissance reshaped the social game more than the geography. It split the world into two parallel facets: Trammel, where players cannot harm one another without consent, and Felucca, which kept the original open-PvP, full-loot ruleset. The same cities exist on both, but the rules of engagement differ. This “Tram/Fel” divide is the single most consequential change to how PvP and notoriety work, and it persists in the game to this day.

• Notoriety and PvP

Third Dawn (UOTD, 2001)

Third Dawn introduced the Ilshenar facet — a large, lore-rich landmass with no player housing and no moongate ties to the other maps, themed around the gargoyles and the Ophidians. Its other headline was technical: UO’s first 3D client, an alternative renderer alongside the classic 2D client.

Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge (LBR, 2002)

LBR was lighter on geography and heavier on presentation. It overhauled a great deal of the game’s art and creatures — many monster sprites were redrawn — and wove in a storyline around the corrupted Lord Blackthorn. It also tightened the client’s support for the newer 3D assets introduced the year before.

Age of Shadows (AOS, 2003)

The big one. Age of Shadows rewrote the rules of equipment and combat more than any expansion before or since. Its additions:

• Malas — a new facet, home to the city of Luna, Umbra, and the Doom dungeon.

• The resistance system: armor no longer used a single Armor Rating but five separate resistances — Physical, Fire, Cold, Poison, Energy — each capped at 70. Damage types matter; you build a suit to balance the five.

• Item properties and intensity: magical gear gained dozens of stackable properties (Faster Casting, Hit Chance Increase, Damage Increase, Lower Reagent Cost, and so on), turning loot and crafting into a min-max game.

• Item insurance, so a death no longer meant losing your equipped suit.

• Custom housing — the in-game house designer, letting players draw their own floor plans instead of choosing from fixed deeds.

• Two new spell schools and the templates built on them: Necromancy (the necromancer) and Chivalry (the paladin).

• Necromancer · Paladin

• Armor and resistances · House types

Samurai Empire (SE, 2004)

An Asian-themed expansion centered on the Tokuno Islands, a three-island facet with its own towns, dungeons, and decorative style. It added two skills and the classes built around them: Bushido (the samurai, a melee/parry warrior with stance abilities) and Ninjitsu (the ninja, with stealth, animal forms, and mirror images).

• Samurai · Ninja

Mondain’s Legacy (ML, 2005)

Mondain’s Legacy added the first new playable race since launch — the elves — with their own starting stats and racial traits. Its other pillars:

• Spellweaving, an arcane school whose power scales when cast in a group, plus the Arcanist template built on it.

• The Heartwood, an elven settlement hidden in the forest, with its own quest-driven crafting rewards.

• Peerless bosses — instanced, key-gated encounters (Travesty, Dreadhorn, Lady Melisande, and others) that became the template for endgame fights.

• Early groundwork toward the resource-and-property crafting that Imbuing would later formalize.

• Spellweaver · Spellweaving skill

Stygian Abyss (SA, 2009)

Stygian Abyss added the second new race — the gargoyles, who can fly — and the Ter Mur facet, the gargoyle homeland, reached through the great Stygian Abyss dungeon itself. It brought three skills at once:

• Mysticism, a hybrid arcane/divine school (the mystic).

• Imbuing, the crafting skill that lets you build magic properties onto items to a controlled intensity — the formalization of ML’s groundwork.

• Throwing, the gargoyle-only ranged combat skill.

• Mystic · Mysticism

• Imbuing · Throwing

High Seas (HS, 2010)

High Seas made the oceans matter. It added a full sailing and naval combat system — multi-tile ships with cannons, ship-to-ship battles, and seaborne enemies like the merfolk and the Corgul boss — and overhauled fishing into a deeper profession with new catches, big fish, and message-in-a-bottle treasure.

• Fisher · Treasure hunting (message-in-a-bottle / SOS)

Time of Legends (TOL, 2015)

Time of Legends opened the Valley of Eodon, a prehistoric jungle land with dinosaurs, the insectoid Myrmidex, and the Zhah and Sakkhra tribes. Its system addition was skill masteries — per-skill mastery abilities that give established characters a new layer of specialization and active powers.

Endless Journey (EJ, 2018)

Endless Journey is less a content drop than an access tier: a free-to-play ruleset that lets accounts log in and play a broad slice of the game without an active subscription, with some restrictions on storage and the newest content. In the ServUO emulator EJ is the highest expansion level, which means it inherits the full content stack of every expansion above.

This is the ruleset our shard runs. When you read elsewhere on this wiki that a skill, spell, or item exists here, it’s because EJ carries the whole history below it forward.

• Our shard

What this means for our shard

Because the shard runs EJ, none of this history is hypothetical — it’s all the ground you’re standing on. Every facet (Felucca, Trammel, Ilshenar, Malas, Tokuno, Ter Mur, Eodon), both extra races (elf, gargoyle), every spell school (Necromancy, Chivalry, Bushido, Ninjitsu, Spellweaving, Mysticism), and every system (resistances, item properties, insurance, custom housing, sailing, imbuing, masteries) is available to characters here.

That’s also why pages across this wiki tag content by era. The item and crafting catalogs mark when each material, item, and recipe was introduced — those tags come straight from the history on this page, so you can tell at a glance whether something is a launch-era staple or arrived with a later expansion. See the item catalogs for the per-item era tags, and the shard pages for the caps, rates, and house rules that sit on top of this EJ baseline.