Your transfer crate includes several containers that you can review before you do the transfer:
- Your bank box.
- Your character's backpack.
- Your equipped items.
- Your stabled pets.
- Your controlled pets.
Your pets show up in their respective containers (i.e., stabled pets or controlled pets) as figurines. I believe each figurine also shows the pet's name and for the controlled pets I think you also see the pet's weight if it is a pack animal. However, I don't recall that you can actually look inside the backpacks of the controlled pets. So check the weight of the controlled pets before you start the transfer and then double check their weights when you get to the step of checking what's in your transfer crate.
Also, when you are checking your bank box, equipped items, and your character's backpack at that step, I don't think you can move stuff around, it's kind of unmoveable; however, I believe you can open up containers within the bankbox and backpack and visually scan at least the top layer to see if everything looks okay.
Blue characters arrive randomly at the inns in Trammel that used to be used for starting characters. Red characters arrive in the back room of the healer in Buc's Den in Fel.
Your character arrives hidden and naked and you have a week to remove all items from the transfer crate. For example, when you arrive, you will probably want to just take your armor out of the equipped items container in the transfer crate, and some rune books and your chivalry or spell book from the backpack container. Take a mount out of the stable and retrieve an ethy out of your transfer crate. Then recall/SJ to your destination and unpack the rest of your backpack at your leisure and pull each pack animal out of the transfer crate one at a time and unload it at your leisure.
Your stabled pets automatically go in the stable and your bankbox is also automatically loaded on the new shard.
Insured items should still be insured, but it is a wise idea to double check them.
You will want to double check your insurance renewal and other optional settings for your transferred character when you arrive. I usually have a guildmate kill my character after I arrive and check the corpse to make sure nothing dropped.
If you are using the 2D client, you can copy your UO macros and possibly also your desktop settings (have never tried those) and your UO Assist macros over to your character's folder(s) on the new shard. If you are using the KR client, I believe there may also be a way to copy over your toolbars and macros, but I'm not sure. It would probably be the same kind of process you use to copy those settings from one character to another. You can't do the copying, of course, until you've logged on at least once with the transferred character on the new shard. Once you've done that, the folders that you need to copy stuff into will exist under the UO and UO Assist program folders.
I haven't done a character transfer in a couple of months, so this may have changed, however I believe the transfer is usually complete in about 20 minutes, although the menu/notice you get tells you it can take longer than that.
