This is a reminder to all that placement of objects outside the boundaries of your house foundation is not intended. Objects placed in this fashion are subject to removal, with a priority given to those that block access to land masses in any way.

Thank you for your understanding.

The stuck command menu has had another pass of improvements, adding an additional option, that can be used more frequently, and will try to move you out of stuck positions without teleporting far away, and also added an option to unstick nearby pets.

• Optimized using weapon from hotbar to try to solve cases of being unable to equip a weapon while having a spell pre-cast saying "you are too busy"
• Fixed issue with lockpicking not updating decay of chests
• Fixed issue with toxicity statbar not hiding again after reaching 0
• Fixed issue with time differences between some regions causing differing levels of daylight
• Daylight extended to make nighttime happen slightly less often
• Fixed issue with pets not traveling with between some dungeon levels

• Fixed issue with "Set All" option on Town Vendors not setting the appropriate amount in some cases
• Player vendor "select location" option optimized, vendors should now teleport to the destination rather than try to walk to it
• Added new Stuck Teleport option with menu to pick a town; this option can be used once every 30 minutes, have to page for help if you get stuck more frequently than that so we can identify and fix stuck issues
• Shrines/NPC Healers in dungeons now require a minute between each resurrection
• Added missing updates to many criminal actions to check for the new confirmation settings and "prevent" criminal actions if desired
• Fixed issue with bonded pets being renamed to " corpse" in some cases
• Pet abandonment now uses in-game time instead of real-world time to determine when they become abandoned to help aid with pet losses due to server restarts or downtime
• Fixed issues with abandoned pets wandering mid-combat preventing them from fighting back
• Mobs will now automatically eject themselves from houses after a period of time
• Cleared "Transfer Bag" properties on existing bags so you can move the bag outside of your bank now
• QOL: prevented disarming when using the hotbar icon for a weapon that is already equipped, to prevent accidental disarming from tapping the wrong button (if players find that they still need a disarm ability we can accommodate)
• Optimized hiding check for nearby mobs LOS, will now ignore group/guild/faction members when trying to hide near them
• Corrected hiding failure speech from "you can't seem to hide right now" to "you fail to hide" while the former message will still appear if you are unable to hide due to combat or in LOS of other mobs
• Removed "Use R-Hand" button from appearing in the Q slot with weapons as it's no longer needed

We're back online. Thanks again for your patience.

Apologies for the delay, we are running a little overtime with the maintenance work. We will aim to be back online by 11am UTC (ideally before that!).

Hail citizens. We have some important news to share with you!

As you may be aware, this project started out as an experiment. It was unimaginable that it would grow into what it is today. To see where we've come today, let's take a quick look back at the history of the game and our project for a moment.

Starting out the game Legends of Aria was known as Shards Online, as some of you remember. Later it was re-branded to Legends of Aria, and more recently the platform is known as the Shards Engine, which makes this project possible.

After the game was re-branded to Legends of Aria, our project was just getting our test-server online and it was decided to use the name Legends of Ultima for the time being while we experiment with things and find our place as a project. This name wasn't originally intended to be used permanently, and admittedly it stayed around for longer than expected.

Today, the project has grown to a point where it is prudent to find its own identity, and as such we are excited to announce, the project will now be known as Shards of Britannia

This represents a new path forward as we progress into the future as a project on the Shards Engine with our new home in Britannia. What's next? We will be steadily working to replace branding across all platforms over time but will do our best to make the transition as seamless as possible. We hope that you are as excited as we are about the future and appreciate your support through these changing times.

Tonight's maintenance window @ 9am UTC (approx 1h 10 mins from the time of this notice) will be extended by up to an hour while we work on the 'lag' issues that are currently being seen.

Thank you as always for your patience.

Group Combat, Shared Loot

• group healthbars with heal/cure/bandage buttons
• group consent added to toggle allowing combat/looting between group mates & you will be asked if you want to consent when first joining a group
• group auto-loot sharing added, will distribute loot between nearby groupmates when using auto-loot on non-player-corpses
• group invite setting added to toggle allowing all group members inviting to the group without needing to be promoted

Criminal Action Confirmation

• now has 3 options: Allow Criminal Actions, Ask Me First, Prevent Criminal Actions
• change this setting in Character Settings under the Combat tab

Combat Target Restriction

• wiki page added: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/combat#target-restrictions-new-feature
• allows players to restrict selecting mobs to a certain type like: All, Monsters, Players, and more
• added to character settings & can also click the top-right corner button next to minimap to quickly change this option, previously this button changed the Confirm Criminal Action toggle
• this option is meant to reduce misclicks when trying to select certain types of mobs in close encounters with lots of mobs
• example: if you set this to Monsters, then you will only be able to select Monsters when clicking mobs to target them for combat
• should not affect spell-targets or other item-based manual targeting, and will still be able to target mobs normally with those actions

General Combat-Related Changes

• using bandage self, bandage last or bandage button from group healthbar will no longer change current-target on use
• potion toxicity on self-healthbar will now only appear when toxicity is above 0
• when logging out in a house you have permission to or in a public inn, you will no longer be required to wait 2 minutes before timing out due to recent combat with non-player beings, previously attacking monsters or other beings would affect this
• added Enter Combat w/Spellcast option so that mages without melee skills don't have to toggle warmode after casting
• you can now see your guildmates/groupmates when they are dead, regardless of if they are in war mode or not

New Custom Client Actions

• Custom Client Action 3 is now Nearest Target option
• Custom Client Action 4 is now Cycle Target option
• both of these options work in conjunction with the new target restriction option
• these actions can be set to hotkeys under Settings -> Keyboard

Hotfix from today:

• resolved town vendors stealing people's money when trying to buy Used items from them
• town vendors should finally clear out their Used inventory regularly

Hotfixes/changes from last week:

• resolved not being able to give murder count to characters when dying from Poison spell in some cases
• poison will now fall off if the caster is a player and dies around the victim
• fixed issue with house sign not setting owner after transferring house sometimes showing previous owner or no owner at all

We're going to need to do an additional restart in about 20 minutes so that we can try to help some players who are unable to login. No downtime expected. Thank you for your patience as we try to get everyone in game again!

We will remain offline during our next maintenance window (9am UTC Friday 3rd September) while we complete migration to one of our host's alternative data centers. During this time, all of our services will be unavailable.

This is due to our current datacentre experiencing some ongoing issues which are intermittently affecting our services. Rather than wait for them to be resolved by our host, we will instead work around the issues by moving to a different physical location/datacentre within their network.

Rather than provide an estimate, we'll update you on the progress of the change via Discord during the migration window. Thanks, as always, for your patience.

Over the last week or two, we've had a few of our players report rubber banding issues when connected to the game. Based on our investigations to date, this seems to be some sort of transient issue that is likely a poorly performing peer/segment somewhere on the internet.

Unfortunately it has yet to affect any staff, so it is difficult to troubleshoot further. However, here are some suggestions we have for those that are affected:

• Try using a VPN. Other users have reported good results using the free Avast VPN trial. We do not endorse any particular product in this regard.
• Try tethering to your phone ("hotspotting")
• Ensure you are not using any third party tools that interact with the client

A VPN or mobile hotspot will generally result in your connection using a different 'route' to the server. Think of it as taking an empty back road instead of a busy highway to get to your destination.

Unfortunately there isn't much else we can suggest at this time, and it seems the issue is largely out of our control. We'll continue to monitor it however, and offer any further insight as it comes.

As you may be aware, earlier this week we identified several users involved in abusing some economic vulnerabilities that were discovered. At that time we had to roll back the server to recover from the impact and to protect our newly established economy.

After that incident occurred the players involved began to launch an attack on the LOU infrastructure (DDoS) causing our servers to become inaccessible. The players involved have since been banned and ejected from the community, but the attacks continue to occur occasionally.

At this time we are doing everything we can to prevent outages, but there may be times when the server will have to be brought down unexpectedly in order to recover.

We will be monitoring things closely to try and prevent downtime and loss of progress, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and support through our growing pains.

• Added New Character Settings for Toggling Auto-Open of Killing Blow/Mutilate/Harvest under Combat Options.

• Fixed an issue causing non young players being warned about losing their young status.
• Rare loot table adjustments.
• Barding pets will no longer offer skill gains however the effects will still work.
• Ratmen and Lizardmen may now be skinned for hides.

• Updated crafting window Repair button to show how to make a repair deed
• CAPTCHA improvements
• Fixed issue with some characters being unable to log in if they were previously unable to complete the transition from Celador
• Fixed issue with trees being "too far away" in North Minoc area
• Logging out in a dungeon will result in being teleported to Limbo when logging back in, if logging in 20+ minutes after logging out
• Marking runes is now possible inside Dungeons on Levels 1 except for Despise being able to mark on Levels 2 & 3
• The following actions are prevented around the nearby areas surrounding dungeon entrances, both interior and exterior:
  • gaining skills
  • marking runes
  • casting field spells
  • dropping objects

Due to ongoing connectivity issues, the server will remain offline until further notice. There is no ETA at this time.

Just a reminder from the article posted last week: https://legendsofultima.online/news/server-is-up-again-1

Any characters, items, and houses that were left behind in Celador are no longer accessible.

If you have any characters stuck in Limbo/Inbetween from the transition and have trouble progressing through the black portal, please send a help request and make sure your contact info (use /contactinfo command) is up to date so we can contact you if no one is available to help immediately.

Critizens of Britannia, be warned! An increased Orc presence has been observed in our lands. These savage creatures know no limit to their ferocity and evil. But fear ye not! Your Brave and Courageous leaders are maintaining the guard around the clock, keeping the Orc scourge out of our city walls and your children safe from their barbarism.

[The Orc Guild has now been fully enabled. Players wishing to join the Orc Guild must seek out and contact a member of the guild]