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

Reminder! Sign-up for the tournament closes this Saturday!

Event Details: https://legendsofultima.online/news/events/add/1v1-pvp-tournament-and-royal-rumble-event

Sign-Up Link: https://event-signup.uo4.life

Today on Memorial Day, we honor and remember all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. We are eternally grateful and forever indebted!

Sorry, everyone, we noticed that some of the fixes we applied during the nightly restart had a flaw and we had to shut down unexpectedly. The server was only up for a short time after, but we still had to roll back to the time of the nightly restart. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be back online as quickly as possible.

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!

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.

"Warriors! The Ritual Site locations and the Weaver Cave that were cleansed in recent days, have regained their former strength... We ask for your bravery once again. My great warriors, please hear me! Vanquish these vile creatures! Do not allow them to encroach on our lands!"

Ritual Site 1: https://imgur.com/XjZOegH

Ritual Site 2: https://imgur.com/S5nmsg4

Ritual Site 3: https://imgur.com/Ipmfexc

Weaver Cave: https://imgur.com/fcAbiWR

~Sir Jeffrey the Justiciar of Britain

As we grow in player count, we are tracking a performance issue that appears to be related to minimap icons (yes of all things.) We are disabling those and restarting to validate this.

We apologise for these teething issues, however we believe this will make a significant difference. We'll work on refactoring the minimap icon system and they will eventually return. In the meantime, use third party tools like http://lou-map.herokuapp.com/ to locate what you need. In particular, we'll have wandering healer locations up there shortly.

Gameplay Notes

• All bosses have had their AI updated.
• All bosses have had their loot adjusted.
• Higher level bosses have had their loot greatly increased.
• Loot tables have undergone another balance pass.
• Spawning in Despise has been adjusted.
• Updated static collision.
• There is now a chance, scaled by monster difficulty, that young players will lose young status when killing very difficult monsters.

Notable Bug Fixes

• Staggering shot mount speed should return to normal after the effect has expired.
• Bandaging a ghost will no longer yield skill gains if the healer is below the requirements for resurrection.
• Attempting to cure poison will no longer yield skill gains if the healer is below the requirements for curing.
• Adjusted durability warning threshold.
• Move Speed should now always be recalculated on resurrection.
• Fixed a bug that caused aggression when taming a creature without a distance check first.
• Fixed an issue causing a criminal flagging when performing actions on yourself.
• You can no longer report yourself as a murderer.
• Fixed an issue causing bosses to continually reset.
• Fixed an issue causing titles to reassign when gaining skill.

• There's a known issue with some objects not being able to be unpacked in houses such as, but not limited to: cauldron
• There's a known issue with some objects being able to be placed outside of the house foundation/walls, or in the yard

Warning: It is not intended to be able to place objects outside of the foundation/walls of your house. If you have objects placed out of bounds they may be subject to adjustments to make them in-bounds, or in some cases removed if they are blocking pathways. The small front yards are intended only for vendors or a guildstone.

Reminder: the Small Workshop and Large Patio houses are temporarily disabled for fixing, and we will try to make them available ASAP

We are back online. Please note, direct connections will no longer work. Connect by selecting our server on the community server screen. Thanks for your patience, as always.

• Added CAPTCHA to Mining, Lumberjacking, Fishing
• Private houses can now have 1 vendor
• Fixed issue with Max Vendor limit on houses being calculated incorrectly (if your house already has too many vendors, they may remain for now but you will be unable to add more)
• Fixed issue with clockwork golem (possibly other recipes) not crafting
• Fixed issue with the unfinished keg being treated as a container and causing items dropped to them to disappear
• Fixed issue with attacking a pet when the owner is hidden nearby causing the pet to flag crim and the owner to get guard whacked
• Fixed "drink" option existing on prized fish (does not affect old fish)
• Fishing outside of town now has a chance to spawn a snake
• Potent potion recipes removed since Gardening skill is not accessible right now

After next restart, cut off heads should display the full resurrection value of the dead.

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.

• 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

We are back online. We will be monitoring closely, however please note that if the issue that caused us problems earlier returns, we may have to go offline again at short notice.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

-- The Team