After being murdered, players should now, again, be given the option to punish or forgive a murder.

We just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone of our Natural Disasters policy with LOU Housing. If you or someone you know that plays LOU is affected by a Natural Disaster or other hardship in which they will be unable to access LOU for an extended time, please reach out and we will be happy to hold your accounts plots until you are able to reach them again. With every month revealing a new natural disaster on our planet, we cannot express our sympathy enough for those affected.

• an issue has been resolved with earth elementals not decaying properly
  - an issue with poison not doing damage to hidden players in some cases has been resolved
  

Happy New Year everyone!

This is a quick note to say that we do read each and every bit of feedback we get, whether it's a bug, a suggestion, or a report of player misconduct. However, as we are a team of volunteers that do this for free in our spare time, who all have lives and families, it is simply not possible to respond to all of the reports that we get (and there are many!). Please do remember that this is not a commercial server, and no one is paid to do what we do.

In particular, please be assured that we investigate every report of player misconduct and take them very seriously. When required, we take the appropriate action against those players. While it may not always be visible to you, please be assured we do action each and every one of these.

Lastly, we'd like to remind everyone that if you have concerns with any actions of staff, then the correct escalation path is to email [email protected] - once again, we cannot guarantee a response to any emails sent to this address, however be assured they are read and actioned as required.

Thank you all once again for your support, and we look forward to sharing with you all the new features we have planned for 2020!

Santa has closed access to his workshop in order to start working on next Christmas. Bye Santa!

• At last, the long-standing bug causing the server to freeze sometimes when players die while poisoned has been resolved

There appears to be an issue with some or all in-game feedback reports (bug reports) not being received. We're looking into the issue. In the meantime you can use the Discord Feedback Bot to submit bugs, as those are still being received.

• An issue has been resolved preventing dead characters from using teleporters

• Auto-unstuck and stuck command has had some general optimizations and you sould see improvement both with using the command and when the system detects you being stuck automatically -- please report if you notice any funky behavior with this

• An issue has been resolved allowing anyone to open a Christmas Gift regardless of where the gift was located
  - We've received a couple of reports now regarding stacking items disappearing if trying to place a stack onto another stack inside of a container that is over capacity or over weight causing the incoming item to be consumed and not added to the existing stack. We are investigating but need more details, if you have had this happen please send a /bug report with as many details around the issue you can recall. Thanks!

Santa's gate has closed in Britain, but the North Pole is still accessible (in and out) through the old entrance at the top of Serpent's Pass in very northern tip of Southern Rim.

Santa has opened up a portal to his workshop from Britain. Go visit him and see if he's got anything for you!

Merry Christmas to you all.

• Slightly reduced the chance for mobs to spawn while looting a treasure chest
  - Added a leash to all mobs spawned by a treasure chest
  - Mobs spawned from looting the chest are no longer required to be killed to loot the rest of the box, initial spawn still needs to be killed first
  - Hidden players will now be revealed 100% of the time when looting an item from a treasure chest

We would like to remind all players that, as per the rules you agreed to when first logging into our server, exploiting bugs/glitches etc is not allowed. In some cases, after a thorough investigation, the effect of a particular exploit may be so game breaking that we have no choice but to react with severe consequences to those players involved.

We do not take these decisions lightly, and of course we would prefer to avoid these situations at all costs. If you do encounter a bug that results in being exploitable, please do report via /bug in game and we will do our best to address it ASAP. Thank you for your understanding.

Covetous and Destard have been fixed, and are available to play again.

The issue with being unable to remove items from a locked down paragon chest has been resolved

• The distance from which NPCs will catch thieves in the act and call Guards on them has been somewhat reduced

• An issue preventing criminal timer from being refreshed during PVP combat has been resolved
  - Line-of-sight requirement for NPCs to call guards has been disabled for Stealing; normally the NPCs in town would wander around and change their perspective, making theiving more challenging and rewarding in some cases, but at this time the NPCs are set to not-wander, so we're doing this to balance in-town thefts until NPC wander has been re-enabled.

We are aware some folks have lost some house contents following the deployment of the 12/8 patch. We sincerely apologize for any losses that this caused. We do not take lost progress lightly and you should know that we're sorry it happened. We do our best to heavily test each change and take measures to prevent losses as best as possible. Occasionally unforseen circumstances do occur, and we normally do our best to recover from them. In this case we were unable to intercept the issue in time to perform a rollback and address it. We thank you for your support and understanding.

Bola Revert

• The most recent Bola changes have been reverted.
• This reduces the success chance to hit the target from 100% back to 66%.
• This also increases the cooldowns from 6s back to 10s.

Plot Deco Changes

• Can no longer decorate locked down objects rotating or moving them outside of the plot bounds.
• Items that are detected out of the bounds will be automatically moved back inside the plot.
• There is now a reasonable min/max limit on lowering/raising objects on a plot.
• NOTE: An autofix has occurred that checked all objects on plots to be out of bounds and has automatically moved offending items inwards towards the plot so not to be extending out of bounds; because of this, some of your decorations or fence pieces may need to be re-positioned.
• GARDENING NOTE: Plants from gardening now require users to be at least friend to use/harvest the plants due to the deco autofix.

Ban List

• Targets that are banned are now prevented from re-entering the plot automatically.
• New tab in the Plot Menu has been added to manage Bans.

Smelting, Milling, Scissors

• Salvaging has been redesigned from scratch to be more like UO.
• You should be able to salvage anything that can be crafted.
• To Smelt something simply double click a forge -OR- use the E ability on a Pickaxe.
• To Mill/Chop something use the E ability on a Hatchet.
• To cut cloth objects, use a pair of scissors.
• You can now salvage items that are on the ground, in your pack animal, or in your inventory, as long as you have access to pick it up.
• You can now salvage items bought from a town vendor, but will receive a greatly reduced amount of resources from them, and no chance to gain skill.
• You can now automatically attempt to salvage objects inside of a container, just target a container or yourself to choose backpack.
• Wooden & Wood Kite shields have been moved to Carpentry recipes and now use wood to craft and are salvageable.

Repairing

• Repairing of equipment will now be done via the crafting menu.
• Applicable crafting stations now have a "Repair" button in their menu.

Disguise Kits

• Thief Disguise Kit & Orc Body Kits have been optimized and should work much more reliably.
• Orc Body Kit is now blessed.
• Orc Body Kit will no longer become locked down on use.

Skinning

• Skinning has been redesigned from scratch to be more like UO.
• All bladed weapons and the skinning knife can be used to:
  • cut corpses to instantly create the meat/hides inside the corpse.
  • cut whole fish, on the ground or in our inventory, into fish fillets.
• Bladed weapons have "Toggle Default" option to set the default double-click action:
  • Use: double click and target something to skin.
  • Equip: double click to equip the weapon.
• Right-clicking a corpse, choosing harvest will check your inventory recursively for a blade to use to skin it.

Treasure Hunting

• Players will now be required to kill all monsters spawned from a treasure chest before being able to loot from the chest.