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

• Missing when attacking in combat is now fixed
• Not being able to split stacks is now fixed

Please log out and back in to the game to enable these fixes.

The server is back online and the shutdown of Celador has been completed. As previously mentioned, any characters, items, and houses that were left behind are no longer accessible.

If you have any characters remaining in 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 back if no one is available to help immediately.

Thanks for your continued patience and support through the transition.

We are extremely pleased to welcome a new member to our team. Congratulations beekel!

beekel will be joining us as a Counselor, and behind the scenes, has already contributed greatly to our project in terms of the wiki, the related wiki bot and of course the interactive map.

He is also contributing in the form of custom music, which we hope to have in game very soon!

Please make him feel welcome.

Power hour will no longer expire after 60 real-time minutes from activation, instead will expire after 60 minutes of in-game playtime, with the same 22-hour cooldown from the time you started it last

This means if you log out before using all of your Power Hour then you can log back in and use what's remaining before the 22 hours is up, after which Power Hour will be reset and you will be able to activate it again

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.

This morning was different. The air did not smell as sweet as it did. A sense of dread had encircled the citizens of Celador. Shopkeepers left their stalls, aimlessly staring into the skies. Children stopped playing on the streets and ran home to their kin. Dark storm clouds began a slow march over the horizon, as sudden wind gusts began whipping the hair of frightened folks in the streets of Britain.  The air bristled with a static electricity and a foul stench. The well waters turned black with pestilence.  Crops began dying as if poisoned by some unidentified force, and the birds and animals all fled in every direction until no wildlife could be seen.

Then it happened... something arose from the ground in the center of the City of Britain. It was too dark to perceive who or what it was, but the energy emanating from it was unmistakable.  A great evil. Someone or something has arrived…

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In preparation for the main event, all servers will be offline from 7pm US EST/11pm UTC Friday 18th June. Please keep an eye on #news for further announcements over the course of the weekend.

• Added an /exhausted command to show currently capped skills.
• Fixed an issue with Magic Trap spell endlessly triggering on containers despite removing the trap with the Remove Trap spell.
• Runebook will now remain open until a Charge is consumed via the Use Charge ability.
• Wisps have had their spell casting fixed and their Gold drops reduced to intended levels.
• Slightly increased Taunt range from 6 to 7 for Tanks.
• Adjusted Camping gains and the 75+ Camping regen bonus.

We believe we have finally squashed the outlying performance bug that was forcing us to restart every 6 hours. As such, we will be returning to our usual restart at 5am US EST/9am UTC.

As a result, this next restart will take slightly longer than usual. We apologise for this, however rest assured that after this, we expect smooth sailing.

Thanks for your patience during this bumpy few weeks!

Test Center Hotfixes have been applied:

• Fixed issue with the house menu not updating the label for decay stage after refreshing
• Prevented placing houses over any objects
• House placement now correctly looks for Housing subregions instead of Britain.Wind for validating placement & housing subregions have been placed throughout most of the world
• Prevented picking up items recently dropped from a collapsed house by Young characters
• Prevented trading items recently dropped from a collapsed house by all

The Paralyze spell now interrupts the victim's spell cast on success

The use of an invisibility potion now breaks spell casts

Skeleton Keys now properly open chests of any level regardless of lockpicking skill

Carpentry kegs have been fixed and no longer produce deeds

• Players can no longer create Camps while inside Guard Protected towns.

It's not going to answer every question, but we hope we've covered the important ones! Something to read while waiting for the main event:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/transition-faq

• Macro system re-enabled & window will now only show once instead of refreshing every time a macro repeats
• Issue with Stablemaster "Retrieve pet out of range" option has been resolved once more, this update was due to go out previously but mistakenly was not applied, now it is
• Issue with freshly tamed pets not attacking their targets has been resolved
• Fixed an issue with Young status not being ended when committing a criminal action
• Fixed issue with "your X will break soon" happening prematurely
• Prevented ability to resist beneficial spells, especially when casted on thyself
• Fixed issue with trees not regrowing in a timely manner in some cases

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

The issue with the official map has been resolved, and it is now available again.

All wandering healers have had their wanderlust reduced temporarily, until we can make them visible via map icons once again. The markers available via https://lou-map.herokuapp.com/ can be used to locate them.