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

The server is up again! Sorry again for the inconvenience but we really appreciate 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.

Hi all,

Please click through to the link below to read this announcement in full.

We wanted to take a few minutes to write a bit of a 'state of the game' update. Firstly, thank you all so much for jumping on board with us. Seeing Britain Bank full of people, the streets of Minoc busy and ore flowing out of Minoc mines (when it doesn't get interrupted by a red-named individual!) and folks spelunking in our dungeons has been an amazing experience. We couldn't have done all this without you, so thank you!

Now for what the development team is up to right now:

1. Our #1 priority is performance and stability - they really go hand in hand, and that is what we are prioritising right now. While you may not necessarily see it as a player, we are still tackling some back end performance challenges which simply must be addressed before we can move onto anything else.

2. Critical bug fixes - I'm sure those of you that have sat through the multiple restarts with us already would be aware that we are beating down critical bugs left, right and centre. We know this is disruptive to your play time, and we thank you for your patience. It won't last forever, and we are making good headway here.

One of the most challenging bugs to date has been the trade window bug. Note that we are still working on the root cause for that one, and will advise just as soon as we're able to fix it.

3. Anything else - this includes any low priority bugs (not game breaking), adding content, tweaking balance, filling out the world, and everything else on our (quite frankly huge) to do list. All of this is prioritised lower until we get #1 sorted, and to a lesser degree, #2.

With all of that in mind, we are going to be a little more disruptive over the next day or two with additional restarts, as we work on #1. In most cases, we have to do this to enable other methods of logging and debugging, in an attempt to get to root causes of various issues. You may also see 'lag spikes' on occasion as we get the info we need. You may also wonder why we even need to do this, as the game is performing great for you all! We'll ask you to bear with us on all of that, and trust that it is necessary.

You're also going to see bugfixes potentially introduce new, unintended bugs on occasion. Sorry about that! Know that we are working on all of this as quickly as we can.

In addition, you will still see oddities like mobs in the water or up on mountains. You might end up in black space (send in a /page!) or encounter other 'cosmetic' issues that are annoying. We do know about most of these and will work to fix them, however as mentioned earlier, if it's not 'game breaking', it's taking a lower priority for now.

I'm sure we'll get 3 or 4 weeks down the track and look back at this phase and laugh. What I can share with you though is we are well prepared to deal with the issues that you only encounter once you actually 'go live' and we will work through them all.

We could have also delayed the launch to address some of these items, but we wanted to stick to our guns this time. I am hoping most of you agree that the game is generally in a decently playable state, and are having fun out there!

Sorry for the (slightly) bumpy road in the meantime. We look forward to continuing this journey with all of you!

• Fixed an issue with not being able to claim Veteran Rewards in some cases
• Fixed an issue with items decaying inside of containers that were recently locked down and then released in a house
• Fixed issue with not being able to rename recall runes by double-clicking/using them
• Stable/unstable pet confirmations removed for QOL, and the unstable window will now show the cost to unstable next to each pet
• Pets will now be fully fed while in the stables

In addition to our website and forums being updated in preparation for our big day on June 20th, our wiki has also been migrated and revitalised. Head on over to:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online

to check it out. Don't forget you can search it directly from Discord - just type "!wiki searchterm". If you're interested in contributing to the wiki, please sign up using your Discord account, then hit up the #wiki-contributors channel in Discord and message the bot with "!wikicontributor"

Huge thanks to community member Beekel, who helped with forklifting a lot of the content over, in addition to creating new content AND writing the new bot for us. Much appreciated!

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.

Water definitions have been added to every town! In those areas:

• fishing should be possible around all of the towns now
• creatures will no longer spawn in water
• players will no longer be able to go swimming

To all,

We sincerely apologise for the (very brief) housing launch today. The server will be coming back online in the next few minutes, however there is some additional impact.

Unfortunately we are unable to return to the world save from just prior to the housing launch. Instead, we have had to roll back a further 45 minutes. This was unavoidable and had to be done to ensure the integrity of our data and the game.

We don't expect the issue we experienced to return, and please go ahead and place your housing. Thank you, as always, for your patience.

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.

• Blacksmith/Weaponsmith/Armorsmith NPCs will now carry more items for sale with differing stock selections from each other.

Gameplay

• Loot tables have been adjusted for Shame.
• Loot tables have been adjusted for Destard.
• Young players will no longer trigger mobile collision.
• There is now a 1 second cooldown between mobile collisions.

Warriors, rejoice! The Colosseum has moved to its new and permanent location, an island just outside of Buccaneer's Den. While it will be used for PVP server events, it is also intended to be a general use area for consensual, non-faction PVP. Thus, the following rules will take effect in the area after the next restart:

1. Combat and murder actions will not flag as criminal on the island. You will not receive murder counts on the island.
2. If a red is killed on the island, their next immediate resurrection will be free. Short term murder counts will not reset, and the free res does not apply if you were killed anywhere but on the island.
3. You cannot mark runes at or recall to the island. Teleporters are up at Britain Bank and Buccaneer's Den moongate.

Full loot is in effect on the island, so tread lightly. For those brave enough, glorious combat awaits!

The server will be coming offline for some extended maintenance @ 9am UTC on 28 July. https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/timezone/utc

The server will remain offline for up to an hour during this time.

An issue with Stablemasters not detecting pets from outside the region you're in has been resolved but will require a server restart to take effect.

• Performance improvements.
• Destard's loot has been improved.
• Destard spawner density has been decreased.
• Some low end Undead monsters have had their loot slightly increased.
• Low end monsters in Despise have had their loot decreased.
• Wrong's loot has been improved.
• Ice Dungeon's loot has been improved.

The latest standalone client has been published to the LOA dashboard and can be downloaded at https://cdn.legendsofaria.com/Legends%20of%20Aria-1.4.1.0.zip

This can be used to install the game in cases where the LOA launcher fails repeatedly for some users.