Vendor Search Stone — Price Visibility Poll

We've got a poll running for the next week or two, and we want to hear from you.

A while back we disabled price visibility on the Vendor Search gump to encourage more exploration across the lands. Now we need your input — should the change stay, or should we bring prices back?

Cast your vote here: https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1545317047221624922

Disclaimer: polls help us gauge community sentiment — they don't guarantee a particular outcome or change.

🎃 Halloween 2026

Halloween opens October 1 at 9:00 UTC and runs through November 7 at 9:00 UTC.

What is happening

• Pumpkins return across the world, along with trick or treating, the Halloween dungeon, gravedigging, seasonal fishing and paragon hunting.
• The Halloween vendors stay open until December 1, so there is plenty of time to spend what you gather after the event itself ends.
• A login gift is waiting for every account from October 24 until the event closes.
• We are running a property raffle this year. Tickets go on sale when the event opens and the draw is on Halloween night, October 31 at 8:00 PM UTC. Anyone who has won a house in a past raffle sits this one out, so the keys go to someone new.
• There are a few new faces to hunt down among the rare pets.

What we have been working on

We went back through years of your suggestions, bug reports and thread posts and used them as the to do list.

A good part of this year went into the unglamorous half: pieces of the event that had quietly stopped working, drops that were not landing the way they should, prices that had drifted, and rewards that nobody could actually reach. The short version is that the season should feel closer to how it was meant to feel.

There is new content on top of that, including a few small additions that came straight out of requests from players.

What comes after

• Thanksgiving: November 7 to December 5
• Christmas: December 5 to January 2
• New Year: December 31

Thank you for the ideas, the bug reports and the patience. Keep them coming. A good number of this year's changes started as a message from one of you. 👻

New Changes

• Further fixes to creatures jumping, sprinting home, or resetting mid-fight. Bosses now turn back at a consistent distance instead of an unpredictable one, and the Ancient Reaper will chase you a little further before returning to its roots.
• Creatures already out in the world pick up these changes too. If you still see one jumping or resetting, please send a bug report noting where it happened.

Combat & Creatures Creatures have been getting stuck in fights, standing in place while taking hits, or turning and wandering home partway through a fight. That's fixed, along with a batch of related problems with how creatures decide to chase, give up, and choose targets:

• Creatures will no longer lose interest in you while you are still well within their reach. Archers and casters were the worst for this.
• Spellcasting creatures will finish what they are casting instead of being interrupted over and over.
• A creature that gets hit while chasing will keep coming. Before, it would stop and never chase again.
• Creatures can no longer get stuck fixating on something they cannot physically reach, such as a target on a boat or a rooftop.
• A creature fought only by a pet will no longer fall asleep mid-fight.
• Paralyze no longer leaves a target stuck in place when the effect is broken early.
• Creatures that lose sight of you will take another look rather than standing and staring. Slipping past them is still possible.

New: while in combat mode you can click an idle creature to start the fight yourself, instead of waiting for it to spot you.

Factions: Town Sigils Town stones have been turning away sigil thefts and claiming no sigil exists, even when one does. This has been a frustrating one to track down, thanks to everyone who reported it.

• The Steal Sigil option now appears only when the sigil is genuinely there to take.
• When you cannot take it, the stone will tell you why rather than pretending there is nothing there.
• Any town stone left in a stuck state will right itself shortly after this update. If there is a town that has been refusing thieves, go give it another try.
• Fixed a case where dying while carrying a sigil could lose it outright instead of sending it home.

Earlier Changes

• Vendor Search stone will no longer show prices to players to help discourage market price-fixing via the search tool and encourage actually visiting shops/exploration
• Due to player feedback, the new recipes can now be purchased from the carpenter (after a server restart).
• The Ice Dragon King will now accept all variants of the Skull Hood.
• Added two new furniture items for carpenters to craft. They require recipes that can be purchased from a vendor.
• Fixed a bug that made the obelisk tip unobtainable.

Halloween activities are about to commence in Britannia, and we want your feedback! Let us know if you have any ideas for Halloween this year! Either send them in-game via the Feedback Tool or else post them in Discord at https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1545269433491001416

We appreciate all of your ideas and will do our best to accommodate requests :)

New Changes

• Zephyrion, the Wandering Curator of Curiosities, has been permanently located at the Crossroads to Paws.
• Note for Season 9: This season will not have a guaranteed mount, as there are already so many in the game. There will, of course, be other new stuff.

Changes

• Fixed the stamina handling of white wyrms
• Prepared rewards for season9

As part of this restart, we're addressing a couple of concerns with the launcher. If you have left your launcher logged in, please click the settings cog and validate files before logging in again.

If you have exited your launcher, it will pick up the new files anyway when you start it - nothing to do in this scenario. Moving forward, we'll look to improve the launcher so we can automate this for you.

Earlier today we detected and removed unauthorized software running on one of our backend servers. This server was not a game server, nor was it our accounts server, so no player credentials were compromised.

The source of the issue was a cryptocurrency mining bot — a common type of malware that hijacks server processing power to mine crypto. This kind of malware is not designed to access or steal data.

Even so, your account security comes before convenience. As a precaution, we're:

• Resetting all account passwords
• Rotating our internal credentials and rebuilding the affected systems from clean backups

What you need to do: go to https://accounts.shardsofbritannia.com any time after seeing this message and attempt to log in. You'll be asked to reset your password. Please note the launcher itself will not tell you this outright, so hopefully you're reading this message now!

In addition, we are rolling out some patches to our launcher which include a new native Linux launcher that is in 'beta' for now. It's important you all exit your launcher (find the taskbar icon near your clock and right click/exit) and start it again to ensure you get the latest update to v0.1.26.

As for the security concern - our monitoring systems caught this quickly and shut it down, and we're taking every precaution to keep your account safe.

We will be back online in the next 30 minutes, but in the meantime you can reset your password right now. Thanks for your understanding — see you in Britannia. ⚔️

— The Shards of Britannia Team

We're coming back online now. Restart your launchers and you should receive our latest launcher. Then login with your new global account from https://accounts.shardsofbritannia.com and you'll be good to go.

We'll still be restarting at tonight's maintenance window about an hour from this message. No avoiding that sorry!

We're running a little long on the login server migration, it may be up to 2 more hours. Apologies for the inconvenience.

We are offline for the login server migration. This will take up to 4 hours, the maintenance window is 2am UTC - 6am UTC / 10pm US Eastern - 2am US Eastern.

TL;DR:

• Login server goes live at 10pm US ET/2am UTC
• Restart your launcher for it to auto download our new launcher
• Log in using your new global account that you created at https://accounts.shardsofbritannia.com

Our login server migration will go ahead at the time shown below this post. During this time, the game will be offline for up to 4 hours while we finalise and validate all the moving pieces to make this happen.

We appreciate that the mentioned time might fall within your play window, however we are unable to schedule an alternative time due to staff availability.

Once the migration is complete, you will need to restart your existing launcher and it will automatically download our new launcher. Once that is done, you will log in with your new SoB Global Account (the one you created at https://accounts.shardsofbritannia.com and matches the email you used to /verify with)

As part of this change, on launch the game will send you directly to the character select screen, and on logout the client will be closed. We are investigating putting you back at the character select screen on logout instead, however that may prove challenging. For now we chose to move ahead so that we have direct control over our login server and any outages, of which we hope there will be none!

Thank you all for your patience during this time. While we have extensively tested all elements of the new system, we expect there may still be some bumps along the way. The best way to raise concerns with us will be via #emergency-support-threads in Discord, or via https://uo4.life/ticket

The time has come folks. All going well, we will migrate to our new login server over the weekend of 11/12 July.

We understand and appreciate that these types of changes being done over a weekend may be disruptive, however it's also the only time where key staff members can be present to support the initiative. Such is the nature of a volunteer-led game.

Remind your friends to /verify ASAP and ensure you've reviewed all the details at https://uo4.life/verify - this will result in an easy migration for you all. After the login server migration, we'll also share details on how to get access back if you missed the /verify boat.

We'll announce a specific time for the actual migration closer to the date, however we expect the server to be offline for no longer than an hour while we put what we need in place.

Please note this patch has been reverted and is no longer active - we'll continue to work on this feature in the background and hope to have it available to you again real soon.

And we are back online!

Unfortunately, there are currently issues with the server. We need to wait for additional support from the team. As soon as we have an update, we will share it here. Sorry :-(

Server Status Update

The server is back online.

We've temporarily rolled back the recent Account Bound Item Recovery patch while we investigate it as a potential cause of this week's instability. We'll be monitoring closely and will re-introduce an improved version of that change once we're confident it's stable.

To the community: we know crashes and downtime are frustrating, especially when they're happening with some regularity. We want to be transparent -- when multiple people are contributing changes to the server, tracking down the root cause of an issue isn't always straightforward. It takes time to isolate what's actually responsible, and we take that process seriously rather than guessing.

The people working on Shards of Britannia are volunteers. We have day jobs, families, and lives that don't pause when the server goes down. We're not always available the moment something happens, but we do get to it as quickly as we possibly can and we care deeply about this community and this game.

Thank you for your patience -- it genuinely means a lot to us.

-- The Shards of Britannia Team

Unfortunately the server is offline at the moment whilst we investigate what caused the crash. apologies for the inconvenience.

The server will be coming back online shortly. Please note that due to a data integrity issue, it was necessary to roll back to approximately 15 minutes before the crash.

We apologise for the inconvenience - as always, we do everything in our power to avoid rollbacks, however it was not possible to avoid it at this time.

The server is currently offline. We're investigating and will restore it ASAP.

New Changes

Bound Item Rescue — Soulbound, account-bound, and Patron reward items are now auto-saved to your bank instead of being lost to house/IDOC decay, ground decay, or monster corpses; adds rescue notifications and a right-click "Destroy Bound Item" option.

Changes

• Faction members ranked 3 or above can now place deeded decoration items inside their faction bases, with a maximum limit of 30 items.
• The Gardener's Chest now handles seeds correctly, with a single entry per plant/color pair.
• The Gardener's Chest now provides the correct storage limits. Limits and other characteristics are described in the player guide: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/gardening_gardeners_tools
• Mobile repair kits have been added to the game
• Magical items can be bulk disenchanted now
• Fix has been applied for existing mage bucklers so they can be used
• Tamed pets can now gain points in meditation -The Black Goods Vendor issue has been resolved. A previous bug prevented players from receiving their rewards. If a player doesn't have enough space in their backpack, the rewards will now drop to the ground and they will be notified.
• The Faction Dungeon is now no-mount.
• A craftable gardener's resource chest has been added. It requires a recipe that can be purchased from the gardening quest giver.

Earlier today, while testing our new mass-mailing system, we accidentally sent a test email with the subject "[TEST] Your Shards of Britannia account isn't verified yet" to all players instead of just our staff. Sorry about that!

Shortly after, we sent the real verification status emails to all addresses we have on record.

A couple of things to be aware of:

• We may have email addresses on file that aren't your login email (such as a Contact Email). If one of those received a "not verified" notice, that's expected — what matters is whether your actual login email is verified.

• If you know you've already completed /verify, you can safely ignore any email saying you haven't. Please take this moment to double-check that your /verify is complete and that all of your accounts are linked under a single email address. If you haven't verified yet, please do so as soon as possible to avoid disruption.

• Full instructions: https://uo4.life/verify

• Need help? Log a ticket: https://uo4.life/ticket