The Lithos necromancy event will end tomorrow. Its spawn rate has been increased until then.

Necromancy is now live in Britannia! A method of procuring the Necronomicon has been introduced and players are encouraged to discover it.

For a short time, a boss event featuring Lithos, titan of Earth, is also active and is another possible way of obtaining the Necronomicon.

Please read the following articles which outline Necromancy- some changes have been made.

https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/necronomicon

https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/forensic_evaluation

Relics of Lithos, titan of Earth, have been sighted in Britannia- a dark omen of evil events on the horizon.

Necromancy is coming to Britannia and is currently in testing! Shout out to Stimwalt who designed the ideas behind much of this system before he departed the team. The following wiki articles will give you a good idea of what to expect. It is a more hardcore lifestyle than your average blue build.

https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/forensic_evaluation

https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/necronomicon

The server will remain offline for extended maintenance during the next restart window @ 9am UTC on the 12th November. We expect this maintenance to take approximately 1 hour.

Thank you for your patience.

The evil mages summoning Arcadion are growing increasingly desperate and frenzied as their power appears to be waning!

The Arcadion miniboss event for procuring a Summoner's Tome will be ending after this weekend. The Arcadion spawn rate has been greatly increased until then.

We have a new addition to the team! Please help us welcome Transcendence to their new role. They will be starting out helping to triage GM Pages and also helping with events and general gameplay design. Welcome, @Transcendence#6283!

Thanks to everyone participating in the Halloween events and activities, we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you. We look forward to doing more in the near future.

• The Halloween Invasion ends after this weekend, on Monday, Nov 8th
• Trick-or-Treating (smashing pumpkins, random camp spawns & Halloween Paragons) will remain active until the following week, Monday, Nov 15th
• The Candy Vendor will remain indefinitely allowing people time to trade and shop

Faction ranks are available on Discord for the new factions- simply run /rank rankname to add your faction role.

Available ranknames are:

• Minax
• Shadowlords
• True Britannians

The new Factions system is about to launch- in preparation, we have removed existing factions from all characters and removed the faction leaders as well. Hold tight while we get everything prepped!

The wiki has a new page for Halloween: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/halloween-2021 here you can see information about the Trick or Treating and the kinds of treats you can get! ^_^ Happy Hunting

There is a known issue with Steam users trying to log in to the LOA game, specifically error 105. Citadel Studios, the makers of LOA has been made aware and have stated they are looking into the issue. We hope the issue is resolved shortly so you can begin your Halloween hunting soon! Thanks for your patience.

The server is coming back online with the Halloween festivities activated as described in the previous article here: https://shardsofbritannia.com/news/halloween-event-progress-report

Halloween Paragon mobs will spawn in both dungeons and in overland & smashing pumpkins and graveyard camps will spawn only in the overland.

The Candy Vendor has not yet finished setting up their shop but we will let you know when they have, very soon. See you in-game and happy Halloween hunting!

The server is now offline for Halloween updates and will remain offline for approximately an hour! 🎃We'll post again when the server is coming back up, thanks for your patience.

The server will go offline around 11pm UTC/6pm Central (approx 2 hours from the time of this post) or a little later depending on our schedules. An hour prior to that we will schedule an automatic shutdown and begin announcing. The downtime is expected to last about an hour to deploy the Halloween updates. Thanks for your patience! 🎃

The Halloween event will start soon! Gravedigging needs a little more time and will come as quickly as possible after the event goes live.

When: The goal is for Today or Tomorrow 10/21 or 10/22 and will last 3-4 weeks, to end before US Thanksgiving

What to expect:

• Candy Vendor: collect candy from smashing pumpkins and killing Halloween mobs to buy Halloween goodies
• Pumpkins & Halloween Gravesites will be randomly scattered across the overworld; smash the pumpkins and kill the monsters for a chance to get a reward or candy that can be spent at the Candy Vendor
• Halloween Paragons: 5% chance for compatible monsters to spawn as a Halloween Paragon that will have a chance to drop a reward or candy that can be spent at the Candy Vendor

Soon to follow:

• Gravedigging: Miners with Forensic Eval will be able to dig gravesites for chances to obtain more goodies & a chance to spawn the Headless Horseman (even more goodies?)
• Halloween day-of handouts & pop-up/invasion events if we have time

Test Center has been opened to the public for testing of Factions and Summoner content. To connect to test center, open your client and in the address bar at the bottom, connect to test.uo4.life:5002

For Factions: NOTE: All timers (capture, etc) have been set to 5 minutes temporarily to ease testing, except the sigil reset timer which is now set to 10 minutes to allow you to run between towns. Only Minoc and Brit are available, which is where you will find faction and town stones. This system is a direct copy of the old UO system, including stealing and IP restriction mechanics. https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/technical/previous-publishes/2000-2/2000-publish-08-5th-december/ We would love some robust testing of the general mechanics of combat and town capture in particular. As the fundamental mechanics of the system are a direct UO copy, these are unlikely to change too much. Wiki article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/factions

Summoning: This system, however, is NOT from old UO, it is our own special homebrew. Think of it sort of like a "Magical Tamer." We'd really love some feedback on how the balance of these mechanics feel in PVE and PVP, and any ideas you have for improvements that would make it better (keeping in mind that the Summoner's Tome full of a bunch of new summons is on the not too distant horizon) Wiki Article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/spirit_speak

Vendors with full spellbooks and regs will be out at the banks shortly. Thanks for helping test!

Please report any bugs with /bug, feel free to ask questions.

A cold wind blows from the East and as it breezes past your cheeks you hear the faint cries of an otherworldly being. Its tongue is both unintelligible but strangely familiar, beckoning you, filling your mind with patterns you struggle to fully understand. What felt like an eternity of thought passes as quickly as it arrived and you return to your senses, wondering whether you've gone mad or tapped into an energy pulsing beneath the surface of Britannia.

(These changes are in testing and are NOT live- see more below)

Spirit Speak has been completely overhauled to allow for benefits for players wishing to focus on summoning! Currently these changes apply to existing summons associated with Magery, but in the future a Summoner's Tome will allow players with the Spirit Speak ability to summon even more creatures from another plane! Details can be found here: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/spirit_speak

We need testers! Test Center will be publicly opened soon for testing of this new feature.

Sorry for the short interruption! Service has been restored. The server will come back online at it's normally schedule time in about 10 minutes after the posting of this

Factions have been completely overhauled from the ground up and include new content- including capturing towns and rewards! This content is currently in testing, but you can see what's coming soon (pending tweaks) at this article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/factions

Dev Blog/State of the Game:

• Staff Activity

  Some staff is on break right now for one reason or another, but not everyone is playing other games. Life always comes first and if things come up in life, it is always advised for staff to focus on real life, which may warrant some time away from the project. When staff members take breaks, that doesn't mean the separation is necessarily permanent or that they did anything wrong.

• Player Feedback & Game Balancing

  We do our best to read all feedback submitted, but we do not have the time to acknowledge or reply to most submissions. If you submitted something a while ago and it hasn't been improved yet and you have something else to add to your submission, please feel free to re-submit it, but please avoid sending in repeat submissions just for the sake of trying to get it fixed quickly. There's always a possibility that we have trouble replicating a reported issue, so more details or a fresh account of the issue is always welcome.
  Additionally, it should be noted that not everything is final, and many features of the game are subject to change when we do balance passes and content expansions, but those things also take time to complete as we discuss, debate and use metrics to determine the best course of action.

• LoA New Client/Citadel Studios Changes

  A lot of people have expressed concern over the changes announced by Citadel Studios in regards to the new experimental client and 3D camera. We can confirm that this will not affect our project and there are no plans to shut down Legends of Aria as it exists today, meaning our project is not in jeopardy of being shut down due to the new client changes, nor will we be forced to use the new client. Additionally, a lot of people ask what happens if CS goes under? In the past, we have stated that it is possible that we may be able to continue the project if that ever happens, but neither we nor CS expects anything like that to occur, and we would do everything in our power to make sure we can proceed.

• The Map

  Most of the map terrain is complete but requires finishing touches. Right now progress is on hold while we work on other content.

• Population

  The population is always in flux and changing depending on many factors like new games coming out, limited time off for people, and season changes. The game is still being played by plenty of people and we are doing everything within our ability to release updates and content as we're able to, to keep people busy having fun.

• Actions Against Player Accounts

  Sometimes players break the rules or behave in a manner that is harmful to the game or our community and we have to take actions against their Discord privileges or in-game accounts. Players that have action taken against them are almost always verbal about it and claim they did nothing wrong when in fact they did. Please make sure you're aware of the rules and are abiding by them. We will never discuss actions taken against individuals specifically in public, but if you have had action taken against you, or you suspect so and would like to inquire about it, please use the Contact Us page on our website to do so. We understand that everyone is human and makes mistakes sometimes, and are willing to give second chances when people show remorse and willingness to do better, so you may dispute the actions and explain to us why you think they should be reversed, and we will consider. Reminder: Real Money Transactions are strictly prohibited and harmful to our economy, anyone suspected or caught buying and selling may be subject to have action taken against them pending review.

• Goals & What's Being Worked On

  We're always working on bug fixes and polishing existing features. Here are some of the goals on our list:

  • short term goals:

    • Holiday Events like Halloween events and Gravedigging
    • PVE, Inscription, Treasure Hunting [and more] content additions. See: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/dev-letters/inscription-overhaul
    • resolving issues with the remaining house models and making them available to be placed

  • medium/longer-term goals:

    • faction content
    • more PVE content & encounters
    • bulk order deeds
    • house customization options (changing the style of walls/roof/floor)
    • gardening (potted plants, does not include growing reagents or other resources)
    • map expansion