🎅 🍬 Updates for Holiday Currencies! 🍬 🎅

We’re excited to continue celebrating holidays in Shards of Britannia with fun events, activities, and vendor shops offering holiday items for unique currencies.

Going forward, we’ll evaluate re-using the same currency each year for recurring holidays. This means you likely won’t need to forfeit half of your currency at the start of the following year’s festivities.

Our goal is to make it easier for you to save, plan your purchases, and reward you for the time you’ve already spent, all while keeping these seasonal celebrations fun and balanced.

Thank you for spending your free time with us! 🎄

🎄 Chrismahanukwanzakah 2024 🎁

The Winter Holiday festivities are just around the corner, and we're excited to celebrate with all of you in Shards of Britannia! Our goal is to kick off the seasonal activities starting December 11th.

As we speak, we're in the final stages of negotiations with Santa and his team of industrious Elves to finalize their contracts (and make sure the reindeer are ready to fly!).

Stay tuned for more updates and details as they become available, we’ll make sure you have all the information you need to dive into the holiday cheer.

Prepare for snow-filled adventures, holiday surprises, and plenty of joy to share with friends and foes alike. 🎅✨

Happy Holidays!

The Halloween House Decoration Contest Results Are In!

Thank you all for your incredible creativity and for sharing your spooky displays. We truly enjoyed reviewing every entry and appreciate the time and effort you put into bringing the Halloween spirit to life.

Winners:

• Staff Pick: Taria’s Halloween Wedding
• People’s Choice: Gruelslayer’s “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Honorable Mentions & Feedback:

• Chriss: Beautiful castle with impressive details. Adding more Halloween elements would have made it perfect!
• Drunken Merlin: Great bar scene and fantastic inclusion of the Headless Horseman. Excellent job embracing the Halloween theme!
• MrNascar: Clever use of Halloween decorations, incorporating everyday objects to enhance your patio and rooftop space.
• Taria: Exquisite details and extensive use of Halloween-themed items. Truly outstanding work!
• Dracula: A welcoming clubhouse, but it could benefit from stronger Halloween elements. We encourage sticking closely to the theme in future contests.
• Thornx: A lovely, spooky room filled with thoughtful details and plenty of Halloween flair. Nicely done!
• Kikoo: Wonderfully gruesome! Great use of everyday items to create a frightfully immersive scene that perfectly fits the theme.
• Gruelslayer: Incredible attention to detail and expertly chosen objects, resulting in a fully realized Halloween scene. Fantastic effort!

We’ll be in touch with all winners soon to arrange your rewards. Congratulations, and thank you again to everyone who participated.

Looking Ahead: We’re implementing a clearer set of judging criteria for future contests, focusing on adherence to the theme, creativity, attention to detail, aesthetics, and use of space. We’re also excited to announce that our next House Decoration Contest will be Christmas-themed! Stay tuned for more details and start dreaming up your festive creations!

Thanks again for your enthusiasm and for making this Halloween contest a success!

🍂 Happy Thanksgiving! 🍂

We're incredibly thankful for each of you in our community. Let's celebrate together with the return of the Thanksgiving Quest! 🦃

• Save the Thanksgiving Feast! Help the townspeople in this festive event.
• Meet Autumna Leafwhisper, the Thanksgiving Organizer, stationed in Castle Britannia, West Britain, eager to recruit your help.
• Quest Details:
  • Complete once per account.
  • Earn unique rewards, including:
  • Mounts:
    • Not-a-Turkey Mount (Chicken Ethereal Mount)
  • House Add-ons:
    • Autumn Vines (3 varieties)
    • Holiday Feast Table (new!)
    • Autumn Potted Tree (new!)
  • Festive Food & Drinks:
    • Celebrate with themed goodies.
  • Equipment:
    • Pilgrim Hat
    • Peasant Hat
    • Feathered Hat
    • Feathered Pilgrim Hat (new!)
    • Thanksgiving Cloak (new!)
    • War Bonnet (Native headdress, new!)

🗓 Event Duration: The Thanksgiving Quest will be active until Monday, December 1st at 9:00 AM UTC.
🔜 More to Come: After we finish visiting with our families, we'll be working to add some Thanksgiving-themed PvE encounters to further enhance the festivities. Stay tuned!

Thank you for being part of our community. Enjoy the celebrations, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving! 🍁

Happy Thanksgiving!

As we prepare to launch this year’s Thanksgiving event, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible contributions of Indigenous communities whose history and traditions have enriched our shared culture in countless ways.

The Team is putting the final touches on the Thanksgiving event, and we’re excited to bring it to you within the next few hours. We’re grateful for your patience and support as we ensure everything is ready for your adventures.

Stay tuned for the official announcement when the event goes live!

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Halloween House Decoration Contest for this year!

We have opened up voting for the People's Choice and the staff will also begin judging the entries, vote here: https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1311194882756448266

Since it's such a busy time of year, we are going to give everyone until Dec 6th to cast their vote. After which we will announce both the team's pick and the people's choice winners.

The winners will receive their choice of a customized Halloween item that may or may not be available via the Halloween Store plus a customized trophy such as a house sign to showcase their winnings.

The next House Decoration Contest currently planned will be for Christmas. If you are waiting for your Halloween decorations to be judged still, please wait if you can to start placing Christmas deco! :)

Once more thanks for participating and good luck!

Halloween has officially come to an end for this year! We want to thank everyone who joined us for the festivities, smashing pumpkins, and collecting candy. Your participation made it all the more special, and we hope you had as much fun as we did hosting it.

If you have ideas for future events or activities, we’d love to hear from you—feel free to share them in-game. As we approach the upcoming holiday season, we’re excited to bring you more events!

Thank you again for spending your time with us, and we can’t wait to see you in the weeks ahead!

REMINDER: There is still ONE more Halloween Raffle drawing to occur on Nov 24th as outlined here: https://shardsofbritannia.com/news/final-2024-halloween-lottery

To all veterans in our community and beyond, we extend our deepest gratitude for your service, sacrifice, and unwavering dedication. Today, on Veterans Day, we honor and remember those who have served and those who continue to stand ready to protect and defend. Your courage and commitment have paved the way for the freedoms we enjoy each day. Thank you for your service, and for inspiring us all. We stand with you, today and every day.

🎃 Halloween Discounts & Updates! 🎃

From now until November 11th at 9am, all items at the Halloween Vendors are slashed by 25%! 🔪 Don’t miss this chance to grab your favorites at a discount!

👻 Halloween Activities: The spooky festivities will continue until November 17th at 9am, and the Halloween Vendors will be available for at least four weeks afterward to ensure everyone has plenty of time to shop.

Thank You! To everyone who has joined us for the Halloween events – we appreciate your participation and enthusiasm!

🕹️ MOBA Arena Update: We’re hard at work on the new MOBA Arena game, but it’s taking a bit more time to perfect. Rest assured, we're aiming to launch it soon, themed for the current season. Once released, it will become a permanent addition to the game. Thank you for your patience!

We're excited to announce two new members are joining the team! Pueblo & Fluffy have volunteered to contribute to the project in their free time. Pueblo will be focusing on Architectural Designs and World Building and Fluffy will be focusing on Community Management & Counselor duties so you may see them around in chat, and in the future you may see them assisting players in-game and even running Events from time to time. Please give Pueblo and Fluffy a warm welcome to the team and thanks for offering to share your free time with us! <3

The Halloween House Decoration Contest deadline has been extended to Nov 17th

Entries will be accepted starting immediately, and the drawing will take place soon after Nov 17th.

Prizes will include Halloween Candy plus a customized Halloween item!

Submit your entries in https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1294438287921905725

This is a reminder that Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the United States ended today, November 3, 2024. Clocks have been set back by one hour, which may affect how game times, events, and restarts appear in your local timezone.

Please remember that our servers run on UTC timezone, and neither the server time nor in-game activity schedules change with DST. All events and restarts will continue to occur at the same times in UTC. However, due to the DST change, the time at which these activities appear in your local timezone may have shifted.

As DST adjustments happen at different times around the world, we recommend checking your local time against UTC to stay on track with event schedules.

Thank you for your attention and understanding, and we look forward to seeing you in-game!

We're back early. Go play!

During our next maintenance window at 9am UTC, we will be running extended maintenance on the server for approximately 2 hours. Thank you for your patience.

The server has been online and steady for the past 5+ hours and is ready to play! Sorry again for the interruption this morning :)

~~ The server is experiencing an unexpected outage, sorry for the interruption! We're working diligently to try and restore it as soon as possible. We don't yet have an ETA but we expect to be offline for some time still. Please check back here periodically for updates, as we will update this post with news as it arrives. Thanks for your patience, and once more sorry for the interruption! ~~

Just a reminder that Season 4 is coming to an end soon.

It was originally scheduled to end Oct 22nd but we are going to extend it by an additional couple of weeks through the Halloween season, and we will plan to start Season 5 shortly after Halloween ends (specific date will be announced as we get closer)

For the next season we plan to add in some additional season goals related to the upcoming holidays Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year to make seasons even more fun and rewarding.

Thanks for participating and thanks for being here!

In the near future we will begin performing audits and enforcing the Player Naming Policy outlined in the Rules: https://shardsofbritannia.com/about/rules

Names that do not align with the rules may be subject to force-renaming. This means that when you log in, if your name does not align with the rules, you may see a pop-up asking you to pick a new name. Please be aware that picking a new name is subject to review by the staff, so please make sure the new name aligns with the rules. All name changes will be monitored going forward.

Thanks for playing by the rules!

🎃Halloween activities will be starting soon!

Our goal is for a start date between Oct 10th to 17th with an end date between Nov 7th to 11th.

Stay tuned for more information soon! 🎃

Reminder: we are currently in the Testing Phase for the upcoming Boat, Naval Warfare & Water Creatures changes as outlined here: https://shardsofbritannia.com/news/testing-phase-for-new-boat-naval-warfare-and-water-creature-changes

A batch of fixes to issues found in the first week of testing have been deployed, fixing and correcting a number of issues. If you tested already, please help to re-test when you can.

If you wish to help test, please use the comprehensive checklist here: https://test.shardsofbritannia.com/?patchId=boat_changes

See the comprehensive patch notes here: https://test.shardsofbritannia.com/docs/?patchId=boat_changes

Thanks for your help with testing!

🚤 Announcement: Testing Phase for New Boat, Naval Warfare, and Water Creature Changes! 🌊

We're excited to announce that the Test Center is now online! You can explore the South Sea, Buccs Den, Moonglow, and Windermere regions with a fresh character database as of September 23rd. Please note that all house and boat records have been cleared.

What Is It?

The upcoming patch introduces exciting new features and improvements to enhance naval warfare, boating mechanics, and water creature interactions in our game.

Key Highlights:

• Battleships: Experience the power of new battleships equipped with 8 cannon sockets. While common models are available immediately, higher quality variants can be crafted from recipes discovered in the world.
• Cannons & Ammo: Equip your ships with cannons (7 qualities) and utilize new cannon ammo types: cannonballs for ships and grapeshot for combat.
• Greekfire: Set fire to ships and the surrounding waters for a tactical edge in battles.
• Boat Crafting Workbench: A new workbench dedicated to crafting all boating-related items.
• Niter Nodes: Mine for sodium nitrate, essential for crafting powder charges and Greekfire.
• Boat Insurance: Protect your ships with insurance, allowing recovery in the event of sinking (ships will return as dry-docked versions).

Gameplay Enhancements:

• NPC Pirate Ships: Encounter automated NPC pirate ships that can engage in combat and drop valuable loot.
• Water Creatures & Swimming: New water creatures and mounts with improved interactions for pets, including the ability to players to swim or dismount effectively.
• Tracking Ships: Utilize tracking features to locate nearby vessels on the map.
• Improved Combat Mechanics: Experience refined combat systems with more accurate cannon firing and better NPC maneuverability.

Repair & Sinking Mechanics:

• New mechanics for repairing ships at sea, handling emergencies, and the consequences of sinking.

These changes are subject to testing and balancing, and we appreciate your feedback as we refine these exciting new features!

Resources:

• Comprehensive Patch Notes: View Here
• Testing Checklist: Access Here – Please keep track of your results and notes. Once you’ve tested everything, copy your results here: Submit Results.

Important: Please do not submit your Checklist Results until you feel that you have thoroughly tested everything and it works as expected, or if you can no longer test anything. If you encounter any bugs or need assistance, reach out in Discord, and we will work to fix issues as quickly as possible.

Once any bugs are confirmed to be fixed, you can update your checklist and submit your results. This helps us ensure that we only receive comprehensive results at the end of the testing phase, and at that point we will review your notes for feedback.

Getting Help: If you encounter any bugs or issues, or if you're unsure how to test something, please reach out in our Discord: Help Channel. We're here to assist you and will address any fixes as quickly as possible!

Testing Hub: South Sea Market

• Test Vendors, boating workbenches, shipwrights, and hireling shipmates are all available here.

Moongates for Quick Travel:

• South Sea Market (safe, testing hub)
• Moonglow
• Buccs Den
• Windermere

Testing Areas in South Sea Waters: Access these areas via Serpent Pillar teleporters from the South Sea Market docks:

• Firing Range: Auto-healing ships to test your cannons (Use Serpent Pillar South of the South Sea Market).
• Water Creature Spawns: Test your skills against new water creatures (Use Serpent Pillar West of the South Sea Market).
• NPC Pirate Ships Spawn: Engage with NPC pirate ships (Use Serpent Pillar East of the South Sea Market).

Thank you for your participation and happy testing!