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

The upcoming Fishing SOS changes are delayed slightly while we continue work on it, however, the container organization changes will go out tonight during the daily restart.

Go play!

Apologies folks, we'll need a little longer to finish our tasks. This could be up to an hour, but should be sooner. Thanks as always for your patience.

We'll be offline for up to an hour during this evening's maintenance window @ 9am UTC. Thanks for your patience.

The Wiki Bot is temporarily offline, it'll return to service after it's had a pina colada or two on the beach.

We're back online. Go play!

During the next restart period (9am UTC 16th September) we will remain offline for up to 2 hours to perform extended maintenance.

Thank you for your patience.

We are aware of ongoing lag issues that some users are experiencing. At this stage, we are waiting for a core issue to be rectified at our host, at which time we will most likely move back to our original datacentre.

The latest advice is that they are working with their network equipment vendor to patch and resolve the issue. Unfortunately this seems to be taking an extended amount of time, however as soon as we are advised that this issue is resolved, we will in turn advise you all.

Apologies for this, it is out of our hands at this time. We know a few of you have suggested moving to an alternative host, however please understand that is not a realistic avenue for us at this time due to both the cost and time involved. We are not a simple 'single server' solution like a RunUO/ServUO shard.

We are looking for ideas for the new Discord logo. Are you handy with Photoshop? We'd love to see what you can come up with. If you are interested in helping out and want to submit an image to be considered for the rebranding, please do so on our forums: https://forums.shardsofbritannia.com/topic/30/discord-logo-submissions Thanks in advance

This is a reminder to all that placement of objects outside the boundaries of your house foundation is not intended. Objects placed in this fashion are subject to removal, with a priority given to those that block access to land masses in any way.

Thank you for your understanding.

We're back online. Thanks again for your patience.

Apologies for the delay, we are running a little overtime with the maintenance work. We will aim to be back online by 11am UTC (ideally before that!).

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.