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.

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.

Test Center is now ready for transition testing! A few items to note:

What you'll see on Test Center is not 100% reflective of what you will see on launch day. There will be no lore etc, this is functional testing ONLY. We don't want to spoil everything!

  • Your existing characters from Live have been copied to Test Center, and the existing regions are also present (i.e. your houses etc will be there)

  • You may be presented with a region selection screen with a list of Celador regions instead of logging directly in like normal. This is fine, please choose a region to spawn in.

  • The world is vacant of spawns EXCEPT bankers - bankers will sell pouches, which you can change into transition bags by putting them in your bank and right clicking them

  • Near each bank will be a pedestal with a 'Tome of the Witch' sitting on it. When you're ready to commence transition, double click that and follow the bouncing ball

  • Once you are in the transition area, you can interact with the large glowing gate to take the final step to Britannia

  • Once you're in Britannia, you can type 'i must consider my legacy' to see your token count

  • The Britannia token vendor is not available for testing at this time

Please do report any bugs you encounter - we also have full telemetry live on the transfer, so we should be catching anything and everything, but your assistance with reports would be appreciated regardless. We want to launch on time, so it is critical we get this part right!

Please note that, going forward from today, Test Center will no longer be available for general testing. Our focus now will be preparation for 'D-day', and as such, TC may be regularly offline, in different testing states, or inaccessible for most players. Additionally, Test Center vendors and editing characters will not be available, in order to properly simulate a live environment.

Finally, please bear with us in this final march towards our soft launch. There's still a lot of work to be done to make this a reality. Thanks in advance for your help, and we look forward to making Britannia a reality!

The server is temporarily offline due to an outage with the hosting provider. It was unexpected to have any downtime associated with this maintenance, but something has come up unexpectedly, so we appreciate your patience. We are monitoring the situation and will alert you as soon as the server is coming back online, or we know something further. <3

We are aware of the issue with the official map and are working to resolve it. Thanks for your patience.

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!

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.

Just a reminder from the article posted last week: https://legendsofultima.online/news/server-is-up-again-1

Any characters, items, and houses that were left behind in Celador are no longer accessible.

If you have any characters stuck in Limbo/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 if no one is available to help immediately.

We are back online. Have fun, go play!

The interactive map has now moved to:

https://map.legendsofultima.online

Please update your bookmarks! We have also updated the wiki.

We are experiencing ongoing issues at our host as a result of a maintenance/upgrade window. We were advised there would be no impact to customers during this time, however clearly that is not the case.

There is no ETA at this time and you may experience odd behaviour or inaccessibility with the game or any of the related services.

Thank you for your patience. We will update you with more information as it comes to light.

Earlier today, we identified an economy breaking issue. While we won't go into full detail on this, what we can say in summary is that a small group of players leveraged an exploit. Our telemetry identified this and we acted as soon as we noticed it.

The end result is that group of players have immediately had their accounts banned. We do not tolerate this behavior and there is no recourse for it. The side effect of is the detrimental effect on the economy. Based on a lot of deliberations and investigations over the last 7 hours, we have concluded that the only way to 100% protect the economy and our game is to execute a rollback.

The time that we are rolling back to will be 16:00 UTC/12:00 US EST on June 23rd. This is roughly 30 hours of play time. We completely appreciate that this is a less than ideal circumstance, and as such would like to reward our players that obey the rules and play faithfully with an additional gift that you'll receive on your next login, as well as a reset of all power hour and level cap timers. In addition, power hours for the next 24 hours will offer double the gain chance that they usually do.

Rest assured we have also made (and thoroughly tested) additional changes that will go a long way to ensure that this does not happen again. We have also made improvements in terms of notification for this particular issue, so that on the off chance it DOES somehow happen again, the lag time between the action and the discovery of said action will improve significantly.

We, like you, are incredibly frustrated with this situation and have had to take time away from our jobs and families to try and put things back in order. We hope you understand our approach to this, and look forward to hanging out with you in Britannia again shortly.

We'll be coming back online within the next few minutes.

It's not going to answer every question, but we hope we've covered the important ones! Something to read while waiting for the main event:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/transition-faq

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.

  1. 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!

It's been a bumpy ride, no question about it. Thank you all for bearing with us during this time. Today, we broke another record for number of players online, as more and more folks jump on board with our little project.

With that being said, we absolutely have some growing pains to deal with, and you're seeing evidence of that right now with little annoyances like the occasional crash, disconnects when teleporting and the like. We do have a plan in place to address all of this, however we want to be transparent with you and let you know that this will likely take us well into the coming week before we potentially fix the underlying issues and we're able to achieve better stability.

Rest assured though, we firmly believe it's just a matter of time before we have this sorted and we are working overtime to get these challenges resolved. In as much as we can of course, as we all have families, lives and jobs - this is a hobby for us after all!.

Thanks for bearing with us, it's been an amazing ride so far. We look forward to more to come, and can't wait to get past these initial stability challenges, turn on some more systems (treasure hunting and housing are next off the list) and create more content for you all!

-- The Team

It's time! Housing will be launched at 10am US Eastern Time/2pm UTC on Saturday 24th July. Some notes for you all:

  • To build a house, you'll need to visit an architect and purchase a house placement tool. These will be available at the mentioned time and not before
  • Both gold and legacy tokens can be used to contribute towards the cost of a house
  • Pricing for houses can be seen once you purchase a house placement tool
  • We will work towards having previews of each house available on the wiki in the next few days
  • Valid areas for house placement are generally flat, green grass. Use your minimap to check these more accurately
  • Please note that housing will NOT be available in Britain and Minoc/Cove to begin with. This is to ensure we can maintain an acceptable level of performance in the short term. We will give advance warning prior to these regions opening up for housing
  • Within the next 48 hours, we will also launch an additional region north of Minoc. This will add a significant amount of extra housing space
  • In total, you will have three regions to choose from in which to initially place a house - Yew, Wind and "North Minoc". Below is a link to an artist's impression of these regions to assist you:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/images/housing-launch.png

Additional features:

  • Guilds will be available, via purchase and placement of a guildstone at a house
  • Housing vendors will also be available

Thanks for bearing with us while we worked against everything that's got in our way since launch. We would have liked to have housing kicked off sooner, however unfortunately it wasn't meant to be.

Happy house hunting!

Server will be restarting in about 5 minutes. ETA about 15 minutes. Thank you!

As stated in our previous announcement https://legendsofultima.online/news/the-conclusion-of-celador Celador will be shutting down within the next 24 hours, and access to any remaining characters, items, and houses left in Celador will be lost.

We are aware some people have had issues going through the transition portal in Inbetween, so if you have any characters already in the Inbetween region, you will not lose access to them. We will work with those remaining on a case-by-case basis to get all stuck characters' transitions completed.

There is no specific time for the shutdown to occur yet, as it is subject to staff availability, but we will post again once we know more. Thanks!