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.

Group Combat, Shared Loot

• group healthbars with heal/cure/bandage buttons
• group consent added to toggle allowing combat/looting between group mates & you will be asked if you want to consent when first joining a group
• group auto-loot sharing added, will distribute loot between nearby groupmates when using auto-loot on non-player-corpses
• group invite setting added to toggle allowing all group members inviting to the group without needing to be promoted

Criminal Action Confirmation

• now has 3 options: Allow Criminal Actions, Ask Me First, Prevent Criminal Actions
• change this setting in Character Settings under the Combat tab

Combat Target Restriction

• wiki page added: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/combat#target-restrictions-new-feature
• allows players to restrict selecting mobs to a certain type like: All, Monsters, Players, and more
• added to character settings & can also click the top-right corner button next to minimap to quickly change this option, previously this button changed the Confirm Criminal Action toggle
• this option is meant to reduce misclicks when trying to select certain types of mobs in close encounters with lots of mobs
• example: if you set this to Monsters, then you will only be able to select Monsters when clicking mobs to target them for combat
• should not affect spell-targets or other item-based manual targeting, and will still be able to target mobs normally with those actions

General Combat-Related Changes

• using bandage self, bandage last or bandage button from group healthbar will no longer change current-target on use
• potion toxicity on self-healthbar will now only appear when toxicity is above 0
• when logging out in a house you have permission to or in a public inn, you will no longer be required to wait 2 minutes before timing out due to recent combat with non-player beings, previously attacking monsters or other beings would affect this
• added Enter Combat w/Spellcast option so that mages without melee skills don't have to toggle warmode after casting
• you can now see your guildmates/groupmates when they are dead, regardless of if they are in war mode or not

New Custom Client Actions

• Custom Client Action 3 is now Nearest Target option
• Custom Client Action 4 is now Cycle Target option
• both of these options work in conjunction with the new target restriction option
• these actions can be set to hotkeys under Settings -> Keyboard

Hotfix from today:

• resolved town vendors stealing people's money when trying to buy Used items from them
• town vendors should finally clear out their Used inventory regularly

Hotfixes/changes from last week:

• resolved not being able to give murder count to characters when dying from Poison spell in some cases
• poison will now fall off if the caster is a player and dies around the victim
• fixed issue with house sign not setting owner after transferring house sometimes showing previous owner or no owner at all

• After the next scheduled restart, the game will remain offline until the housing launch time of 10AM US Eastern/2pm UTC
• Further information on housing is available on our wiki here: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/housing
• Cost, plot size, lockdowns etc will be available to you once you purchase a housing tool
• The final list of available launch houses may not 100% reflect what is shown on the wiki. We'll advise further with the launch announcement
• The area north of the town of Minoc is now available to players. This will also be one of the regions where you'll be able to place a house, as per the wiki article

Some performance updates are being applied. Should be back in just a few minutes.

Go play!

The Britain Sewers are now open. This is a young-only dungeon, and designed to be quite simple to survive and skill up in for new players.

• Updated crafting window Repair button to show how to make a repair deed
• CAPTCHA improvements
• Fixed issue with some characters being unable to log in if they were previously unable to complete the transition from Celador
• Fixed issue with trees being "too far away" in North Minoc area
• Logging out in a dungeon will result in being teleported to Limbo when logging back in, if logging in 20+ minutes after logging out
• Marking runes is now possible inside Dungeons on Levels 1 except for Despise being able to mark on Levels 2 & 3
• The following actions are prevented around the nearby areas surrounding dungeon entrances, both interior and exterior:
  • gaining skills
  • marking runes
  • casting field spells
  • dropping objects

Reminder! Sign-up for the tournament closes this Saturday!

Event Details: https://legendsofultima.online/news/events/add/1v1-pvp-tournament-and-royal-rumble-event

Sign-Up Link: https://event-signup.uo4.life

Restart has been completed. Thanks for your patience!

• Fixed an issue causing guards to be unresponsive.
• Fixed an issue causing murderer to be unable to leave dungeons.
• Fixed an issue causing recent tames to retain heal over time effects.
• Fix an issue that would cause a rare crash condition.

Water definitions have been added to every town! In those areas:

• fishing should be possible around all of the towns now
• creatures will no longer spawn in water
• players will no longer be able to go swimming

"We have found a place of great evil in the region North of Minoc. Trackers have informed us that a Northern Cave is filled with a monstrous and deadly Arachnid. We fear that this beast is linked to the creatures on the Peninsula. If they launch an attack on Minoc, we will be unprepared to defend against them. We beg you, find their nest and extinguish them. We will forever be in your debt warriors.”

~Julie the Artisan of Minoc

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!

• Added CAPTCHA to Mining, Lumberjacking, Fishing
• Private houses can now have 1 vendor
• Fixed issue with Max Vendor limit on houses being calculated incorrectly (if your house already has too many vendors, they may remain for now but you will be unable to add more)
• Fixed issue with clockwork golem (possibly other recipes) not crafting
• Fixed issue with the unfinished keg being treated as a container and causing items dropped to them to disappear
• Fixed issue with attacking a pet when the owner is hidden nearby causing the pet to flag crim and the owner to get guard whacked
• Fixed "drink" option existing on prized fish (does not affect old fish)
• Fishing outside of town now has a chance to spawn a snake
• Potent potion recipes removed since Gardening skill is not accessible right now

*Torches should now occupy the torch slot and not unequip the right hand

*Killing/stealing from someone in town and looting with another multibox character should now be prevented.

As you may be aware, earlier this week we identified several users involved in abusing some economic vulnerabilities that were discovered. At that time we had to roll back the server to recover from the impact and to protect our newly established economy.

After that incident occurred the players involved began to launch an attack on the LOU infrastructure (DDoS) causing our servers to become inaccessible. The players involved have since been banned and ejected from the community, but the attacks continue to occur occasionally.

At this time we are doing everything we can to prevent outages, but there may be times when the server will have to be brought down unexpectedly in order to recover.

We will be monitoring things closely to try and prevent downtime and loss of progress, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and support through our growing pains.

Thanks for your patience during the downtime, we have received word that the issue is now resolved and we are now bringing our services back online including the game server. See you in-game and thanks again for your support

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.