Recent News List

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

The Paralyze spell now interrupts the victim's spell cast on success

The use of an invisibility potion now breaks spell casts

Skeleton Keys now properly open chests of any level regardless of lockpicking skill

Carpentry kegs have been fixed and no longer produce deeds

Unidentified musical instruments will now properly identify

The maintenance is complete, nice and early. Why are you reading this?! Go play!

*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.

Today on Memorial Day, we honor and remember all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. We are eternally grateful and forever indebted!

Map marker icons have had an optimization pass and have been re-enabled. Just a heads up that we may need to further optimize or change the way the map marker icons appear but will try this for now.

The server is back online.

• Mana Vampire can be cast upon thyself again and will properly do a Resist and Gain check, where previously it would prevent it.

The issue with the official map has been resolved, and it is now available again.

Go play!

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

• Added looting rights as described at https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/notoriety
• A previous issue with Looting Rights not keeping track of Bard damage has been resolved

We've identified an issue with Looting Rights not being handled properly for bards killing monsters with provocation and have disabled criminal checks on monster corpses for the time being while we work the remaining issues out.

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.

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!

• There's a known issue with some objects not being able to be unpacked in houses such as, but not limited to: cauldron
• There's a known issue with some objects being able to be placed outside of the house foundation/walls, or in the yard

Warning: It is not intended to be able to place objects outside of the foundation/walls of your house. If you have objects placed out of bounds they may be subject to adjustments to make them in-bounds, or in some cases removed if they are blocking pathways. The small front yards are intended only for vendors or a guildstone.

Reminder: the Small Workshop and Large Patio houses are temporarily disabled for fixing, and we will try to make them available ASAP

• 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

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.

We're very excited to provide the community with a preview of our upcoming inscription crafting overhaul. This overhaul will have far reaching implications for every craft and playstyle out there in Britannia! Check out the full preview here on the wiki.

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/e/en/dev-letters/inscription-overhaul

The interactive map has now moved to:

https://map.legendsofultima.online

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

We'll remain offline for now while we work to solve this latest batch of issues. No ETA at this time.

The following changes are now live on the Test Center:

• Lumberjacking has been refreshed to be more in alignment with UO

• Successful harvests will produce up to 20 logs per swing

• Trees now have a maximum amount of wood that can be harvested

• Harvest bonuses removed and Prospector's Tool disabled for now, needs redesigned

• Kindling/apples removed from normal lumberjacking routine

• Can now use blade to cut trees to gather kindling

• Can chop trees in town, but resources are halved

A bug allowing users to repeatedly magically lock dungeon chests for gains has been patched

After next restart, Karma should be functioning properly.

Secure Trading issues:

• we've received several reports of players having to click Accept repeatedly until the trade finally accepts

Corpse Looting issues:

• we're aware that many or all corpses are not appearing when attempting to open them and the best-known workaround is to use the Loot All context option

Pet Commanding issue:

• we're aware of an issue with pets not engaging in combat again as expected after being idle; best-known workaround is to say All Stop and then try your commands again

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.