Recent News List

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.

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

Unidentified musical instruments will now properly identify

Sorry, everyone, we noticed that some of the fixes we applied during the nightly restart had a flaw and we had to shut down unexpectedly. The server was only up for a short time after, but we still had to roll back to the time of the nightly restart. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be back online as quickly as possible.

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.

*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.

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

After next restart, cut off heads should display the full resurrection value of the dead.

• Fixed issue with house security not working for Owners in some cases (you may need to release/re-secure containers if they are affected)
• Fixed issue with the Buccs Den/Minoc archway teleporters getting pets stuck
• Increased paralyze immunity duration
• Earth elemental spawn chance added to Mining
• Fixed issue with being able to use the Moongate in Limbo while dead, it's intended for you to resurrect using the Shrines first before leaving
• Fixed an issue with pre-written books not being useable
• Added tooltip to Guildstone to explain how to move it
• Fixed issue with being able to use crafting tools from the bank

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

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

After next restart, Karma should be functioning properly.

• Blacksmith/Weaponsmith/Armorsmith NPCs will now carry more items for sale with differing stock selections from each other.

• Fixed issue with being unable to accept friend requests from the notification panel, optimized adding/removing friends in general
• Dragging resources/stackable items to the hotbar will now default to a "Command" button, bypassing the old "Resource" style button, preventing hotbar icons from saying "No Items Available" when there actually is items in your backpack
• Lumberjacking has been optimized to get a few more chops out of each tree
• Fixed issue with crafting favorites going to the wrong recipe or none at all
• Fixed issue with pets not casting
• Removed the macro interrupted speech when a target is not acquired
• Fixed issue with being able to over-stuff packhorses
• Tracking will now be interrupted by damage received and death
• Fixed issue with Guild security options being available when no guild is assigned to house
• Fixed issue with stacks of objects not responding to player split requests in some cases
• Fixed issue with stacks of gold being created over the stack limit size of 60k in some cases, like on monsters
• Potion kegs have been reworked, fixing the issue with potions being eaten & improving their general performance and behavior, like with auto-filling kegs when crafting potions & you may notice the right-click options look/behave slightly different than before
• Fixed issue with released pets names staying blue erroneously, they should go back to their wild name color (gray usually); they will also be aggressive once again

Please help us welcome our newest teammate, Sol. Sol is currently training to be a Counselor and will soon be on the front lines helping players out when possible. Welcome to the team Sol! For those of you curious about what Counselors do, please see: https://forums.legendsofultima.online/d/45-about-the-counselor-role

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

Non-faction players can no longer create collision with, heal, or give beneficial spells to faction players

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

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

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.

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.

• Dyes, used for changing the color of a dyetub, are now single-use and stackable
• Added looting rights as described at https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/e/en/notoriety
• Unused secondary skills removed from the secondary skill window, currently all of the secondary skills are under review and disabled
• Fixed issue with being able to sell more than vendors can afford when the bill of sale exceeds their budget
• Added vendor message letting users know how much gold the vendor has to spend when trying to over-sell; AIn the future we will work to make it more like UO where the vendor will buy what they can and leave you with what didn't sell, rather than block the transaction, making it easier to use for players
• Added missing resource counter UI update to vendor transactions
• Fixed issue with "Quick Loot" context menu option not working on items inside corpses
• Added 500ms cooldown between item-pickup actions to prevent spamming movement of items
• Added eating sound when eating food
• Updated Treasure Map window with new in-game map
• Removed "Stack All" options from containers, as these need to be redesigned
• KNOWN ISSUE: Barber NPC's buy window is not working, hopefully this isn't happening to other vendor types also

Public Service Announcement

• Please try not to abandon your pets, you will lose them if you do. They stay in the world if you log out if you don't stable them. Over time your pet will start to wander, looking for you, eventually releasing you from their control. <potential herding opportunity here?>

Changes from last 24 hours:

• Issue with not being able to steal from a stacked object resolved (requires another server reboot, sorry)
• Improvements to Trading, let us know if the trade acceptance issue proceeds or not
• Removed the ability to gain skills from scroll spell-casts
• Removed use-case options from runes
• UI/Window performance improvements, including reducing the amount of UI/window refreshes, you may notice a slight delay between window updates because of this, and even possibly a performance improvement
• Warg pets removed, we did not intend to spawn those in at this time and they are forcibly removed
• Removed Vendor Buy/Sell confirmation window popup

Changes from earlier:

• Moved Torch over to torch equipment slot instead of right-hand, does not affect old torches
• Treasure hunting temporarily disabled; working on setting up the locations still
• Pet AI issues resolved, was causing pets to not attack and maybe other things too
• Stablemaster minimum-range to check for pets reduced to improve pet summoning
• Added pet position validation when using 'follow' commands to assist with getting pets un-stuck while we work to improve the root cause
• Horses set to 0 taming difficulty, does not affect old horses
• Added some missing interruptions to Mining/Lumberjacking/Fishing to prevent performing other tasks while harvesting
• Resolved issue with bladed weapon target actions not checking for distance
• Fixed issue with trying to use food in places where it was inaccessible saying "you feel more refreshed" while also saying "you can't access that"
• Fixed issue with sometimes getting a backpack from corpses
• Fixed issue with trying to open corpses failing and not showing a container window
• Added notification and system message when being murdered to guide players to Reputation window to report the murders if desired

The interactive map has now moved to:

https://map.legendsofultima.online

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

• 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

An issue with Fishing erroneously saying "go outside of town for gains" when you are already outside of town has been resolved. This hotfix will be available after the next scheduled server restart.