Balancing & Improvements

This patch has been deployed to the live server, see most recent changes at the bottom of this post

Young Player Status changes:

• increased account-time-played-as-young threshold from 40hr to 72hr
• increased per-character skill total threshold from 350 to 600
• removed ending Young status when accomplishing 80 skill-points in any skill
• unchanged: killing monsters of a high rating still has a chance to cause Young to end, with warnings occurring prior

Rotating Dungeons:

• introducing a Weekly Protected Dungeon that will be randomly selected each week on Sundays at 9am UTC
• criminal actions are prevented in the weekly dungeon (thieves can still Steal objects from the dungeon's structures though)
• weekly dungeons have a 50% reduction in loot
• boss/sequential spawns temporarily suspended in the weekly dungeon
• the Daily Dungeon feature will remain active, and Daily Dungeon should never conflict with the Weekly Protected Dungeon, allowing players to choose between: more danger for more rewards (Daily Dungeon), normal danger for normal rewards (All Other Dungeons), or less danger for less rewards (Weekly Dungeon)

Lord's Boon (Hearthstone)

• introducing Lord's Boon, a hearthstone that is blessed & soulbound to their owner
• usable by innocent players, not in a faction, with positive karma (above 0)
• can be obtained by completing a quest which will involve killing monsters at the Graveyard and possibly other tasks; see Lord Seymour in Castle Britannia (West Britain)
• can be used to teleport to a town they have bound to, uninterrupted (except death), with a 1 hour cooldown
• use this inside of a town's inn to bind your spirit to that location for use with this hearthstone

PVP Balancing & Improvements:

• added temporary PVP Protection to innocent players as they Resurrect, allowing 5 minutes of invulnerability from other players (not monsters), and will be interrupted if engaging in combat, or looting a corpse that is not their own or their pet's; this protection will only apply to innocent players with NO murder counts
• added an upper-limit for post-death murderer restrictions, now capped at 72hr, previously unlimited
• increased aggro or threat generation against murderer or criminal characters by NPCs/monsters
• added a warning to PKs if they go to attack a player that has (a) died recently, (b) been murdered in the past 24 hours, (c) if the murderer has killed any player in the last 24 hours
• prevented murderers from using item insurance & prevented from equipping insured items, items will automatically be unequipped on login if they are insured
• prevented being able to give murder counts to members of the same faction, similar to being in a guild or group
• prevented AOE spells from damaging innocent players inside houses without line of sight (Earthquake, Chain Lightning, Meteor Swarm)
• added craftable Camouflage potion for innocent players to use to prevent being tracked by players for a duration; this will be interrupted if becoming criminal; can be crafted by Alchemists
• added "call for help" speech command for players to be able to warn other players in the vicinity of a nearby murderer
• prevented the "Loot All" option on player corpses, except for the owner
• changed Hireling NPCs to be able to be used in PVP only against PKs by Innocent players, but they cannot be hired by PKs
• balanced skills/stats for Hireling NPCs to be tougher in PVE, in return their damage has been reduced in PVP in order to keep them balanced; they also now have a periodic self-bandage ability (subject to change)
• reduced Tracking range for player & pet targets by 20%
• fixed Tracking hunting mode to avoid party/friends

Reputation Improvements (preparation for upcoming additions to reputation):

• we've aligned the ways in which one can gain & lose reputation from the Ultima codex
• you can now gain Fame by: killing murderer characters you are not associated with, completing a Season challenge, completing a Quest objective, completing an Escort Quest
• you can now gain Karma by: healing, curing or resurrecting players
• prevented Fame/Karma losses from actions against players or pets you associate with (own, group, guild, faction)
• you can now lose Fame when logging in if your character has been logged out for an extended period of time (7 days or more); this will only cause a small amount of Fame loss and is NOT scaled by the amount of time you were logged out

Updates for Feb 22nd, re-deployment of this patch:

New changes:

• Added "Dungeons Status" context menu to self to be able to check the Daily & Weekly dungeons at any time
• Players will now be able loot player and pet corpses that are half-decayed to better align with expected UO mechanics; note: player corpses turn to bones at the half-way point
• Increased player & pet corpse decay time by 10m, now it will take 40 minutes to decay in total, or 20 minutes to half-decay
• Improved Hireling Mercenary commanding
• Completing the Lord Boon quest will now put the Hearthstone in your backpack rather than your bank
• Removed chance for characters with Hiding to not reveal when looting corpses that are not their own/their pet to align better with expected UO mechanics and for balancing

Fixes:

• Fixed murderers not being able to equip any items
• Fixed PVP prevention happening when trying to perform beneficial acts
• Fixed issue with not being able to complete the Lord Boon quest in some cases
• Fixed issue with adding to a stack of items not registering the new amount with the Quest tracker
• Fixed issue with Undead Crystals not stacking, not retroactive
• Fixed issue with Hearthstone not being bound on creation, retroactive fix for pre-existing items included
• Fixed issue with Weekly Dungeon spawns not being refreshed properly
• Fixed issue with un-hired hireling mercenaries attacking pets
• Fixed an issue with Karma becoming locked again after unlocking it, when gaining Karma but the total Karma remains below 0
• Fixed being able to drop backpack-bound items outside of the backpack
• Fixed issue with monsters being able to see over walls in dungeons in some cases

• Rare Royal Magic Sceptres with fireworks are now live in-game! Visit the Jester in Britain Castle to try out the fireworks! There are four different types: Lilac, Blue, Red, and Rainbow. Each one can be bought and/or found in different ways in the game, e.g., treasure chests, riddle tokens, fishing, and defeating bosses.

• Recharge crystals for these sceptres can also be found within the world. We have also added a personal jester vanity pet to the Jester vendor in Britain Castle, which can be bought with riddle tokens.

• Chuckles the Jester has hidden special riddles in all the towns of Britannia! Double-click on inanimate objects to try to find them for riddle tokens.

• New rare loot has been added to dungeon and deep water fishing.

This is a reminder of the upcoming annual dye sale of Azurite Dyetubs available from February 11th to February 26th as scheduled and written about earlier: https://shardsofbritannia.com/news/annual-pigment-enamels-donation-dyetubs

Thanks for supporting the project!

Our lottery official is now back at Britain Bank, ready to sell lottery tickets! Collect 10 raffle tokens from paragons throughout Britannia to purchase a ticket. The 1st prize will be a surprise one-of-a-kind mount, while the 2nd and 3rd prizes will remain a mystery.

Chuckles the jester has hidden special riddles in all the towns of Britannia! Double-click on inanimate objects to try to find them for riddle tokens. These tokens can be used to purchase items from the jester at Britain Castle. This event is ongoing, and new riddles will continue to be added until further notice.

• The chance to catch dungeon fishing rares has been slightly increased.

• You now have a chance to fish up a killer king crab while dungeon fishing, which can be killed for rare loot.

• New items can now be bought from Billy Bob, the pig farmer.

• The spider queen has undergone its final tweaks and is now fully operational! Gather your friends to try and take down this monster for fantastic treasures!

We'd like to welcome the newest member of the team, Kelsier! He has extensive experience with infrastructure & development and has a passion for Shards of Britannia! Kelsier will be focusing primarily on Development for the moment. Please give him a warm welcome!

• We have slightly increased the chance for some of the fishing loot in the moat and added some new items.

Occasionally, you might sail into a spot that is invalid or off-limits and cause your character and any other beings aboard the vessel to be ejected and possibly moved to land. Due to which, it may require you to use the Shipwright NPC to retrieve your boat out of the invalid position. If that happens, please try to send us the coordinates of the boat in it's invalid position if you can, so we know where to look. We apologize for the inconvenience when this happens, and will work to improve it and avoid these interruptions.

• You can now attempt to destroy the Spider Queen's torture cages by double-clicking on them when you are trapped.

• An issue with the protection scrolls for the Spider Queen's torture cage that was preventing players from reapplying them has been fixed.

• The health and damage of the Summoner's dark guardians and strange gazers have been slightly reduced. This adjustment is part of our ongoing game balancing efforts.

• A new mount has been added as a 5-year veteran reward.

House Decoration Contest - Winter 2023/24

Make sure to check out of all of the amazing player-submitted decorations in the following Discord channel: https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1186715359647113287

The contest was evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Artistic Creativity
• Playfulness and Whimsy
• Coziness and Warmth
• Use of Unconventional Materials
• Miniature World Creation
• Narrative Strength
• Depiction of Snowy Scenes
• Outdoor Decorations

Top 3 Winners (ranked by the team):

1. Fenris: Home for The Holidays for Most Cozy & Inviting
2. Taria: Gingerbread Celebrates Christmas for Most Creative/Artistic
3. Guybrush: Honey, I Shrunk Christmas! for Best Miniature World

All other entries (also winners!):

• Tommesatan: Tommesatan's Christmas Feast: Best Use of Unusual Objects

• chriss: Merry Grilling: Best Outdoor Decorations

• Zarnack: Your fight is over gingerbreads: Best Storytelling

• Swiss Precision: Santa's Sleigh Shed: Best Snowy Scene

• Kikoo: Not much snow around BUT we still have fun: Most Whimsical/Playful

Prizes:

• Tiered prize packages are being put together, and all participants will receive a prize due to their time & effort spent on the contest. Thank you for participating!
• Prizes will include:
  • Elf Food to buy stuff from Santa
  • Personalized item
  • Winter House Decorations
  • an unopened Christmas Gift box
  • more!
• Please allow a few days for the team to build the prize packages for everyone. We will send them to your account in-game and write you when it is has been sent.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, the team enjoyed every minute of looking around at your creations, fantastic work!

We would like to inform you that GM Shroud and CM Milamber have recently stepped away from our team. As is the nature of dynamic volunteer teams, changes like these are part of our evolving journey. We are extremely grateful to both of them for their time & contributions and wish them nothing but the best. Our team remains dedicated to the project and we look forward to continuing this adventure with your support. Thank you for being here with us!

We apologize for the delays with judging the winter house decoration contest. The team is currently backed up but we would like to complete this as quickly as possible thank you for your patience and thanks again for participating amazing work everyone!

• Congratulations to the winners of the Christmas lottery! 1st: Lord God, 2nd: Loro Wenn, and 3rd: Sharky. We will be in contact soon with your prizes!

We're aware that some newly placed crafting stations are not receiving their Container attributes as expected and working on a resolution

We're aware of an issue causing houses not to decay. We're looking into it and hope to have a fix in the coming days. We will do our best to avoid refreshing all houses in order to avoid inconveniencing players watching the houses any further. The goal is, once we have identified the root cause and come up with a solution, we will start the current stage timers over again, meaning IDOCs would be continue to be IDOC until they collapse after 1-3 days as expected normally. More details will follow when we know more

UPDATE: We have identified the issue and deployed a fix. After the daily restart at Jan 13, 9am UTC, any houses that might be IDOC currently will have their times reset but will remain as IDOC, and then they will collapse within the normal IDOC timeframe after that. We have also extended the decay time for objects that fall to the ground from a collapsed house. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience!

We're aware that people are having issues with organizer bags not functioning or with containers not offering the "Set Container Type" option when expected.

UPDATE: We've identified this issue to be related to bags being put into Secured containers in a house losing their "Organizer" properties and the "Set Container Type" option. We have deployed a hotfix to resolve the issue. If you continue to have issues with Organizer Bags, please allow for a full server reboot and try again. If, after a full server reboot, the issue persists, please write a bug report in-game and provide as many details as possible on how to reproduce it. Thanks!

Game Update: January 2024

Introduction

It's a new year, and a great time to lay out what's going on with our game. As we step into 2024, we're excited to share our vision and the proactive steps we're taking to ensure the game's ongoing success and evolution. This update includes a rundown of our priority items and our action plan for the months ahead.

Your engagement is vital to us. Whether you're a dedicated player or a valued supporter contributing through donations or subscriptions, your role in our community is indispensable. We're incredibly grateful for your continued support and enthusiasm. Together, let's make this year the best one yet for our game!

What we are working on

New Player enhancements & New Player Island

• Ocllo/Haven Island with New Player Dungeon & more content for newer players
• Extension of Young Player duration (providing more time to play as a Young Player)
• See more of our current New Player plans here: https://trello.com/c/FQUuKTgr

PVP balancing (player versus player)

• On-going balancing efforts for player-versus-player encounters
• See more of our current PVP Balance plans here: https://trello.com/c/YoKynuNu

Multi-level building support

• We've achieved some success with adding multi-level support to the game via our SoB Launcher game extension
• We will need to perform Unity updates to every building in the game to complete this feature
• We are still experimenting and is not guaranteed to be added to the game

Naval Warfare

• cannons
• new mining material & crafting recipes to obtain
• grappling (for piracy & fetching loot from wreckages)
• NPC warships

New water content & water pets

• Will be able to use cannons to take out water creatures & NPC ships
• New pets coming: Shark (aquatic mount), Water Wyvern (amphibious) & Water Dragon (aquatic)
• Audits to collision inside of water that currently blocks passage in some spots
• Completion of collision around incomplete islands

House Collapse changes

• We're considering offering house decay warnings to players on login if their account owns a house and it needs refreshing (same for boats)
• We're considering offering to send Patron-bound items to the owner's account if a house collapses
• Houses that are IDOC (in danger of collapsing) will soon have their contents put into barrels when the house collapses, requiring players to punch their way through the barrels to look for loot
• Considering: IDOC Announcement Board for players to see houses that are nearing collapse

What is being planned or in discussion

Combat Balancing

• We've got ongoing discussions in the team to try to balance combat. Recently we have tried some different changes and they were reverted for further review.
• We plan to conduct more testing in the near future

PVE Content

• We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our existing PVE content and explore opportunities to introduce new content
• Our plans include continuous addition of more exciting content, which will feature new abilities for monsters, making each adventure engaging and unpredictable

Crafter Pets (previously Tinkering Golems)

• Introducing new pet options for crafters, currently in discussion: Craftable Construct beings, Ore Elementals that can be subjugated & tamed via Tinkering trap
• These pets will have durability instead of health and will need repaired with materials like Ore & Reagents
• These pets are intended to be useful for both PVP & PVE

Evolving Pets/End-game Taming

• We're looking into the possibility of end-game pets, commonly referred to Evo Pets in the UO community
• These pets would start out as smaller, weaker beings and you would train them to grow and evolve into tougher beings, with different species to pick from
• We've got a few new pet models ready to use for something like this, like beautiful new Dragons

Player Jails

• We're discussing the possibility of adding a Jailing system where players can "press charges" against their murderers. The culprits could then be captured and sent to jail to serve a sentence for their actions. This is a rough idea, and there's no solid plans or ideas yet.

What we've completed recently

Seasonal Challenges

• We've completed Season 1 and have just started Season 2
• Seasonal challenges offer a large variety of tasks for players to engage in, accruing points to unlock vast rewards

New mini-games

• Snowball Fight (available now near Windemere)
• Jousting (available now in Vesper)
• MOBA Game (was used with Chucky Doll for Halloween, will continue to iterate)
• more to come: Life Size Chess, and Texas Hold'em Poker

Water & Boating Expansion

• We've expanded the waters of the world. Previously only 2 regions were prepared for players to drive their boats around in, now every online region is capable of being sailed in.

Music & Sound Additions

• We've deployed several custom Music tracks written by previous team-member Beekel & some additional tracks sourced elsewhere by our team
• We've also added dozens of new sounds that may sound exactly like our favorite classic game!
• We will continue to expand and add more as time permits, including additional or replacement Sounds, Ambience tracks, and Music
• Disclaimer: All recognizable sound-effects incorporated in our project have been sourced from the US Library of Congress and are classified as Public Domain content.

There's much more that we haven't listed here, to see a list of recent patch notes, check out our News page here: https://shardsofbritannia.com/search/query:patchnote

Marketing

We periodically run paid ad campaigns on popular marketing platforms like Google, TikTok and other social media outlets from time to time. As you may know, advertising is very costly, so we are unable to run paid ads all the time. We try to run campaigns when it is strategically advantageous.

We've recently completed a polishing pass on our website to improve education for new players & to improve the general flow for new visitors, as this is where we point advertising viewers to when they click on our ad.

Joining Hands with Our Community

Fostering Positivity & Good Vibes

• We highly value the power of positive and productive interactions among our players. While we recognize the importance of expressing one's thoughts and emotions, it's crucial to ensure these expressions contribute positively to our community. Voicing opinions in a manner that isn't constructive or beneficial could potentially discourage new players from participating in discussions or trying out our game. Critiques about the game are not discouraged; however, we request you to frame them constructively.

Spreading the Word

• Your help in promoting our game would be greatly appreciated! We invite all members to share their experiences with friends, family, or anyone who might be interested. Whether they're fans of Ultima games or Ultima Online, or simply enjoy online sandbox games without any prior knowledge of Ultima, your word-of-mouth recommendations can make a significant difference. Please remember to do so respectfully and considerately.

Reminder, as previously scheduled, Xmas Activities have come to an end. Santa will remain until the end of the month for you to finalize any trades & purchases.

The Christmas House Decoration contest deadline is Jan 12th and the judging will commence at that time with prizes announced shortly after, you can enter and see current entries here: https://discord.com/channels/369023244038045697/1186715359647113287

The Christmas Lottery deadline is Jan 15th and the drawing will commence at that time with prizes announced shortly after

Happy new year!

• Some items that can be stolen in dungeons have been fixed. Previously, players were unable to see these items in order to steal them.

The Map page has been updated to reflect the new world boundaries for boating: https://map.shardsofbritannia.com/

Edit: The map has been updated once more to add Yellow lines along the shared waterways/harbors in Yew/Skara, Britain/Cove, and Minoc/Wind. The following labels have also been added: Incomplete Area (off-limits), Castle Britannia, Yew Jails, Snowball Fight Arena

We've deployed the following fixes:

• fixed an issue with lag occurring, that is perceivable to all other players in the region, when players log-in or transfer regions
• fixed an issue with Mining Caves not being mineable

• Selection issues with the 4-year veteran ethereal spider mount have been fixed. You will need to re-log into the game.

• New Corrupted Dragons have now been added inside dungeon Destard
• For a limited time, you can now buy 5 noble coins from the vendor in Shame for 15 Dungeon Tokens

We're receiving reports that players are seeing graphical glitches or display issues with the in-game mini-map; it's not intended for there to be any changes to the mini-map at this time, so we will be investigating the cause and working on a fix ASAP. If a workaround is found, we will post again with more information

EDIT: If you are having this issue, please try switching regions to resolve it (eg travel from Britain to Minoc.) We'll continue to investigate in the meantime.

We've deployed the long-awaited sound and music tweaks, where we will utilize more of the wonderful tracks that Beekel composed for us, in addition to replacing many sound effects. Turn your volume up!

There'll be more to come in this area, however we hope you enjoy what we are able to provide today. Please note that as part of the patch, it was necessary to update two of our largest asset files, britanniamain and loudungeons - these will download on your next connection attempt. For anyone with slower connections, we apologise in advance!

• The animations for the 4-year veteran ethereal spider mount have been fixed.

• New items have been added to the moat fishing loot, and drop rates have been slightly increased.

The Item Fixer NPCs have a new option to fix Vanity Pet Cages that don't work when double-clicking them

New items added to the fishing SOS loot!