Pending a nightly restart, the following changes have been made:

Bone Crafting has been introduced! This will allow players to harvest bones and ethereal bones from gravedigging, and craft bone armor, as well as bone crafting stations for their houses. Bone Armor will become more useful, as players with > 80 Forensic Evaluation (e.g. Necromancers) may meditate in Bone Armor and will enjoy the benefit of the passive mana regen being cut in half compared to non-necro players. Bone items require both Tailoring and Forensic Evaluation skill to craft.

Additionally the following changes have been made:

A bug allowing players to actively meditate in armor heavier than leather has been patched. The Necromancer spell Death Ward now lasts 5 minutes, with a one minute cooldown.

Happy holidays from the Shards of Britannia staff!

Twelve days of Xmas is about to commence. Santa has set up shop outside of Britain in Paws town. For naughty Britannians, Evil Santa has set up shop outside of Minoc next to the Buccaneer's Den archway teleporter. You will be able to talk to Santa each day, per account, to receive a gift. There may be appearances of Krampus or other evil holiday spirits throughout the event as well, stay tuned for more updates.

Note: Santa will not start handing out presents until 9am UTC Christmas Morning, but if you are logged in starting at midnight UTC on Christmas Eve you will get a gift to open early! :)

Event details from Discord: https://discord.gg/CuwaP9sbep?event=922085498011398165

• Some noxious decay bug fixes have been added to avoid the "endless heal" scenario.
• A bug causing the faction pillar to be a stingy bastard has been fixed.
• Fey slayers have been removed from crafting tables, as we have very few fey mobs at this time.

As you may have seen, an article was published today announcing a business deal between Citadel Studios and another game company. This was also the first we have heard of this news at Shards of Britannia, as we find out news the same time the general public does. There's been no mention of what this means for the future or if any changes are expected for community servers. Due to that, we are continuing business as usual. We will, of course, keep you updated if we learn of any other news or updates, but for now we don't know anything more than what's been said in the article posted. Rest assured, our work will not stop and we will continue to push forward. That's all for now, thanks for reading!

• Fixed an issue preventing skeleton keys from receiving their decay timers, this was an unintended side effect of another hotfix recently
• Fixed an issue with being able to use objects inside of secured containers when you don't have permission to
• Fixed an issue with being able to open Lottery Boxes when they are not inside your backpack
• Fixed an issue with not being able to use/decorate locked down objects that are stacked on top of each other due to line-of-sight, you should now be able to use/decorate objects up to the ceiling

• Fixed an issue causing players to see "you can't do that so quickly" erroneously, as well as preventing players from teleporting in quick succession
• Tracking distance is now greatly reduced when inside of a Dungeon as part of the ongoing balancing

The server will remain offline for up to 2 hours during the next restart window (9am UTC on 21st December) while we conduct some extended maintenance.

Thanks for your patience.

On Christmas Eve, the gravedigging vendor will cease to sell Santa's Candle, the item used to trigger the Santa Claws boss event. After Christmas Day, he will be gone for good, along with his Ethereal Reindeer.

The Colosseum can now only be reached by using the skiff at Buccaneer's Den docks, or the skiff at Britain's docks south of the bank (the larger docks slightly to the south-east, where the Town Crier calls out the latest gossip). To be clear, skiffs are the smaller boats, not the big ships.

To leave the Colosseum's island, 2 different skiffs are available to take you back, north to Britain, or west to Buccaneer's Den.

We've deployed a hotfix for the issue preventing players from releasing objects with collision. The full fix requires a server restart, until then, you can say "I wish to move this" to bring up the Decorating Tool and use the release button from there and it will work.

Pending a restart:

• Faction guards are now mounted and quite fast.
• Faction members' names will now be displayed in special colors: Minax - Cyan; Shadowlords - Green; True Britannians - Purple
• All warhorses purchased from here on out will only be rideable by faction members.

The following changes have been made to help prevent getting items stuck inside of house walls causing them to be unable to be retrieved.

• Can no longer drop items in places that are blocked or that you cannot see
• Can no longer release locked down items that are in blocked locations or in a spot you cannot see

Note: In some cases, to decorate and move objects on top of each other you may be required to place items in an open spot first and then use the house Decorate Tool to move them to the desired place

Item Collision issue:

• Fixed an issue with object collision not being updated/removed when moving or picking-up items that have collision

Notes:

• Escorts and pop-up Orc Camps have been re-enabled & town vendors are vulnerable again
• Vendors & dungeon chests have been respawned

Fixes:

• Fixed issue with SOS treasure not being created in some cases
• Fixed being able to drop items into other beings' backpacks in some cases
• Fixed Fame & Karma values not being rounded
• Fixed Meditation being interrupted when switching targets
• Fixed issue with Magic Reflection not causing notoriety actions in some cases
• Fixed issue with some Ostards not being able to traded, bought, and/or controlled by players with no or low taming skill
• Fixed issue with being able to loot equipped items from dead NPC paperdolls (special items obtained this way are subject to removal)
• Fixed issue with skeleton key being used inadvertently in some cases
• Fixed issue with not being able to trade Fire Beetles or other pets in some cases due to "having items on them"
• Fixed issue with stacked objects not showing the count in it's name in some cases
• Attempted to fix edge case with releasing a pet sometimes causing notoriety action erroneously

Changes:

• Increased leash distance for pop-up Orc Camp mobs
• Pet abandonment time limit increased from 3 days to 7 days
• Blank Scrolls inventory minimum increased from 20 to 333 on Scribe vendors
• Create Food spell now creates food directly in your backpack if you have room instead of requesting you to target the ground
• Escorts will now show how much time is left before you can accept another one
• Armored Saddles now have durability that decreases with each successful bola hit you take
• Removing saddles from pets will no longer refund the deed
• Warhorses now have passive bola resistance due to their built in armor
• Players will now be kicked off their mount if they somehow manage to mount while the pet is paralyzed or disabled; it is not intended to be able to mount & move on a paralyzed pet

The Halloween Candy vendors will be available until January 1st, so be sure to spend your candy as soon as possible!

Soon you will begin seeing server alerts for ongoing miniboss events that will occur in various areas of the overland on a regular basis. At this time, there will be four different miniboss events available. You should see one happening every day or two once they've been implemented. These events will require a decently sized group to complete.

These bosses potentially drop several brand new rare items created by team member Transcendence. Some are decorative, others are useful.

An exploit causing faction players to receive quite a lot of silver upon depositing silver into a controlled town stone has been fixed. This exploit has existed since factions were released. As a result, upon next restart, all players' faction silver will be reset to 0. This exploit was only recently reported to us despite being around for so long- to avoid future wipes, please report anomalies promptly so that we can fix them immediately.

Additionally- purchasable faction guards have been beefed up a bit.

• Bonded pets will no longer release themselves when starving
• Pet hunger rate has been decreased greatly, now starvation will occur at 72 hours without feeding, instead of 16 hours

Note: Bonded pets will still continue to experience hunger, but it has no effect at this time. In the future, hunger may factor into controlling your pets.

As you may be aware, we're working to isolate the root cause of the recent crashes. Through the process of elimination, we are making a change to the town vendors, and they have are now invulnerable again for the time being. As a result of this change, the Escort NPCs are disabled, as well as the pop-up Orc Camp spawns.

This change is temporary while we monitor the servers for a short period of time. We appreciate your patience and support!

Occasionally a visual client bug occurs when using Organize Backpack option where it organizes the items but they continue to appear in the old position inside your backpack. If that happens to you, you can simply pick up the bags to refresh the items and show them in their correct position.

• The time to capture a town once the sigil is deposited into a faction stone has been reduced from 24h to 8h
• The time between when a town is captured until it is once more vulnerable has been decreased to 36 hours to compensate