We’ve recently added a new BETA Resource Stone next to the Galven bank. Players can double-click this stone for a package of resources/commodities to assist them in their journeys (primarily to assist in jump-starting the economy). This package may only be obtained once per account.

The following items are contained within the package:

• Imbuing Tools:
  • Imbuing Hammer (25 uses)
  • Imbuing Saw (25 uses)
  • Imbuing Fletching Tools (25 uses)
  • Imbuing Sewing Kit (25 uses)
• Resources:
  • 200 Spined Leather
  • 200 Gold Ingots
  • 200 Yew Boards
• Commodities:
  • 500 Bandages
  • 500 Arrows
  • 500 Bolts
• Finances:
  • 20,000 gold check.

We hope that this offers further incentive, and we certainly believe that this package will be a huge help to everyone.

Remember, once Open BETA ends and we do our final wipe prior to launch… this package will no longer be available.

Enjoy!

We have officially pushed out our open BETA, just under two months removed from closed BETA. We’ve made a ton of progress in very short order, which will be fairly evident to those of you returning. We have already done a wipe and a quick reboot (enabling auto-account creation) earlier in the evening.

During BETA, we’ve got a handful of objectives high on our priority list that we’d like to test. We’re at the point where we are interested in some of the more abstract factors of the shard.

• Is skill gain fast enough?
• Are our loot tables and economy configured properly?
• Do the bonuses for capturing heroes feel worthy?
• What other rewards can we provide players with for hero capture and world wars systems?
• Are our rares worth nabbing?
• What is your experience with latency / server stability?

Of course, any concerns, bugs, or questions you may have are able to be posted on our community forums for us to evaluate and / or fix. Every little detail is appreciated! We appreciate all of your posts and those using the original [Feedback system.

There’s something in it for you, as well. We’d like to offer up a reward system of sorts for those of you testing. We will be offering unique rares to our testers on shard launch. It isn’t likely to be anything that would conflict with the balance of our launch (such as skill gains or housing – mostly reserved for donations), but things like our unique clothing rares and items. More details will be available shortly before our official launch.

I’d also like to take a moment to reveal what else is in store for Sanctum in the coming days/weeks:

• A full-featured Wiki. While our main site contains a wealth of information, there is plenty more available for addition.
• We have a perpetual PvP system, why not add something for PvE? We’re evaluating our options for some sort of a reward system for those not interested in PvP on a constant basis.
• Expanded fishing system. While boats may not be usable, we may be able to find a few creative ideas to make fishing worthwhile again.
• Progressive spawns (similar to champions). These spawns will be much shorter and much faster.

Regarding our official launch:
We’re hoping for mid-December at the earliest. We’re aware that a large majority of our content is done, but we’d like to finish polishing what we currently have and add a bit more content. Launch will be here before you know it. Please feel free to spread the word; tell your friends! The more we work together during open BETA, the better we will be for launch. And the more we bring to the table on launch, the more fun we’ll all be able to have.

I wanted to post a quick update to let everyone know that Open BETA is officially on the horizon. We’ve still got a remarkable amount of work ahead of us to get things going but we are extremely pleased with where we are at thus far, placing us squarely in the final stretch.

Open BETA Goals:
This Open BETA push will largely be our way of getting large-scale file distribution to our player-base prior to launch, but will also be a milestone in our development. The majority of our major systems are in — minister control, heroes combat, world wars, artifact crafting, and so on. Closed BETA has gone far better than we could ever have hoped for.

We’ve got a few “major” things we’re trying to iron out and will be implementing them throughout Open BETA, and we’ll be doing it all while we tackle any bugs or errors you may find or any good ideas that you may suggest.

We want to heavily address the basic fundamentals of the game; and by heavily address, I do not mean: “make it more like the way other Ultima Online shards have been”. Farming and killing monsters in Ultima Online is a poorly developed system at its core, especially in regards to high-end monsters. We’re not claiming we are going to re-invent the wheel here, but we’re certainly looking to improve upon what is already there.

Yes, we will be testing everything right along with you!

What can you do during Open BETA?
I’d like to give you an idea of what we’re interested in achieving during Open BETA. First and foremost, whatever you’re ‘good’ at or want to do in Ultima Online, do it. Let us know how you like our systems, if you found any bugs with them, have any concerns, and so forth.

Beyond that, we’ve got a few key things we are very interested in..

Skill Gain
How is it? We want our combat skills to feel brisk. We’re not saying you’ll be fully fleshed out on a 7x GM character in a few days after starting from scratch, but we don’t want you to feel like you’re grinding away at nothing. When you consider stacking skill gain bonus potentials from dungeon gains and citizenship bonuses, things can get pretty quick. Conversely, we want our crafting to be difficult; the prosperity of a good strong crafting community relies on the fact that players have a community to sell their wares to. When everyone is able to be self-sufficient with their own crafter because it is too easy, they lose out on potential patrons.

Economy
Are you able to find anything that seems imbalanced relative to other methods of making gold? How does the economy, for a lack of a better term, feel to you? We’re looking to curb some of the rapid inflation that plagues Ultima Online.

Combat
This one cuts deep and in many ways. This extends to the hero capture system, to world wars, to simple combat mechanics. Can you break the hero capture system? Are any of them too overpowered? Are any of them simply too weak?

Ultimately, we want testing and feedback on everything. In the days ahead we’ll outline things more thoroughly and set up some focused test dates. We’ll also reveal some of the perks we’re planning for our BETA testers.

Open BETA is currently set to launch at 8pm Eastern Standard Time, on November 11th (yes, that’s tomorrow).

Gorgeous, new custom map, diverse player ruled towns, perpetual militia combat system, world wars, crafting improvements, new monsters, anti-railing, guild and player stat tracking, two client limit and more. Enjoy Ultima the way it was meant to be.

What is Sanctum?

Sanctum is a new, fresh take on “classic era” UO. The core elements of old-school UO are still intact: PKs, thieves, tank-mage templates. But there’s also a whole body of new material to fix the things about UO that are broken or don’t hold up in 2013. You can check out more elaborate descriptions of those features on this site; continue reading for a brief explanation.

Custom Map

For years, players have been skeptical of custom maps on free shards, but we truly believe we found one that works. Let’s be honest, the standard Britannia map is just too big for a game with niche appeal in 2013. Ultima Online is no fun if you never run into other players outside of hot-spots or dungeons — one of the most quintessentially awesome MMO experiences is running into a fellow traveler in the middle of no where. This custom map is no guaranteed panacea, but it does structure housing in such a way where the majority of plots are right on the road. Combine that with a faction system that necessitates traveling by foot (described below), and you’re bound to have a world where running into random people on the road is commonplace again.

Crafting Changes

Crafting in Ultima Online has captured a spirit of freedom and entrepreneurship that few games can come close to replicating. Sanctum desires to continue this tradition and place more power and interaction into the hands of crafters. Crafters on Sanctum will have even more depth and interaction with the community. Magic items no longer sporadically appear on monsters as loot; instead artifacts can be obtained in their place. Utilizing these artifacts crafters will be able to imbue their properties into the goods they create. These artifacts may be applied to anything appropriate; carpenters may apply accuracy artifacts to quarterstaffs, tailors may apply hardening artifacts to leather gloves, blacksmiths may apply an artifact of silver to a halberd and so forth. No more disappointing cleavers of vanquishing (unless that is, you actually want one) and crafters will gain additional importance within the world.

Combat Changes

Combat on Sanctum is the fruition of fifteen years of Ultima Online, evolving into various states and on various shards, doing some things right and a bunch of things wrong.

Please consult the melee combat or magical combat subsections of our site for further and more detailed information.

General combat mechanics are in large part similar to those that would be known as “T2A” mechanics. Players accustomed to the tank mage will feel right at home. Those that prefer some of the mechanics featured in the UO:R patches will also be appeased; the “pure” mage, warrior and hybrid are all viable. Our goal is to provide, at the core, the remarkable PvP environment that only Ultima Online is able to provide. When looking at the various types of combat paths a player can go, the tank mage will still be one of the premier templates and favored by most duelists. The burst damage of a tank mage is virtually unrivaled and unchanged on Sanctum. What has changed is that other play-styles are both viable and fun. Previously, players were essentially punished if they attempted to PvP with a template other than the tank mage.

Towns, Politics, and Ministers

Sanctum has implemented its own version of “player government”. Players are free to become citizens of several different towns, and each citizenship (depending on the town’s military power) will carry certain bonuses (for all players, not just members of the militia). Citizens may elect their town’s Minister, who has the power to choose which bonuses the town offers, the guard level (i.e. some towns may permit murderers to roam free, others may instruct NPC guards to kill them on sight), and appoint the commander of the town’s militia.

Militia Warfare

Each town has a militia that is in perpetual war with all other towns. Players may join the militia of the town they are a citizen of. Unlike citizenship, joining the militia will not make all your characters member of the militia. Only the character that joins the militia will become a militia member. Joining the militia allows players to freely fight members of opposing militias, enter opposing militia strongholds, attack and capture opposing heroes and participate in Vorshun world war battles. Players enrolled in the militia are able to earn silver by capturing heroes and killing opposing militia members. This silver may be spent on special town-associated clothing dyes, unique clothing items, armor dyes, banners, rare items and other special items.

The core concept of this system is that each town has a stronghold where their NPC hero resides. Militias gain silver by capturing enemy militias’ heroes, which they can do by essentially laying siege to the enemy stronghold. The best part? Capturing a hero requires physically escorting the hero to your town’s stronghold (i.e. no gating there). So essentially, breaking into the enemy stronghold is the easy part — you have to then fight your way back to your hometown on foot. It’s basically capture the flag (in layman’s terms).

Bounty Hunters

Bounty boards are back! Revamped, of course. Bounty hunters can collect a reward and impose temporary stat-loss on murderers by turning in their severed heads. We’ve made some tweaks to reduce the incentive of exploitation (i.e. reds killing themselves to collect the bounty). This will help ensure there won’t be any senseless grieving, but it won’t be enough of a deterrent to eliminate murderous activity.

Among all of these exciting new features, we have introduced a variety of smaller features sure to be of use and/or interest:

• Resource Order Deeds (similar to Bulk Order Deeds, but for resources)
• In-game Private Messaging (hardly a novelty item, but sure to be of use without a global chat system)
• Revamped fishing system that includes named treasure chests, unique spawn, and a variety of retrievable rares.
• Fully functional water taxi system. These taxis will transport players to and from various locations around the world.
• Unique dungeon barrel system. “Special” barrels can be found throughout various dungeons that have a chance to spawn creatures, loot, rares, etc when “chopped” open.
• Variety of in-game events, including: Battle Chess, Skullball, Bomberman, Paintball, and plenty more.[/list]

The list goes on and on! We have a competent, driven, and professional Staff team that seeks to create and implement new in-depth content on a consistent basis. All of our services (sites, wiki, VoIP, etc) are simply unmatched by any other community. We sincerely hope that other cookie cutter servers out there haven’t killed off everyone’s “itch” for UO. Sanctum has been expressly designed to breath fresh life back into Ultima Online in a creative fashion, for just that reason. Open BETA is currently live, and everyone is welcome.