In closed alpha
Ultima Online, made our own. Craft with intent. Fight on even ground. Find a reason to stay.
Playable, not promised
Live in alpha
There is already a world to play in. Hunt for crafting fragments, work on a suit, learn a boss, or meet someone in the ranked arena. All of it is running on the test shard today.
We are not recreating a particular era. Stones brings together Item Insurance, skills and conveniences picked from different chapters of Ultima Online, alongside systems of our own. Each one earns its place the same way: it makes the game more enjoyable to play.
Live in alpha
Monster drops feed your next upgrade. Collect fragments, combine them into stones and runes, then choose what to work on. The crafting window shows the possible results before you commit.
Monsters drop fragments. Twenty of a kind make a stone, and rune fragments make runes. Bring what you've collected to the Shadowlord's Cube.
Want Faster Casting rather than another resist? Add rune fragments to an Exalted or Chaos Stone, and only the property families you picked can roll. The cube lists every possible result before you pay.
Runes in the wrong family aren't wasted. Trade three of one family and a Chaos Stone for a rune of the family you need.
Need one exact line? The Soul Forge opens the bench, which sells fixed recipes: put on a set line at a set value, swap it later or take it off. Each item takes one bench line.
Adds a property
Choose a side with room for a new line. Keep what is already there.
Rerolls a side
Rework the prefixes or the suffixes. Rune fragments steer the families that can appear.
Rerolls a value
Pick an eligible line and roll its value again within the item's grade. It can go down as well as up.
Risks corruption
A corrupted line, reworked properties, a socket, a shifted value, or no change. Corruption seals the item: no ordinary stone can change it afterwards.
Live in alpha
A blank gold ring and a pouch of free stones. Click a stone, then click the ring where you want it to work.
Practice only: no aiming, bench or runes here, and nothing touches your character. Craft any item in the full simulator.
Gold Ring
Gold lines are in the top fifth of their range. Click the selected stone again or press Esc to put it back.
Vaal can leave the ring unchanged, add a corrupted property, rework properties, open a socket or shift a value. Corruption seals it.
Combine fragments of a family into a rune, add sockets with an Artificer's Stone, and fit the runes that suit your build. At the cube, loose runes of the same family and a Chaos Stone can be converted into a different chosen family.
Exalted, Chaos, Divine and Vaal fragments. Item art from the client.
Clear a side, remove a random line, or use the bench for a deliberate choice. The cube, stones and bench are parts of the same crafting system, not separate lotteries.
Live in alpha
Smiths sell runic hammers and tailors sell runic sewing kits, so a good base suit comes from gold you earned rather than a lucky bulk order.
Out in the world
Live in alpha
Crafting materials come from play, not just a handout. Eligible monsters drop stone and rune fragments into their corpses, while the hardest fights offer a chance at corrupted gear.
Fragments accumulate towards a stone or rune. An ordinary hunt can move your next crafting project forward, even when the perfect piece does not drop.
Every eligible monster pays into the same chase, so the hunting ground you enjoy is a fair place to gear up.
Live in alpha
Lady Melisande, Dread Horn and Monstrous Interred Grizzle each wait in their own lair. Gather keys for a private fight, or contest a boss when it rises on its own. Whoever carries the cursed reward box can't recall or gate away with it, and it only opens once it reaches a bank.
Live in alpha
The graveyards are thick with the restless dead, and each one hides a paragon boss that hits harder than the rest. Everyone who can loot it rolls for its artifact, and one of them takes it home.
Live in alpha
Classic champion spawns and the Harrower are joined by the era's hunting grounds and monsters. They're built for groups, and for rivals who turn up halfway through your spawn.
Live in alpha
We've brought these schools into Stones because they open up more ways to play. Their balance comes from hundreds of thousands of simulated fights, and alpha play keeps refining it.
Live in alpha
Runetomes keep your routes together, with custom covers and travel buttons beside your destinations.
Smart Recall chooses between Sacred Journey and Recall using the best travel skill you can cast with, then falls back to a stored charge when neither spell is available. Choose a charge yourself whenever you prefer.
Rename and reorder your entries, choose a default destination, and keep Recall and Gate Travel close to hand. Ordinary runebooks get Smart Recall too.
Play together
Live in alpha
Stones is better with company. Guilds, parties and houses get the same care as the fighting.
Live in alpha
Guilds use later-era rules, with alliances and wars between guilds. The guild window keeps your overview, roster and diplomacy in one place, and shows when each member was last online.
Live in alpha
See your whole party by name, who is online and which facet they're on. If someone drops, the party keeps their place for a while, and leadership passes on instead of the group breaking up.
Live in alpha
Buy tickets with gold during the week. One ticket wins each weekly draw and takes a share of the pot, and the rest leaves the world, which keeps gold worth having.
Live in alpha
Secure it in your house and keep a whole collection of rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces and talismans, sorted by kind in its own window. What it holds doesn't count against your house storage. Jewellers sell it.
Live in alpha
Stones responds faster than stock Ultima emulators. Casting feels more immediate, actions queue cleanly, and movement is more forgiving when your connection briefly stumbles.
Live in alpha
Stones runs on its own build of ClassicUO, with the quality-of-life improvements players have wanted for years: fights that are easier to read, hotkeys that do what you expect, and options you can shape to your own screen.
One launcher installs it and keeps it current, together with Stones' Razor and the game data. Logins are encrypted.
A hotkey may do what you pressed, and a macro may repeat it while you're at the keyboard. Nothing may fight for you, and nothing may play while you're away.
The launcher brings Stones' own Razor. Its scripts and macros cannot check your hits or paralysis. Mana and stamina remain readable.
Live in alpha
Ranked duels and team fights use standardised kit, not the suit you could afford. Your belongings are put aside, and nothing is lost in the match.
The ranked arena and season ladders are running now. Beyond the arena, the ladders recognise field PvP, guild wars, champion spawns, boss hunting, artifact finds, harvesting and crafting.
The direction
PvP has a ceiling.
The long chase lives in PvM.
Seasons bring fresh competition without erasing your character.
The long chase
Live in alpha
Hundreds of stones set around the six virtues. Every monster you kill earns devotion, devotion lights stones, and each lit stone makes you better at hunting, in the way you choose to hunt.
Point at a stone to read it. Click it to light the path from the centre; click a lit stone to put it out.
The full design, drawn from the tree being built on the test shard. Stones may still change before it opens.
Honesty for magery, elements and Spellweaving. Justice for necromancy, poison and Ninjitsu. Compassion for tamers and bards. Sacrifice for axes, two-handers and last stands. Valor for swords, maces, fencing and Bushido. Honor for Chivalry and archery. Mix them along the paths that join the virtues.
Each virtue ends in great stones that change how you fight: a weapon that casts, a pet that grows stronger alone, a swing that comes sooner. They open only after your first kill of a champion or a peerless boss.
Devotion belongs to your account. Every character you make can spend all of it, so a second character starts with everything the first has earned.
No stone touches a hit on a player. Hurt another player or their pet, and your Circle goes dark for a while. A fight between players stays a fight between players.
Seasons bring a virtue of their own, falling prices for newcomers and a free reshape. Your Circle carries on from season to season.
A full set is a long hunt, and the whole Circle is a chase measured in years. Beyond it come Humility ranks, titles and hues that never run out.
Where Stones is heading
The long-term plan. These are designed and on the way, not release dates.
In the forge
Fight through the elemental islands, bring down their Ancients and open the way to the Unmaker at the blackrock heart. Rival groups will have every reason to meet along the way.
This is our own place to explore and fight over, not another copy of a familiar dungeon.
On the horizon
A calling is a path your character takes up on top of the Circle, earned through a set of trials. It gives you one signature move: say your virtue's mantra at a monster and the virtue answers, but only against the evil of the world. The Mage lays bare a monster's weakest resist. The Bard softens its blows on your party. The Paladin calls it out to fight you. The Judge, the calling of Justice, makes it pay for every curse, poison and bleed it carries. There are eight, one for each virtue, and they arrive a few at a time, season by season.
On the horizon
Shrine keepers post bounties on the monsters roaming the world, with richer ones in Felucca. Swear a Vow at a shrine to make every fight harder, and climb a ladder for the bravest oath.
In the forge
Trammel's dungeons are being set aside for the Atlas: party missions in closed dungeon levels, entered through gate stones, with a different level each run. A deeper PvM chase beyond the Circle.
On the horizon
Different skill and stat templates on the same character, changed in town rather than mid-fight.
From here: grow the closed alpha, then beta and the opening season.
Where we are
A small, hand-picked group plays Stones on the test shard. Everything marked live on this page is running there today, and balance and drop rates will keep moving until launch.
Stones is invite-only. Join the Stones Discord to ask for access.
Join the Stones DiscordStones runs on Windows; Mac and Linux come later.
