What Is Different Here

Shadowbane was built for hundreds of players fighting over cities. This is a small PvE-first shard for a handful of friends, so the parts that assumed a crowd were re-tuned, and a great many long-standing bugs in the server code were repaired along the way. What did not change is the part you came for: the rates are stock, and the combat is Shadowbane's. Each section below links to the page that carries the detail.

The world is not empty

Six hundred computer-run adventurers live here, two hundred of them out in the world at once, with real names, races, levels and worn gear. They camp the monsters you camp, wear what they loot, and fight back when attacked. See sim adventurers.

You can hire help

Mercenary contracts drop from world mobs. Double-click one and a hired fighter — tank, healer or caster — appears beside you and fights at your side, and the contract is never consumed. It is how a solo player covers the roles nobody is around to fill; see mercenary contracts.

You can get around without an alt

The multibox-a-Traveler-to-summon-yourself era is over. Runemasters teleport anyone to all thirteen safeholds at any level for a distance-scaled toll, a Muster Horn lets a group leader call every groupmate to their side, and a plantable, destructible Waystone gives you a personal anchor in the wild to channel home to. See fast travel.

Cities go up in an afternoon

Construction runs at 1% of stock time: the rank 1 to rank 7 climb that cost six real days on retail takes about an hour and a half here, at 5% of the gold. There is also no upkeep — weekly maintenance is switched off, so nothing decays, deranks or bills you. See cities and building.

The pace is the original pace

Experience, gold and drops are stock: a kill here yields what the same kill yielded on retail. That is deliberate — rates were briefly boosted when the shard opened and put back in August 2026, so the 5x figures you may still see quoted are gone. Respawns, trainers and crafting are where this shard actually moves faster, on rates and progression.

Things to do on a given evening

Seventeen named monsters can appear in place of an ordinary respawn, each with a signature item that always drops, announced to the whole server by name. A world event runs every three hours, three waves deep, with a level-65 boss if you clear the adds in time. One zone at a time is a hotzone. See events and named spawns.

Long-standing bugs are fixed

The server code this shard runs on had years of faults in it that players had learned to live with. Percentage enchants on gear did nothing, so a -22% weapon-speed prefix swung at exactly the rate of a plain weapon; a vendor could take a looted rune and pay zero gold; Ire of Heaven landed 2 of its 11 ticks. Those are repaired, along with a long list besides, on bug fixes.

Our client, and what we did not touch

The download is the stock 2003 client with the intro movies and the retail patcher removed and our own launcher added under the Shadowbane.exe name, which fetches only the files that changed. The game itself, sb.exe, carries exactly one patch — it makes your client draw you at the water surface when you swim, which it never did before — and nothing else is altered. See client changes.

What is still broken

Magic items from ordinary monsters drop without their enchantment rank, so they are weaker than their names suggest. Monsters have no line of sight and will chase you through a wall. The sims have no society: no guilds, and no way to talk to one. The running list, including the things that look like bugs but are not, is known issues.

Where to start

If you are not playing yet, getting started covers the download, the launcher and making an account. If you would rather see the raw numbers, every setting we changed is listed with its live value on the settings reference.