The Official Utopia Blog

Welcome to Age 54! There’s plenty of action already happening in the game, but we’ve a few announcements that should be of interest to you.

Free stuff

That got your attention, right? In Age 53 we had our first Utopian census. It was obvious there was some confusion about the premium items available in Utopia. We’ve already made some changes to highlight when/where these items are useful, and now we’re going to give you some for free so that you can experience how great they are!

• The hostility meter will be visible to everyone for the next week (if you’ve already purchased the hostility meter we will extend it by one week).
• Monarchs will each receive 3 Royal Commands, which they can use to better direct their kingdom’s activities. 
• A random member of each kingdom will receive a taunt that the kingdom can use to antagonize and ridicule an opponent. Just make sure that you stay within the confines of the code of conduct when you do so. Check your inventory in the shop to see if you’ve received a taunt. 

An upcoming feature

We have a new feature in development that we hope you’ll be excited about. Recruiting players from other kingdoms is currently very time consuming and many kingdoms never manage to fill all of their slots. In this new feature kingdoms will announce the kind of recruits they want and matching players will be able to find these opportunities. We’ll release more information in a few weeks when its closer to release.

Comment here. 

Friends, Utopians, countrymen, lend me your ears;
We’d like to know more about you and, in particular, what you think about Utopia. Some of you are already active on the forums, but not everybody has the time or inclination to publicly engage in debate. Our first Utopian census gives each of you the opportunity to express your equal opinions. The results will tell us how you feel about things right now and how we can improve Utopia in the future.

The survey is short (about 3 minutes) and anonymous, so get started and let us know what you’re thinking!

Launch survey 

This survey is now closed

We’ve got two exciting features to announce today. Rather than having to memorize island and kingdom numbers you can now create Bookmarks instead. These bookmarks act as shortcuts when you want to switch between kingdoms. You can add to and access your bookmarks by clicking on the ‘star’ icon (see the image below) which opens the bookmarks menu.

The second feature that we’re releasing today is called Royal Commands. With this feature, monarchs can ensure that everyone in the kingdom obeys their commands.  Each royal command displays a target kingdom and the monarch’s instruction, and is shown on every kingdom selector.  

Royal commands are a premium feature and cost 5 credits for each new command. Once a command is created a monarch can freely update the description as many times as they like. Monarchs create commands by clicking on the ‘crown’ icon (see image below).

Help your monarch; hold the war button; bend the enemy to your will!  Now you too can see the hostility meter…

This new premium feature is available from the kingdom page at a cost of 3 credits per week. Thanks for your continued support of Utopia.

With Age 53 almost upon us, we wanted to let you all know about a couple of changes we’ll be making.

The most striking change is going to be a bit of an update to the look and feel of the Utopia. Our goal is to make the game more visually appealing, especially to new players.This is purely CSS work, meaning that no game mechanics or text have changed. It’s mainly an update to the colors, the layout and typography. We’ve added a theme chooser to the account settings page, which defaults to the new theme (which has a leather, steel and gold motif), but also allows you to revert to the “neoclassic”  theme (which is mostly identical to the current look and feel). We know that visual updates to the game are always contentious, but we hope the extra effort we made to allow people to revert to the old style will appease people who prefer the old style.

You can take a look at a sample of the new look and feel here.

We would also like to encourage anyone with CSS skills to inspect how we’ve organised the CSS, and create new themes that we can make available to everyone. For example, if someone wants to create a work-appropriate theme, I’m sure the community would appreciate it.

The second new feature is a re-organisation of how you pay for premium features. At the moment, premium features such as sitting, ad blocking, taunts, kingdom invites and so on are scattered around the game, and are charged for in different ways. This is confusing, and makes it hard for us to create new premium features without making it even worse. So we have re-organised all of these features into a “Shop”, which is linked at the top of each page. In here you can buy premium items (such as sitting, taunts etc.). These remain in your inventory until you use them or gift them to another player.

As part of this re-organisation, we’ve straightened out how you pay for sitting. Previously, you were charged for sitting once per night, regardless of whether you activated it in the morning or the evening. This was getting confusing for lots of people. Now you activate sitting in advance for a specified number of days. For example, if you activate sitting for 3 days, sitting will start immediately and elapse 72 hours later. 

These changes will be made available on Wednesday when we deploy the new age. We hope that they make Utopia a better game to play.

Please add your comments in the forums here.