Best Part of Ultima 9

Hilarious and beautiful at the same time.  Wow, the high resolution terrain really brings out the color of the potions.

It is a pity the game’s scripting elements are so easy to screw up.  I just fixed the demon bug in valoria by changing a Trigger Once command’s item target. (only two bytes in the trigger file were altered) I’ll just throw that fix in with the rest of the patch, it was so simple.  That whole demon sequence is really quite complicated, lots of timers and triggers just to show 4 brief cutscenes of the other two guys fighting the demons and of course controlling the combat properties of those involved.

Annoyingly, it would appear that AI battles between npcs or npcs and monsters will require heavy scripting. I was hoping for a slightly less script-controlled sequence for npc fighting to add a little bit of “party” combat.  Now it looks like it will be sequences that either look forced or just screw up. Oh well, we’ll see how it ends up.

Dang, just when you think you have explored everything in a game, you find something new.  Okay, so I’m exploring Valoria, collecting anything I can.  When I see this darker area with floiage over it.  I walk over it and end up in a spiked pit.   I look down and spot a Bag.  I was rather shocked to see it. In U9, these bags are worth doing anything to get (such as going back to Wrong).  At this point, I don’t really care as I always use the economy patch and have some 25 bags in my inventory alone. Still, really surprising to find this little hidden treasure.

Oh and I also found an unfinished feature: the mortar and pestle can be used to crush reagents.  Clearly a component intended for use with alchemy and possibly even the binding ritual.  Unfortunately, the feature is very incomplete as the reagent isn’t destroyed and the product is just an iron ingot (a placeholder object essientially).

In addition, I found an invisible Flame Sword buried into a stone on a small island near Valoria just to SW of the Shrine.

Still, for all the complaints about interactivity and small size of the world, I still seem to find something I’ve missed.  And I’ve played this game at least 9 times if not more.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by  iceblade.

That is odd. How many saves do you have?

Also, I don’t think there are any nightshade in Despise, though I could be wrong.  I might not have searched the Despise’s nonfixed file for that reagent.

As for the invisibility of nightshade, this is set via a translucency property rather than something inherent in the object type.  This almost certainly means any nightshade bought from a shop is visible (must be why you couldn’t buy them in the official game).  In addition, there might be a problem with the inventory removing properties on objects.  Also, the nightshade in Hythloth is visible probably because the world builders forgot to add the property.  I probably won’t bother fixing these issue for any patch.

I was just rereading this and I noticed something an inaccuracy in your first post.  You can bake bread in the game. There is even a book nearby the oven that tells you how to do it.

And as for the skeleton respawning thing.  While I intend to neutralize 90% of skeleton spawn points (almost all in Covetous), I won’t be removing all of them. The ones I plan on removing on almost all of the ones in Covetous and those West of Britain as part of successfully completing the Ruby-skeleton quest.  If you ignore the quest, then the respawns will remain active.