Voyager Dragon has, as of today, released version 3.1 of the Exodus Project’s Ultima 3 Upgrade.

This release adds a few gameplay fixes to the game and addresses a few issues/concerns folks had with version 3.0.

• A set of gameplay fixes that can be enabled/disabled in the configuration program. The fixes must be toggled as a group; they cannot be toggled individually. If enabled, they will do the following:
  • Double the overworld monster generation rate. Perhaps one of the largest complaints of this port of U3 is the low monster generation rate and, by extension, the ship generation rate.
  • Increase the dungeon monster generation rate. Rate increase varies by level such that it is double the original on the first level, but only 25% more on the bottom level. Note that the effective rate increases with each dungeon level. This results in more lucrative dungeon runs, but also potentially more dangerous.
  • Halve the food consumption rate. Food is supposed to be taxing on a party, but weighs to heavily against poorer parties.
• A streamlined installation procedure. This package ships with default configuration for the most common or recommended settings. You are of course free to customize it as needed, but it’s no longer required.
• Windows-native (32-bit) and Linux-native (i686 ELF) versions of the U3RESET, U3CFG, and BINPAT tools. Windows versions end in “w” and Linux versions end in “l”. This should make it simpler to run these programs without having to boot into Dosbox and manually run them. Sorry MacOS users – I’d love to have OSX native versions as well, but I don’t have a great cross-compile solution to build Mac binaries from Windows.
• The DOS 16-bit version of U3RESET was missing from the v3.0 package. It’s included again now.
• A bugfix where a resurrection would cause the game to crash.
• A minor VGA graphics update to the dragon animation on startup.

Naturally, you can grab the updated version 3.1 download of the Ultima 3 Upgrade from both the Exodus Project website and its project entry here.

Additionally, per a comment he left on the Ultima 3 subdomain, I have expanded the Ultima 3 Assembly project entry somewhat; it now plays host to a number of technical files released by Voyager Dragon (the assembly dump being among these).