In and amongst the numerous content-heavy posts that our friends at the Wing Commander CIC put up over the weekend in celebration of that site’s anniversary was a short — but highly interesting — piece of Ultima Forever-related news:

When Ultima Forever launched last year, there were rumors of a quest that involved a downed Kilrathi ship. The game’s untimely cancellation was announced without the easter egg ever having been found, but thanks to a little birdie, the mysterious relic has been revealed! Here’s the screenshots! So cool!

The “little birdie” in question is none other than former Mythic producer Jeff Skalski:

@banditloaf @thatbarnettblok Stumbled onto these. Enjoy. 😉 pic.twitter.com/uBya3F7Gtg

— Jeff Skalski (@Jeff_Skalski) August 14, 2014

These images prompted me to go back to the massive PNG file I have sitting in a Dropbox folder, which is a full-scale (I think; its dimensions are 11776×11776 pixels) image of the Britannian overland from Ultima Forever.

When Ben “BanditLOAF” Lesnick had asked me — a couple of weeks ago, if not more — if I knew of the Kilrathi ship in the game, I had gone back to the overland map on the Ultima Forever subdomain and checked out the ankh-shaped island located due east of the Fens of the Dead. I had thought — based on a too-distant recollection of seeing the Kilrathi ship in-game whilst on-site at Mythic’s now-closed studio — that it was either this ankh-shaped island or the smaller island situated still yet further to the east of it that had been the intended location for the downed Kilrathi.

Unfortunately, these islands are barren on the map…or, at least, seem to house nothing so interesting as the ruins of a Kilrathi fighter. So I mistakenly assumed that the Kilrathi had been removed from the game prior to its being shipped.

But clearly, I was wrong.

I took the liberty of making some crops of the full-scale map for this post; these are the same islands that Jeff Skalski tweeted out images of:

As it turns out, I had been looking too far to the north. The Kilrathi crash site is due east of Serpent’s Hold, while the Kilrathi monument is situated on the island that should have played host to Buccaneer’s Den:

I say “should have” above because, as you can see, there’s no indication of Buccaneer’s Den being on the island, despite the fact that an in-game map of the town is available.

But I digress.

It’s important to note that none of these locations is accessible in Ultima Forever by regular means. Indeed, I’ve only heard of people reaching Serpent’s Hold by means of some manner of game glitch which has resulted in their Avatar’s location being shifted thereto, and this glitch has not proven to be particularly replicable. Had boats been kept in the game, it would have been trivial to at least sail up to each island and grab some screenshots…but, alas, Mythic removed that mode of travel from the game some time between the alpha and the iOS soft-launch.

And sadly, I’ve no other information available to offer concerning what story, if any, would have surrounded the downed Kilrathi. But if anyone is reading this who was formerly a Mythic employee, I’m sure that both we here and the good folks at the CIC wouldn’t mind hearing additional details about this part of the game!