For those unfamiliar with the project, Ultima IV Rebirth is a module for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition originally developed by Melavir Sauin Dragon. While not a fully faithful re-creation of Ultima 4 (mainly due to the limitations of the NWN engine), it is nevertheless a very keen take on the game, and it is enjoyable to experience its story — and the world of Britannia, as Melavir was able to render it — in 3D.

The story of Rebirth’s developmnent is one of the more fascinating stories in the Ultima fan project scene, given how many times development has changed hands. It began as Ultima IV Reborn in 2003, saw some unofficial updates released in 2010, and even got an Italian translation at one point. Reborn was developed for the original Neverwinter Nights, and when Beamdog released Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, still yet other developers took it upon themselves to port Reborn to the new game, changing its name to Rebirth along the way. In short, each new developer has build upon what was done before, a continuity enabled by the extraordinary design and user-friendliness of the Neverwinter Nights toolkit.

Back in 2022, a certain bliznik released an unofficial patch for the module to correct a number of outstanding issues in it; Melavir had stopped supporting the module roughly a month prior to the unofficial patch coming out. In January of this year, Dark Ranger announced that he had released a second unofficial patch for the module, building upon bliznik’s work and correcting a few more outstanding issues:

Ultima IV Rebirth is a FANTASTIC mod that, unfortunately, was plagued with a lot of issues during my recent run of it. This mod has been passed through many hands throughout the years thanks to a sheer dedication to seeing a remade Ultima IV be the best it can be. Unfortunately, some glaring issues still remained even after the most recent patch by bliznik, including broken innkeepers, naked NPCs, and a broken quest. On top of that, almost everyone involved through this mod’s lifecycle have moved on from this project. Thankfully, a lot of these fixes I was able to resolve, even with my limited toolset knowledge. While I was at it, I went ahead and streamlined the installation process, see below.

This edition of the mod should give you no issues with progression (if you think a quest has a dead end, do other quests! Some relate to each other) and all major quests and most, if not all, side quests should now work as intended. See below for some changes I made:

v2.3.2

• Fixed many innkeeper and shopkeeper conversations not continuing past the greeting after speaking with them for the first time
• Fixed an Alkerion dialogue not appearing after being clued in through honest means
• Fixed a couple of dialogue errors relating to the <StartAction> token (I surely missed some, if you run across any more please leave a comment with the NPC affected, namely if you see UNRECOGNIZED TOKEN in dialogue)
• Added feats to various NPCs, who would be naked due to not having the armor proficiency needed to wear their armor/clothing
• Removed duplicates of Shamino and Julia in the Paws stables… we don’t need to introduce cloning technology here
• Corrected a couple of translation errors

You can grab the patch at its Neverwinter Vault entry, or at the Ultima IV Rebirth project entry here at the Codex.