Iceblade has posted an update to the Forgotten World subdomain detailing recent progress he and his small (but growing) team have made on implementing fixes for outstanding bugs in Ultima 9. Many of the bugs that have been patched pertain to quests in and around Moonglow in the game, including the character of Leeland and some issues pertaining to the bandits in the area. Paws also got some attention.

We are progressing with the testing and fixing work. Leeland’s quest line finally works cleanly and correctly from first bothersome conversation to that last sheepish cry about his highly effective caster founder who easily handles a pair of weak bandits. Still, there are two new bugs that have been added to the list: Leeland is too large during the second conversation for some reason – very weird bug! The second issue is far more serious: the old hardlocking bug with the bandits with Duncan’s dagger that Tydus sends you to first. I don’t know how I failed to remember this bug given it caused me to repeat two hard fights during the very first time I played Ultima IX. Well excuse me for being Intelligent enough to attack the bandits from Range rather than walking up to them to have them yell at me. Anyway, we are trying to get a simple global variable to turn true without needing to encounter the bandits little speech. Ultima IX proves odd with its scripting system.

Anyway, we found some of other fixes that need to go back to the research phase to figure to finally get to work. Cleo – Smith’s friend – just refuses to appear in Paws above ground. Elena in Minoc still needs work. And the music in Minoc still is a bit buggy and requires some major tweaks in term of area properties for the music trigger box.

In any case, we now have 62 fixes on the list: 53 are totally complete and 9 are in partial status. Performing testing and fixing with two or three individuals is far easier and less demotivating than trying to do all of the work (especially the testing) by myself.

Over on the Ultima Dragons Discord server, meanwhile, Iceblade has been floating the idea of a difficulty patch for Ultima 9, something that would make the enemies in the game a bit more challenging. Join the discussion there if you’d like to weigh in on this.