“Classic Ultima Online”, by Shattered Moon, is Back…Maybe…Sort of…

To look at the Shattered Moon website, you wouldn’t think the project is still active; the last news post there was made in early 2017. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Shattered Moon is the nickname of the developer behind Classic Ultima Online (CUO), a multiplayer version of Ultima 4. The official CUO server has been offline for some time (since late 2016); the client and server setup files were made available after the shutdown.

However, as of early 2025, Shattered Moon has popped up on the Ultima Dragons Discord server, and has been chronicling new work being done on the project in a dedicated channel there.

I’ve been working hard for a while now to get this project back up to speed. There have been a ton of bug fixes and missing functionality added, and one of the things I’m focusing on now is offering as many of the platform and fan created tile sets as I can.

For the moment, Shattered Moon has been focusing on adding support for additional tilesets; tilesets from xu4, the SMS version of Ultima 4, Josh Steele, and the Apple II have all been added, and possibly others as well. Happily, some of the other developers who frequent the Discord server, including Grant W. Chapman, have been contributing time and effort to help with adapting these disparate sets of graphics to work with CUO’s engine.