In its initial incarnation, this promising project turned Ultima 4 into a multiplayer experience. Developer Shattered Moon built both the game client and server which, when paired with the Ultima 4 game files on your hard drive (a free copy of Ultima 4 can be obtained via GOG), allowed you to take on the Quest of the Avatar…with your friends. Or with complete strangers!

Sadly, the only public server was taken offline toward the end of 2016. Concurrent with this, Shattered Moon reworked both the client and server to allow for local, offline play, so the experience of Classic Ultima Online was not lost entirely…but further development on the project ceased.

However, as of mid-2025, Shattered Moon has resumed working on the project, and has expanded its support to include the first three Ultima games, as well as a plethora of additional official and fan-made tilesets.

For the first time in years, the downloads page has been updated with a new version of the client and server! You can extract the download locally to host your own local server and play the game using the client.

Hopefully, a public server will be provided soon.

For now, you can help a lot by downloading the local version and testing it as thoroughly as possible. Please let me know if you encounter any problems, no matter how small.

Shattered Moon has also been posting semi-regular development updates to a dedicated channel on the Ultima Dragons Discord server; you can follow along there for the latest news about Classic Ultima Online. If you’d like to test this new version of the local client and server, you can grab a copy of the client and server from the project’s official website; I’ve also updated the project entry here at the Codex to serve as a mirror.