Ideal Dragon posted an update about the most recent additions to Ultima 8: Exult on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group a few days ago. They’ve still been working on building out the capital city of Pagan, Tenebrae, and the latest addition thereto has been the Necromancers Enclave.

Yes, it’s basically finished. All buildings in the Necromancers enclave of Tenebrae have been built. All three floors. Yes, three (!) floors.

The first and second floors have, for comparison, screenshots from the original game’s first and second floors. Obviously, there is no third floor in the original game, so there is no comparison for that one as it’s additional content. Feel free to speculate on what’s going on with what you see there. It might not be what you expect.

As always, these are work-in-progress screenshots as part of our “build the architecture” phase of mapwork. Terrain and so on is another phase.

Now that the Necromancers enclave has been built out, it falls to me to begin building the last few structures from the original game that are unbuilt – that is, the Fishermans Reef (kilandra’s house and a few empty buildings), and the farm in the Herdsman’s Valley. Though the farm will now be moved a bit further away and will be part of a Paws-sized rural community.

Naturally, there are screenshots:

Additionally, the team have been doing some behind the scenes work to better bring the Ultima 8 experience into the Exult/Ultima 7 engine:

• TheGreyWanderer has added new features to core Exult code itself, for use in our project, that will revolutionize Exult modding. Now we’ll be able to have special, fancy new interfaces with excellent art by GWChapman for casting Sorcery, Tempestry, and more, rather than faffing about trying to find the exact place on the map.
• Niko, our composer, is hard at work making many great songs for U8 Exult, and contributing much to the morale and creativity of the team in general.

If you’re a member of the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, you can follow along there for further news about updates to Ultima 8: Exult. They’ve also got a dedicated channel on the Ultima Dragons Discord server where many of the same updates and screenshots get posted.