Back in September, which was the last time I checked in on Anthony Salter’s 3D remake of Ultima 7, the news was that everything in Trinsic — NPCs, plot points, events, instruments, etc. — was finally working in Ultima VII Revisited. I promised to keep up with it, and then didn’t, which is a shame, because the good Mr. Salter has been busy with the project. Here’s what he’s shown on r/Ultima since then.

Around mid-September, the project gained support for replacing NPCs and monsters with custom sprite sheets. To show it off, Salter swapped the Avatar for a villager from his own game Planitia, adding: “Now we just need sprite sheets for every NPC. And monster.” Not long after, he posted the first tests of the new NPC sprites and credited contributors 1Crash007 and UrAnt.

October brought a working spellcasting system, plus a design question for the community that’s worth quoting in full:

Among the (many) issues with Ultima VII’s combat, is that the Avatar is the only spellcaster. This is odd because mage NPCs can cast spells just fine. Just attack one and see. … So I was wondering…would I be betraying the original game if I allowed Companions like Jaana, who could cast spells in previous Ultimas, to cast spells again once the magical aether is fixed? It would do so much to make combat more interesting.

Combat itself is getting a rework too. A clip from a stream shows a prototype “Real-Time With Pause” combat system, which may answer the question of how to fix Ultima VII‘s notoriously terrible combat. (It’s also worth noting that some of the the other recent Ultima 7 reworkings have moved the game in the direction of RTWP combat.)

UrAnt shows up again in what may be the biggest news about Revisted since September: work on Forge of Virtue has begun, thanks to “a huge amount of work” UrAnt submitted. A late-October stream was apparently “just too amazing for one 60-second clip,” so Salter put together a whole highlights video of it. It shows a first-person mode, weather effects and an object finder, with thanks to contributors DLBSP, JRenner and UrAnt.

In-game visuals have been getting attention too. On October 30, Salter showed off a new lighting system, calling it “one of the biggest departures from the original game,” but one he thinks “both looks good and stays true to the previous games.” Then, just yesterday, he added UrAnt’s firmament fix, which puts the sun, stars and moons into the 3D view.

None of this has been released in a new build yet; 0.2.5b is still the latest. You can follow the good Mr. Salter on X, or on Reddit or Facebook.