Cheating in Ultima Underworld
Ultima Underworld has no build-in cheat system, however, weakness in the game engine can still be exploited.
General Cheats[edit]
Infinite Potions[edit]
Breaking a potion with spells turns it into a pile of garbage. However, said garbage still has the properties of the potion and will never run out of charges! Especially useful with healing and mana potions
Unlocking Doors[edit]
Locked doors can be unlocked with Dispel Rune. Despite an error message, all locks are removed.
Randomize Barterable Goods[edit]
When a game is loaded, the goods NPCs offer to barter are randomized. Iterations of this process may lead to better goods the NPCs will offer (either new items, same items with different quality, or different quantity). However, this does not affect items that the player has bartered off; they retain all their properties and will remain available for barter in the NPC's inventory regardless.
Also, there are other items that are designed to remain available (like the ring one bandit on level three has) and are not affected by this tactic.
Breaking Skill Point Cap[edit]
Once the player’s experience reaches its maximum, skill points will also be frozen. Death, however, (when followed by resurrection) costs experience, which then allows the player to earn it back, along with skill points. By planting the Silver Sapling, the player can repeatedly die, as necessary, suffer a reduction in experience and return to reaping skill points.
File Manipulation[edit]
Permanent Light[edit]
The way the game manages light has a weakness. To eliminate all darkness, just remove the file SHADES.DAT from the data-directory, making light sources obsolete.
Item Duplication[edit]
Items can be duplicated by the following these steps:
- Save a game with the item in inventory.
- Put the items to be duplicated on the ground.
- Save the game again, in a different save slot.
- Copy the PLAYER.DAT file from the first save into the save directory of the second save.
- Upon loading the second save, the items should be both on the ground and in inventory.
This works because items in the inventory, unlike the rest of the game world, are saved in the PLAYER.DAT file, meaning that transplanting a player is trivial.
Hex-Editing for Stats[edit]
The PLAYER.DAT of each save game can be manipulated in order to ramp up the stats significantly. Bytes 10 to 3F have to be set to FF and the bytes 40 to 4F to 64 in order to get a significant boost for the player stats and abilities. The game will detect this, however, and make mention of it at the end.