The Ultima Savegame Editor

41 Responses

  1. Cear says:

    Excellent work! All I needed was some food after a mishap leaving my game running on III. sadly as an adult time is of the essence when doing these playthroughs.

  2. HiPhish says:

    Nice tool, but it’s Windows only unfortunately. I got it running on my Mac in Wineskin using Wine version 1.4.1 and I had to find mfc42.dll on the internet and put it in the same folder where the editor EXE lies. That part is necessary or else the program will quit before it even shows up. Maybe someone will find this information useful. Now I can finally give my party all the food they can eat in Ultima III.

    It would be cool if there was a platform-independent version of this editor. I’m not a big fan of Java personally, but this is the sort of thing where an executable JAR file would be great. Write the program once and run it on almost anything, including your toaster.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I should get you to send me that DLL, so I can bundle it with the download. Hit up the contact form at ultimacodex.com so we can get in touch via email.

      As to a cross-platform version of this…that’s a little less likely, but I’ll see if I can make some inquiries.

  3. Kraken says:

    Thank you very much for this! Awesome savegame editor.

  4. tacgnol06 says:

    There’s a bug when editing Ultima 4 saves. Editing a save results in your food and number of steps being reduced to extremely low numbers, and if you attempt to edit either of those values, save, and reload the save, the changes don’t stick and again, the numbers drop to low values. This is a problem because the game uses the number of steps to determine monster spawn difficulty.

  5. My comment didn’t seem to post, so I’ll try again. The editor doesn’t work properly with my Ultima 4 saves. Saving an edit results in my food and number of moves reduced to extremely low numbers, regardless of whether or not I attempt to edit them. The move count determines monster spawns, so now I’ve just got orcs and skeletons on my overworld.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Hmm…I seem to be showing both comments as posted. Ah, well. Thanks for the bug report; that’s good to know, at least. I’m not sure anything can be done about it, as this utility is long out of development, but at least those looking to use it for Ultima 4 are forewarned!

  6. Lizard Man says:

    You are funny tacgnol06longcatacgnol, I finished Ultima 1 to 5 thanks to this editor.

    The thing you are mentioning happens in pretty much all the 1 to 5 Ultimas, see this:
    What happens when you add more experience than the maximum number you added in the editor?
    What happened to me was that the value went back to 0.

    The solution to this it’s simple, add around 1000 less.

    Oh, and more thing, I don’t know if you are playing the Ultima games like when you see someone rapidly taking a peek at the pages of a magazine. Want some advice? Don’t go beyond that if you have no clue, it took a lot more than FAQ peeking to complete the Ultima games, and I have completed all the Ultima Collection games. And yes, Akalabeth included, thank you Lizard Man.

    • I… didn’t say anything funny. And no, it’s not a roll-over issue. I can type in ANY number, click save, and when I reload the save in the editor or the game itself, it’ll have changed to 0, 2, 657, and so on.

      Case in point: when I first loaded my save into the editor, I had 325 food. I did NOT change this value. All I did was change my humility value back to 0 (partial Avatar) after messing up, and then saved. Anyway, when I reloaded my save, I had 2 food, AND my moves number had dropped way down. Again, I hadn’t touched those values, so it’s NOT a roll-over issue.

      You seem to have taken my bug report personally, because your post has a condescending tone and drips with sarcasm, and implies that my report is incorrect and invalid. I don’t appreciate that. And who the hell are you to tell me how to play a game?

      If you think I’m trying to insult the creators of this software with poorly-educated bug reports, I’m not, and I think they can take care of themselves without you white-knighting them.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Yes, let’s keep the personal attacks and relatedly confrontational language to a minimum.

  7. Mike says:

    One interesting problem in Ultima V is that setting Dexterity for the Avatar above 33 triggers outlandish increases in the cost of weapons (at least at Iolo’s Bows in Britain). At a Dexterity of 34 or above, the price of a bow jumps from a low of 75 (if the Avatar has a Dexterity of 33) to a high of 23,000+ gold pieces! Increasing all the other stats to high levels seems to have no deleterious effect (so far).

  8. Hiroshi says:

    I went through almost all the gold I had during the attempt to get Space Ace, and after achieving that and returning to Sosaria I wanted to edit my HP cause I wasn’t gonna have enough gold (or patience in dungeons) to get more. But the editor refuses to let you keep the 20 enemy ship kills and forces you to go between 0 and 19. That seems something of a glaring flaw, because now I have to go back up and hope there’s still enough enemies to get back to Space Ace again.

    Otherwise, the editor was really good. This is the first time I’ve played Ultima since maybe the NES version of Exodus. I had been forgetting to use Q to save my game, and when it crashed after I’d done a lot of stat gains I was totally bummed to discover I hadn’t saved, but this helped out great.

  9. Xenerkes Dragon says:

    Hi everyone,

    Thanks for the bug reports. They are valid and I am planning in fixing them. I’ve released a new version (1.3.1). It is just a small update but it removes the limitation on the enemy ship kills. Hopefully @Hiroshi, it should fix your problem.

    • Edge says:

      Xenerkes, thank you for creating this nifty tool. Unfortunately, there seems to be a glaring bug in the #1 reason I sought out and downloaded it. The Ultima III “New Boat” feature. The instant I click “New Boat at” button (after selecting a location), the editor crashes immediately. It seems to work fine for regular editing though… but the glaring flaw in this otherwise awesome game is the severe lack of ships!

      Please look into this bug when you get a chance. Thank you! 🙂

  10. ryzawy says:

    Same for me actually! The editor crashes instantly when I try to spawn a ship.

  11. Bill says:

    you there? Files are not accessable, i’d really like to get the editor – thanks.

  12. Kran says:

    Awesome tool! This is really making my retro runs of these games much less stressful! I’m still on U1 so I don’t know about the other games. I just have 2 questions. I noticed that the only transports I can add are the enemy ships. All the others won’t let me type in a number. And I was wondering how to use the Go To. The drop down menu only has headings for Towns and Dungeons. No specific ones. And I don’t know how to find out the numbers for the locations.

  13. Just discovered that this exists. However, the link to the program is not working.

  14. Andrew Welty says:

    Hello! I’ve been playing through U5 again, after many years. I’m running into a problem, and I was hoping that this utility could help me. It does not do the specific thing I’m looking for, however. It is possible, apparently, for certain rooms in certain dungeons to become “flagged” as having been “cleared”. At first glance, this would appear to be appropriate behavior – it would be (and has been) an exploit to repeatedly clear rooms for loot and xp. However, I would argue that this leads to broken functionality in dungeons like Wrong and Covetous, where certain rooms are based off templates. The room becomes marked as cleared, and EVERY room in that dungeon using that template is now empty. I was hoping this utility would allow me to clear that flag. Is it possible to add this functionality? If that is not possible, is it instead possible to get the source code, so that I could add this functionality? Thank you very much!

  15. Anyone still checking this at times? I’m in Level 8 of the Dungeon Doom, aka shortly before endgame. Came all this way without any cheat – but just now I realized that my characters are too low on level and didn’t want to do more stupid levelling outside. The editor does a great job there, works just fine, no matter what I add in terms of stats, items, spells etc. BUT: Even though I did not change my coordinates it always brings me down to Level 256 (!), which seems to be some sort of debugging ground for Lord British. If I change the coordinates to some surface location I end up in a 1-tile-dungeon room labeled “Level 1” which I cannot escape from. I’m running the gog.com version of Ultima 5. Don’t know what to do tbh. 🙁

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I’ve been trying to get in touch with Xenerkes; I’ll try again and see if he can be roused to come render aid.

      • Andrew Welty says:

        And I take it you don’t have access to the source code? I long for the source code to tools like this. As a developer, I could quite possibly fix this, and I’m willing to, if only the source were in an open source repository like Github. If the original developer has abandoned the project, open source becomes the perfect solution.

  16. halob says:

    Regarding food, it is stored in units of hundredths. So, 200 food is stored as 20000 (200 times 100), or in the hex file 200 food, which is 4e20h or 20 4e in a hex editor (little endian). Perhaps the same for steps.

  1. March 13, 2013

    […] to a big assist from HiPhish, Xenerkes Dragon’s command-line editor for Ultima 1-5 savegames has been updated in two key […]

  2. June 13, 2013

    […] Man brought his speedruns of the last three Ultima games to our attention in a comment at the Ultima 1 subdomain. Some might quibble as to the legitimacy of […]

  3. April 24, 2021

    […] been trying to get in touch with Xenerkes Dragon regarding his Ultima Savegame Editor recently, to no […]

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.