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Produced by: Moa Dragon
Website #1: Remaking Ultima IX
Website #2: Eriadain @ Facebook
Releases (previous version):
* Eriadain (module) (13.2 MiB, 142 hits)
* 18 in 1 (hak pak) (109.8 MiB, 180 hits)
* AoB Super Placeables (hak pak) (33.2 MiB, 143 hits)
* The PC Pack v3.0 (hak pak) (18.9 MiB, 137 hits)
* Palace of Lace v2.0 (hak pak) (1.9 MiB, 132 hits)
* Extra Hak Paks #1 (3.3 MiB, 130 hits)
* Extra Hak Paks #2 (18.8 MiB, 121 hits)

Eriadain began as a module for BioWare‘s Neverwinter Nights that was to be based on the original storyline of Ultima 9: Ascension. This original storyline, also known as the Bob White Plot, was a much larger, more detailed plot that remained much more true to the Ultima tradition and the history of the series.

Moa Dragon built a sizeable portion of the necessary map for this project, including much of the overworld and all of the dungeons. He also implemented many of the necessary scripts, although many of these were untested at the time that work stopped on the project. Dialogues were incomplete at that point, and were marked with placeholder conversations for the most part. The released module above should not be considered a demo for these reasons.

Sadly, Moa Dragon stopped working on Eriadain some time ago, and the project languished here in the Orphanage for several years. But then a rather incredible thing happened: part of the actual Bob White Plot documentation was found and released online. This inspired Moa Dragon to begin shopping around the idea of an Eriadain reboot here and in other fora, and in March 2011 he rebooted the project…this time using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine and working in (informal) collaboration with the team developing Return to the Serpent Isle.

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Produced by: Sergorn Dragon
Website: Ultima Adventures
Releases:
* Ultima 9 Endgame (Classic Stones) (90.7 MiB, 293 hits)
* Ultima 9 Endgame (UO2 Stones) (90.7 MiB, 216 hits)

Sergorn Dragon, despite his well-known love for Ultima 9, isn’t the world’s biggest fan of the “modern” remix of Stones that plays during the end credits for Ascension. To that end, he took it upon himself to release two alternate versions of the video file that includes the “good” endgame movie and the game’s credits, one of which used the more classical arrangement of Stones featured elsewhere in Ultima 9m and one of which used the version of Stones composed for the never-released Ultima Online 2.

Both movie files are available for download, in the MPEG format, above. To install one or the other:

1. Rename the downloaded file to “goodendgame.dat”
2. Locate “goodendgame.dat” in your Ultima 9 installation
3. Overwrite the old file with the renamed file from Step 1

And yes, it really is as simple as changing the extension on the video file.

Castle Britannia

Produced by: Firstknight
Website: Beautiful Britannia @ Forgotten World
Latest Release:
* Beautiful Britannia 2011 R3 (286.2 MiB, 479 hits)

Mini Mods:
* BB Mini Mod #1 (130.5 KiB, 115 hits)

Previous Releases:
* Freedom Mod (3.1 MiB, 938 hits)
* 2009 Beautiful Britannia Demo (6.7 MiB, 958 hits)
* 2010 Beautiful Britannia Demo (170.5 MiB, 641 hits)
* Beautiful Britannia 2011 R1 (172.3 MiB, 747 hits)
* Beautiful Britannia 2011 R1 Hotfix (381.4 KiB, 182 hits)
* U9BB.EXE (200.2 KiB, 641 hits)
* Beautiful Britannia 2011 R2 (259.6 MiB, 426 hits)

Beautiful Britannia started as a ‘Freedom Mod‘ for Ascension, assembled by Michael Menapace in response to the linear feel to the plot of this last Ultima title. The mod didn’t do much to alter the order of events in the game, or to change at all the inconsistencies encountered in Ultima 9‘s plot. What it does do, however, is alter some aspects of the structure of Britannia, eliminating obstacles that previously prevented you from roaming the land of Britannia freely.

Eventually, the project grew into what became known as Forgotten World, and a team joined FIrstkniGHT. FIrstkniGHT himself left the team for a while, though the project moved on; it gained a website and grew more ambitious, evolving into an attempt to decode the Ascension game files with an eye toward building a world and game editor, in order to provide players with a better experience.

Firstknight (slight spelling change) then rejoined the team, and the project split into two separate projects as a result: Beautiful Britannia (a more “lush” version of the original Ultima 9) and its “Unlimited” spinoff (a more lush Ultima 9 with a few additions and revisions), and Forgotten World proper (the in-engine remake, which will feature many corrections and updates). Firstknight subsequently departed the team again, and then returned a short while later; in the interim, Beautiful Britannia became this standalone project.

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Produced by: Titans of Ether
Website: Titans of Ether

Ultima IX: Redemption is being developed with the Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls engine, and will feature a totally original plot and original gameplay.

This re-imagining of Ultima 9 aspires to live up to the Ultima greatness that the original game, in the opinion of the Titans of Ether, failed to achieve. It will feature total freedom in moral decision-making (which the original didn’t grant), as well as multiple endings.

Since Sept. 18, 2004, this project and The New King have been one unified effort under the direction of Corv. The New King will be the direct sequel to Redemption.

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Produced by: Dorian Hawkmoon
Website: Ultima Ascension Traducción
Releases:
* Ultima Ascension Traducción (7.7 MiB, 278 hits)

This is a full translation of Ultima 9 into Spanish.

Forgotten World

Produced by: Iceblade, Hawkwind, Splat, Rorschach and Firstknight
Website: Forgotten World
Forum: Forgotten World @ Titans of Ether
Releases:
* Ultima 9 v1.19f.01 (147.6 KiB, 1,134 hits)
* Forgotten Hallows Rise 2010 (181.5 KiB, 951 hits)
* Ultima 9 v1.19G (952.4 KiB, 1,562 hits)
* Ruins of the Hold (ZIP) (2.2 MiB, 137 hits)
* Stones Town Theme (ZIP) (1.3 MiB, 118 hits)
* Self-made Nonfixed File (705.3 KiB, 132 hits)

Forgotten World started as a ‘Freedom Mod‘ for Ascension, assembled by Michael Menapace in response to the rather absurdly linear feel to the plot of this last Ultima title. The mod didn’t do much to alter the order of events in the game, or to change at all the canonical inconsistencies encountered in Ultima 9‘s plot. What it does do, however, is alter some aspects of the structure of Britannia, eliminating obstacles that previously prevented you from roaming the land of Britannia freely.

Eventually, the project grew and a team joined FIrstkniGHT. FIrstkniGHT himself left the team for a while, though the project moved on; it gained a website and grew more ambitious, evolving into an attempt to decode the Ascension game files with an eye toward building a world and game editor, in order to provide players with a better experience.

Firstknight (slight spelling change) rejoined the team for a time, and the project split into two separate efforts: Beautiful Britannia (a more “lush” version of the original Ultima 9) and its “Unlimited” spinoff (a more lush Ultima 9 with a few additions and revisions), and Forgotten World proper (the in-engine remake, which will feature many corrections and updates). Firstknight subsequently departed the team again, this time apparently for good; in the process, Beautiful Britannia became a standalone project.

This project focus has also shifted in terms of the content the team is aiming to produce; Forgotten World‘s principal aim is to produce a series of well-crafted Ascension patches and mods, rather than become lost chasing something which may not be deliverable in the first place.

The ultimate goal of Forgotten World hasn’t changed, however: they are still intent on turning Ultima 9 — using its original, promising engine (albeit with a little help from the OGRE 3D engine as well) — into a better Ultima game.

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Produced by: Xenerkes Dragon
Website: Ultimatrix Homepage
Releases:
* Extended Setup (494.4 KiB, 466 hits)

A powerful and complex utility, this program allows you to edit every aspect of Ultima 9‘s lengthy configuration without ever having to open the OPTIONS.INI file in a text editor.

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Produced by: Edward Pinniger
Releases:
* Freeform Savegame (805.2 KiB, 350 hits)

An interesting savegame for Ultima 9. The creator has travelled through a fair bit of the map using the fly cheat and finished a number of the column quests (recovering the glyphs in the process) without speaking to NPCs along the way, thereby avoiding tripping plot triggers as much as possible. The Terfin/Bucanneer’s Den subplot has been completed so as to grant the player access to Raven’s ship.

Essentially, some of the game has already been completed (but the player starts on the Britain docks with little or no equipment) but the remainder of the game (a fair chunk) is now effectively non-linear, and Britannia is yours to explore!

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Produced by: Meschiari Stefano
Releases:
* Power Tools (646.9 KiB, 317 hits)

A configuration package that puts to shame the limited configuration options that ship with Ultima 9. It includes three major components:

• Game Options & Tweaks – replaces the default options program and allows configuration of all game performance aspects, including those previously only modifiable in OPTIONS.INI
• UIX Keymap Editor – allows easy modification of all key settings in the game
• UIX Starter – reboots the computer and starts Ascension without first loading the Windows Explorer, thus reducing memory overhead and eliminating background processes.

Note: This utility may not work, or work completely, with newer Windows operating system versions. As an alternative, check out the Ultima 9 Extended Setup utility.

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Produced by: Aquamarine Dragon
Releases:
* Music Decoder (15.0 KiB, 210 hits)

This is a program to extract the music from Ultima 9 and encode it to the WAV format. It also includes the option to amplify the volume of the sound, as this is quite low in the native file format.

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Produced by: Grandor Dragon, Novum Dragon
Releases:
* Monster & Economy Patch (79.8 KiB, 357 hits)
* Combined Patch (495.5 KiB, 390 hits)

Ultima 9 left a lot of disgruntled fans in its wake. Some of those who weren’t repulsed from the Ultima series as a whole by it decided to try and improve upon the last single-player Ultima title for themselves and others, and these two patches are the fruits of their efforts!

The Combined Patch offers three patches in total: the Dialogue Patches, the Monster Patch, and the Economy Patch. The Monster and Economy patches respectively tweak the monster stats and the economic system in Ultima 9, making it a little more realistic and true to how Ultima typically works.

The Dialogue patch puts you in a whole new version of Ascension. While it robs you of voiced dialogue (because so much of the game dialogue is changed in the patch), it re-works much of the game’s plot and dialogue to better take past Ultimas into consideration…and removes some of the inconsistencies as well.

If you don’t want the Dialogue patch, there is also a standalone Monster/Economy combination patch.

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Releases:
* 1.19f Patch (1.9 MiB, 2,270 hits)

This patch, rumoured to have been written by one of the developers of Ultima 9 in an act of frustration, offers further improvements to the Direct3D support that the 1.18f patch touched on. It also adjusts the spell damages a little bit, removes the “too many items” bug, and removes the SafeDisc protection on the game.

Indeed, this patch is pretty much necessary if you intend to run Ascension on a modern system.

Note: this patch requires the official 1.18f patch to be installed, so get that one first.

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Produced by: Origin Systems Inc.
Website: UO Herald
Releases:
* 1.18f Patch (6.2 MiB, 1,546 hits)

This was the last of the patches Origin released for Ultima 9. It corrects a lot of the bugs that plagued the game, removed many plot-stopping errors, and offered marginal improvement to the Direct3D graphics performance of the game.

It is highly recommended that you install this patch if you plan to play Ascension. Indeed, this patch should be considered the final step in an Ascension installation.