I'm starting to feel like an idiot in some sort of mental test. I need a boat to get to Ambrosia and the small islands, but there are no boats to be found. From what I gathered I am supposed to hope for a pirate ship to appear, take the crew out and board the ship. I've walked the coasts of Sosaria several times and haven't seen a single boat. Come to think of it, even the serpents and squids have stopped spawning. Am I missing something? Do I need a certain level? I wouldn't even mind hacking my game files if I knew what to do.

This walking back and forth is really boring, ther eis no challenge in it, I'm not even doing anything aside from fighting some trivial critters. Of course all that nonesense ends up wasting my food, so I need to spend more gold on food, but I cannot buy stat boost without gold, so I need to grind even more! Did they even playtest this thing properly? I mean let a person who doesn't know anything about the game play from begging to end? Or am I stuck in some sort of bizzare bug? So far the first trilogy has been an unbalaced mess not worth the time.

That's... weird, even for Ultima III. Can you post your savegame? I'll take a look at the game myself and see if I run into a similar issue.

Which file would that be?

weird Pirate ships should show up at some point..

The PARTY.ULT file for sure... I'm not sure if there are others to indicate where you are in the game but I don't think so.

Here it is
[dead link]

I can open it in a Hex editor but I don't know what to change. I wouldn't mind cheating to get around this.

I assume you're using the upgrade patch? If so, this may be a bug in the patch. I tried the game with it installed and ran into the same issues (no ships, no serpents, not even the whirlpool.) I then tried it without the patch and the first thing I noticed was that the whirlpool was zipping around the water again. I had to stand in one place long enough to starve half to death but a ship did eventually appear as well.

If this is a patch bug, I don't think cheating will help because it appears the whirlpool is gone as well. I'll look at the upgrade page and see if I can report this as a possible bug.

::EDIT::
Hm. Maybe not a bug...
I tried to replicate the results a few times and I did get the whirlpool to appear with the patch installed on my third try (but still no ship.)
I also got the exact same result on my second try, without the patch installed, as I did the first time I tried it with the patch installed. On the third try I got this:

Exodus Swarm

Yeah, nine enemies swarmed me before I could even move away from Britain... XD
But again, no ship showed up.

So now I'm thinking it's the piss-poor random encounter generator in the game rather than the patch.

That would be so great! I think Ultima 3 is so far the only RPG where i whish for more monsters to spawn. Really, this whole issue could have been avoided by having a sperate ship count, like between two and five ships always to roam the sea independelty from the other monsters. I read that leaving the chests after monsters die reduces the amount of potential spawn ponts, so it makes it more likely for a monster to spawn in water, but again, I've been roaming Sosaria back and forth fighting the same stupid orcs over and over again. I think I'll just skip Ultima 3 and come back to it when your new patch is released. Also, the whirlpool was there all the time, so that's no issue.

I'm having this same problem where no boats are appearing. I'm fairly far along in the game, and need a boat in order to get into one last dungeon. However, after spending nearly an hour walking around Sosaria, not a single boat has appeared! The whirlpool is still milling about, but that's about it. I'm not seeing any sea monsters at all either.

Ideas? Kind of frustrating as I can't really continue with the game!

I'm running the patched version of the game.

Thanks,

..Al

This won't help, but I just gave up on the game. I could have started over again, but the tedium of grinding monye just for food because of the high consuption rate and the low spawn rate really turned me off. I mean Ultima III is a nice simple C-RPG and it has a surprising amount of content going for it, but the beginning is so boring. Sadly Voyager Dragon hasn't come out with a balance fix yet, so I decided to just skip this game until he does.

I can't get boats to appear either. I just donloaded the game a few days ago and I went through 1000 food and no boats. I've had squid and serpents appear, no boats. Please help. I've spent quite a bit of time to have it wasted like this.
I don't know why this forum topic is labeled solved, it isn't.

Yes, I marked it as solved because that's as close to a solution as we will get. Sucks, but that's what happened.

Maybe i was very lucky but i didn't have any problem with ships during my playthrough (last community patch installed). Just roam the eastern shore and kill everything you see and pirates will eventually attack you. It took me about 10 minutes of grinding to get the ship.