Hi there,

I am just wondering if there are any major bugs that is left over that can be avoided?

Someone posted in another forum that you should never fly to the island of the avatar with the magic carpet as it will permenantly lock the a cave a the end of BG that is part of the main quest.

I just want to make sure I don't inadvertently screw up my save game.

(Was going to use Exult's engine to try the game but there seems to be a major bug with items dissapearing which they haven't been able to solve for the last couple of years[?])

Regarding the disappearing of random items in Exult: If I understand it correctly, that applies only to the daily builds. The official release (1.4.9 rc1) shouldn't have this bug, which appears to have been introduced in more recent builds (and is thus why there hasn't been a new "official" version of Exult for the past few years).

As for the magic carpet and the Isle of the Avatar, this is a bug in the original game that, to the best of my knowledge, Exult doesn't fix. What happens is, there is a trigger somewhere in the dungeon below that causes a one-way glass door to close, and for some reason this trigger can be activated simply by flying over its coordinates on the carpet. In other words, you can still use the carpet to travel there, as long as you avoid flying over that one specific area of the island.

SPOILER: below is a spoiler but it is also a game breaker.

be aware that the number of pieces of blackrock is very limited and you need a certain number to advance the game at one point.

Ultima 7 does have a built-in 'cheat console', which you can use to get around the Isle of the Avatar door problem, among other things. It's not active by default though; you have to launch the game with a specific -tag in the command line to enable it.

There are two other things that I can think of that are common showstoppers - bug-wise at least:

In "The Serpent Isle" picking up the Staff of the Serpent is supposed to set a flag, but it may not be set properly if you aren't standing reasonably close to the staff when you pick it up, or if you pick it up using less common methods. If the flag isn't properly set then another event much later in the game will not occur when it should, and you can't progress beyond that point.

You can find the staff long before you actually need it to trigger the event, so my suggestion is that if you find it (it's in part of the cave section of Furnace), just leave it there until it's time to trigger the event.

Also, in "The Serpent Isle", do not walk out onto the docks of Sleeping Bull Inn until you've freed the ship captain from the nearby jail. You're supposed to free him so that he can take you on a voyage to Moonshade, but the event may (this doesn't always happen) trigger when you walk out onto the docks, even if he's still in jail. You'll get to Moonshade and everything will proceed normally, but leaving Moonshade later on requires that you talk to him about ways off the island - and he'll still be in his "Get me out of jail!" mode, causing you to become stuck.

Speaking of major Serpent Isle bugs, there's a big one you need to be aware of.

North of the Inn of the Sleeping Bull, there's a burnt-out mill haunted by ghosts. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to talk to any of these ghosts. For whatever reason, the game treats them all as if they were a crucial NPC found much later in the game, the Chaos Hierophant. Talking to this character before you're supposed to will result in massive spoilers at best, and potentially game-breaking flags being set at worst.

Exult fixes this bug, but it still exists in the pure DOS version sold here.

Cheers all, very good to know.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's in the latest official build, too. 1.4.9rc1 was released in Oct 2010, and in this thread about the disappearing objects bug on the Exult forums, one of the Exult developers says, "The bug is most likely not a recent one, the first report in the bug tracker was from 2009, so the bug is probably even from 2008 or earlier. AND we made other changes and fixed stuff as well, so running the latest snapshot and saving often is what I'd recommend."

I'd really like to run Exult, but I'm going to stick with the original version for now, and keep an eye on the Exult folks tracking down that bug.

Thanks, all, for the tips in this thread.