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Ultima iii exodus strongest weapon3/15/2024 That's well and good, but what about those dungeons? Monsters there just show up randomly, right? Well, yes and no. Of the four Sands of Time I buy to preserve myself through these battles, I only needed one. I did in this run, getting only 1 of 8 possible pirates in the first pirate battle, and only 3 of 8 i the second. The other two pirate battles we have to face in the game, in Sosaria and in southern Ambrosia, we simply try to luck out on. By walking back and forth, we can glitch the ship guarded by the northern pirates in Ambrosia, and bring it to the top of the stack, letting us steal the ship without fighting the pirates. One pirate battle of the three needed can be skipped entirely, by taking advantage of how the game does not know how to handle having two sprites on the same map square. We need three ships to win the game: one in Sosaria, and two in Ambrosia. This also works in Ambrosia (important to avoid the Man of War battle there) and in towns (handy to keep that one trollish townsman from blocking the way to and from the Guild shop in Gray). As long as the D pad is never let up on (we can change directions, but can't let it go neutral), the monsters will never move and therefore will never attack. The can be frozen in their tracks if we go to the Status screen, press B, then immediately press a direction on the D pad before the menu is cleared. The enemies also cast spells themselves, and have many hit points.īut there is a glitch. Exodus Castle is cruel in that it's loaded with monsters who cannot be frozen with the Sands of Time that work the whole rest of the game, and also cannot be attacked by ordinary weapons, including any form of missile weapon. But we found a way to avoid having to fight even a single wandering monster in the endgame. It takes luck to avoid high-level encounters in the dungeons, but the dungeons can be done early, so the route was actually practical in a live, single-segment run.Įven so, Exodus Castle should have been too hard. It turns out that due to the perfectly consistent and manipulable AI, and the Floors having just low enough HP, they can be killed by magic missiles, in quantities that can be cast without buying stats at all. But gold? Everyone needs gold, right? All the good spells cost money! The easy part was minimizing the leveling: simply choose not to gain levels for any character but one, and give that one only the minimum 400 xp needed to get to level 5, get a ship, and do the end-game tasks. It also expects the party to be at level 25, for 10,000 combined experience gained, gotten in increments of 3 to 12. This is a game that envisions the party having maxed out stats, costing (99 * 2 + 74 * 2) * 100 * 4 gold, or 138,400 gold, gotten in increments of 1 to 99. Thank you, Pony Canyon, for making Ultima Exodus's music much better than Hydlide's.Īs for the route itself, the amazing thing about it is that we found a way to beat this game without grinding. And finally, thank you to all who make SDA happen, and to Pony Canyon for coming up with a fairly well-made console port of a DOS classic. Also, without Feasel giving me early moral support and inspiring me to take on this game, it might not have happened at all. But I also want to thank Emptyeye for helping me get on the right track in researching the game, and all my stream viewers for their constant encouragement and support. FatRatKnight suggested the kernel of what became the final, hard-to-believe route. Gyth, the current TAS record holder in the game, tipped me off on some glitches, and worked with me to develop others which made a big difference in the run. Dunnius encouraged me to learn fceux, which helped me optimize character creation. The TASing trio of Dunnius, Gyth, and FatRatKnight in particular were of great assistance. So I'd like to start by thanking all of those who helped me out with this. I went into this project hoping to get 1:30:00, as the best known run was in the neighborhood of 2:20:00, so it's amazing to me that i've finished at 0:43:37. Fortunately in attacking Ultima Exodus I had a friendly and active community of interested people, pointing out improvements, and pushing me to push the game to the limit.Īs a result of all that help and moral support, I believe this game has approached the limit of what can be done with currently known glitches. The hardest thing about running a game that has never been published to SDA, is knowing when to quit.
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