Hythloth Fix
After building 3 dungeons, with dozens, and dozens of rooms, traps, layouts, monsters etc., I find myself a little bit skilled in this area. It’s not that hard, but working almost strictly in a hex-editor, makes it a bit of a task. Nevertheless, I have persevered, and the crypts are done.
While my skill in this area is still high, I thought I would take a look at the ‘Hythloth’ bug. The Hythloth bug refers to level 6 of Hythloth, where there is an impassable room, a room which should lead into an adjacent room, to allow one to continue through to level 7. Additionally, another room in the same 3 room chain of rooms is missing door data for the party, and so is really, also, impassable, as all the characters start in the room ‘phased’ into a wall in the north-west corner. I know there is a fix for this issue somewhere out there, but I couldn’t track it down. The fix, I believe, added a secret door to the first, eastern room, which allowed passage into the middle room. It also fixed the door data for the western room, so the player and his party could pass through that room properly as well.
Since I couldn’t find the fix, I decided to quickly whip one up myself. However, when doing this I noticed something a little weird. The eastern room did not at all mesh/match with the middle and western room. It was also not at all suitable for inclusion of a secret door. The central room has a big huge entrance into the eastern room, but the eastern room has only room for a one or two space wide door, with a lot of weird finicking with triggers.
I went into the Apple II version and found that it suffered from the exact same flaws/bugs.
Same room as the Dos version. No way out to the west,
and no clean way to make a secret door open and logically mesh with the central room.
After consideration, I decided that a secret door in the eastern room was not likely part of the original plan/design. I concluded that a room which mirrored the eastern rooms design would work well, considering the ‘mirror image’ layout of the central room. So I made a new eastern room, tweaked the creatures inside, and added correct door data for all the rooms.
Just drop this file directly into your vanilla Ultima IV folder, and overwrite the existing Hythloth.dng (backup first…)
I think these images are kind of spoilers, as they reveal the rooms in complete detail. If you like/want to experience the rooms spoiler free, don’t scroll down...
The New Hythloth Eastern Room
Hythloth Central Room
Hythloth Western Room
I was hunting for the hythloth fix. This Ultimaaiera.com got me to the following at archive.org: Web.archive.org
Is that the old fix?
Yes, this is a new one that creates a room similar to the original intention (I think) of the three rooms in question. The old fix, at Ultimaaiera.com uses the original, though likely incorrect room, by hacking in a secret door. When I built this fix I discarded that approach, because it was obvious that the rooms were meant to be symmetrically related, and the addition of a misaligned secret door seemed quite 'kludgy'.