Ultima IV -- FAQ

The following are basics to get you going once you have Ultima IV installed on your Ubuntu computer.

Where is the Documentation?

Once you installed the Ultima IV package, you have a few PDF files available under /usr/share/ultima4/doc.

At some point, we may add a menu in the window so you can access these files directly from our interface. But thre's no such menu available at the moment.

Is there a Quick Help in the Game?

Yes. The Ctrl-H key shows you many help screens with all the available commands. There are many pages, but that's often faster than having to open the PDF documents if you have a good idea of what you are looking for.

How Do I Quit the Game?

While in the startup screen, you can simple hit Q until it quits. That's two or three times. If you are in the configuration window, exit to the main menu first.

While playing the game, exit the current Dungeons or City, then use the Q key to Save your current state to file. Once saved, use Ctrl-X to exit the game. You may also use the X at the top-left of the window. The game will close that way too.

One day, I hope to find a way to add menus to the window.

Can I Play More Than One Journey?

Yes. It's called a profile in this version.

At this time, it is only available on the command line. To access a profile other than the default, use the --profile command line option. For example:

ultima4 --profile avatar

will start with the settings from the avatar profile. Note that all the settings, including how the window looks like, whether it is full screen, the music and sound effects, etc. are all going to be reset back to the defaults when you start a new profile.

Your profile data is found in

~/.config/ultima4/profiles/...

How Do I Backup my Ultima IV Data?

Make a copy of the ~/.config/ultima4 directory to your backup drive. You may create a zip file or an equivalent with all the files present in that  folder.

The folder is generally very small. A few kilobytes. That's as expected.

To restore, put those files back in ~/.config/ultima4 and you'll be ready to go. All the other files come from the ultima4 Ubuntu package and thus is it not required to back them up. You may make any number of copies of the package though.

Note: The debug sub-folder is not required in your backups. That folder is used to make sure the game works as expected.