Ultima V Damageless Run in Only Seven Segments

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17 күн бұрын

I've been wanting to complete an Ultima V Damageless Run ever since I posted my Pacifist Run over a year ago. SPOILERS ahead.
Combat aside, Ultima V has a myriad of ways to deal you damage. Some ways, such as trapped treasure chests, are easy to bypass. Some are accidental--have you ever mixed reagents incorrectly or ventured into rough seas without a frigate? Still others, like falling while mountain climbing or experiencing earthquakes in the Underworld, are almost as inevitable as they are random. Damage might even be self-inflicted as you seek secrets beyond fireplaces. I dare say there's at least one way to take damage that requires you to deliberately go out of your way to achieve: wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Use...
The FIRST STEP in completing a damageless run is to define what I mean by "damageless."
Since Ultima V is a turn-based game, I decided on the following definition: At the end of each turn, all members of your party have HP no lower than they had at the start of the turn. (HP will be the same OR possibly higher due to leveling up or due to healing Shamino [or Mariah] who starts with low health.) Getting possessed or poisoned (if no drop in HP) or getting grazed in combat wouldn't be damage. A decrease in frigate hull strength won't count as damage. Consumption of magic points (MP) isn't damage. Loss of karma (emotional damage??) isn't damage. We only care about Hit Points. One addendum to the rule to cover loopholes: Instantaneous death of your entire party followed by Lord British's resurrection isn't allowed either! There are two such "insta-death" opportunities I am aware of: One is falling down the trap door in the Shadowlord's Stonegate keep. The other is drowning due to being on board a frigate that hits zero hull strength when no skiffs are onboard AND you don't have the magic carpet in your inventory. (The first time I experienced that, I remember thinking THAT'S probably the main reason the game warns you when no skiffs are on board. For years I thought it was just because it makes it harder for you to return to dry land.) But I digress.
Now that we've settled on a definition, you might feel it's overly complicated. It is. I was hoping to gloss over the fact that game requires you to take damage to reach the final dungeon (cave), Doom. Doom is on an island surrounded by impassible mountains. The only way in is to step on lava, and lava randomly deals between 1 and 8 points of damage. But I'm not going to let that get in my way of my damageless destiny. A ring of regeneration restores 1 HP at some random interval. If you are lucky enough to take only 1 "damage" from the lava AND have the ring do its thing on the same turn, then you'll hardly notice the fluctuation in HP ~ 49:26. You'll literally miss it if you blink--and I'm not talking about In Por!!
What are the odds of the lava dealing 1 "damage" and the ring regenerating you on the same turn? I'm not exactly sure--maybe 2% AT BEST. Presuming a uniform lava damage distribution, you have 1/8 odds (12.5%). In my limited testing with a ring of regeneration on Shamino, it took 113 presses of the space bar for his health to increase 20 points. The average (mean) number of turns between regeneration was a little over 5. The median was 3, the mode was 2. However, the biggest gap between regenerations was 42. I favored passing four turns and hoping for the best. It took 162 attempts in my run--failed attempts NOT included in the video--for me to be successful. (When I was testing out my regen. ring idea for the very first time, it only took me 20 or so tries for the stars to align.) Needless to say, this "damageless run" is segmented.
The SECOND STEP in completing a damageless run is to decide on my level of pain tolerance.
My (secondary) goal is to minimize the number of segments. The longer a segment goes, the riskier it becomes. If you mess up, then you have to repeat a much longer chunk. It would be super easy to abuse save scumming and to Quit & Save after every couple of moves in the Underworld. However, I wanted to come up with a plan. I think I like the planning aspect of Ultima speedrunning more than the actual gameplay, but actually seeing the plan work is what makes it all worth it. Typically with my speedruns/challenge runs, I figure out what's needed to get through Doom, then I work my way backward.
I'm running of room to write here, so I will add more details to a comment in my video.

Пікірлер: 4

@CyberSlugGump 15 күн бұрын

** Please see the MAIN DESCRIPTION for details where I define the parameters of this segmented, damageless run! ** I ran out of room in the description to say everything I wanted, so I am continuing below: ===Timestamps of the segments=== 1) 0:05 Gypsy virtue questions 2) 0:20 Iolo's Hut to LBC, Fogsbane, Britain, W. Britt, N. Britt, LBC again, Compassion Shrine, Cove, 5:07 Minoc, Codex, Sacrifice Shrine, The Lycaeum, Moonglow, Blackthorn's, Sutek's Hut, 13:57 Hythloth; Hythloth's treasure room, five visits 14:20 - 17:22 3) 17:58 Exited Hythloth; saved before holing up and camping 4) 18:30 After holing up; got dex boost from apparition. Serpent's Hold, Compassion Shrine, Justice Shrine, Empath Abbey, Codex, Justice Shrine, Codex, Sacrifice Shrine, Codex, Spirituality Shrine, Cove, Stonegate 5) 34:08 Enter waterfall to the Underworld. 34:54 Amulet, 36:00 Shard C., 38:10 Shard F., 39:55 shard "maze", 40:18 Shard H. Exit Underworld at 41:00, and begin destroying shards: Serpent's Hold, The Lyceaum, Empath Abbey, Yew, 47:28 Shame 6) 48:29 Exiting Shame, and flying to Doom 7) 49:26 At Doom's lava (Doom is entered at 49:54 and mirror at 56:39) FYI: The video's thumbnail doesn't exactly happen during the run. I drink a white potion from Moonglow (equivalent to x-ray spell) so that more of Doom's island shows up in the picture. A damagless Doom is not terribly difficult. It should be apparent that this run will have some similarities to my solo Avatar run. High dexterity can help in combat--but it's even more important when mountain climbing. It seems the probability of NOT falling is Dex divided by 30. Max dexterity means you NEVER fall. Oddly, the same isn't true of waterfalls: At 30 dex, I estimate waterfalls still damage you up to 1% of the time. We can get 25 Dex with favorable gypsy questions (but 24 is more likely), +5 dex with shrine quests, and +1 dex by leveling up. Boosting dex to 30 is why this run is nearly an hour long! I visit shrines in a strange order to optimize things a bit.... For the Gypsy, pick Compassion followed by Spiritually/Justice then Sacrifice. You need the first four questions to feature each of those virtues individually. As much as dexterity helps in combat, I try to avoid most combat with invisibility or negate time scrolls. (I will refer to the latter as "FT" since that's what the runes look like to me and "freeze time" is a a suitable substitute.) I came up with damageless Doom plan that had a high probability of success with only four FT scrolls. The game has four FT scrolls in fixed locations; however, one is out due to being behind the fireplace in Lord British's (LB) room. The easiest ways to procure a fourth FT are raiding the LB basement treasure chests or looting the "mother lode" room in Hythloth. Hythloth seems the better choice since it also has rings (invis & regen) and doesn't hurt my karma. I understand that karma affects the probability of LB apparitions, and I will need my Avatar to reach Level 3 to cast the blink spell. I ended up being super lucky with the FT scroll drops in Hythloth, so I enter Doom with 7 FTs! With 29 dex, you have about a 4% chance of falling anytime you climb a mountain (or 96% of climbing safely). You have to climb 44 mountains to get to the Shard of Hatred. At 29 dex, you only have an 18% chance of traversing the entire mountain path without falling. At 28 dex, the odds drop to under 5% success. With 30 dex, you NEVER fall while climbing. You might think that you can only have one active shrine quest at a time. This is sort of true. You can stack quests. So instead of going Shrine1-Codex-Shrine1 and Shrine2-Codex-Shrine2, you might go Shrine1-Shrine2-Codex-Shrine1-Codex-Shrine2. There might be a precedence to the shrines. (It's not a simple stack or queue; I'm guessing there's a bit mask the game uses internally. I might test more later.) The Codex will only show you one message, and you have to revisit the corresponding shrine to get credit. This doesn't necessarily save as much time as you would expect since each shrine quest still ends up requiring a visit to the Codex and two visits to the shrine. My route ended up as follows: - Shrine of Compassion - Shrine of Spirituality (moongate) - Codex shows compassion message - Shrine of Sacrifice - Compassion Shrine +1 - Shrine of Justice - Codex shows justice message - Justice Shrine +1+1 - Codex shows sacrifice message - Sacrifice Shrine +1+1 - Codex shows spirituality message - Spirituality Shrine (moongate) +1+1+1 I was *completely* surprised to collect all shards from the Underworld without being hit by an earthquake. (I did do some safety saves at each shard, so one might argue that's it's technically more segments.) Not shown: It could have been six segments if I hadn't been hit with an earthquake after exiting Shame and before blinking. (Earthquakes are the reason I save *before* entering the Underworld!) The hardest part of the run was the first main segment before camping for the apparition. I actually got the apparition on my second camp out and miraculously got Dex boosted! By the way, I realized while standing before the lava of Doom that I forgot to pick up the glass sword. I also forgot to have An Sanct mixed for the sandtrap's likely chest drop, but (J)immy luckily worked first try. Since I was stacked with FT scrolls, I decided to YOLO Doom. My movement isn't the best in this run as I was largely winging it in the second half, and the route is far from optimal; but it gets the job done. There are a couple other mistakes with moongates that ended up working out in the end, but I'm quite happy with the run even if it didn't showcase my Doom strat of In Zu Grav in the reaper/mongbats room and sharks/wisps room. You were spared from watching me use the halberd and An Xen Corp spells against the final room of daemons. Actually, this damagless run doesn't damage any glass swords or frigates, and I was never poisoned or grazed despite miscounting my remaining FT time in the reaper/mongbats room. I don't have an exact record of all my attempts. This was a Father's Day weekend project, so things were slightly rushed. Here were some of the things that killed some of my attempts: Breaking all my keys, getting attacked by sea creatures before I had invisibility (sharks are the reason I keep a sling), carelessly hitting the deep water near Cove, the presence of a Shadowlord in Minoc (though Falsehood--and to a lesser extent, Cowardice--can sometimes be salvaged), entering a moongate at the wrong time when trying to get to the Shrine of Spirituality, pirate ship cannons, and even a whirlpool. I can't believe my first ring of invisibility disappeared as soon as I tried to wear it. My second ring of invisibility totally made up for that fact as it lasted the whole time I had it and saved me from the bat ambush at 36:40!

@NESMasochist 13 күн бұрын

I love how you have figured all this stuff out. Keep em coming man.

@frankg1422 5 күн бұрын

Mind if ask how you got the music to work? I have never been able to get any of the mods to run for music on win-10.

@CyberSlugGump 5 күн бұрын

I'm pretty sure I just followed the steps for the "Windows V Upgrade Patch." Also, you need to make sure that you use ultima5.com to launch the game with music. If you run the regular Ultima.exe it won't have music, which is handy since I actually prefer practicing without music.