This is the home of the Ultima 6 Minecraft conversion project (U6MC as I call it). This is an automated conversion of the 2D game data from Ultima 6 into a playable, 3D Minecraft world. The entire overworld and all dungeons are included in this conversion.

Ultima 6 has a much higher level of detail, so some things convert more directly than others, but an effort was made to reproduce the world as authentically as possible.

This is a work in progress. See the known issues section below. And please let me know if you see something broken or have an idea for making something look better. The map is so vast I simply haven't been able to check everything in it.

Download

You can download the U6MC world files here. You need a copy of Minecraft to play! The free Minecraft Classic version will not work.

World-U6MC-1.1.1.zip (6.19MB)

Last updated March 22nd, 2012 (6.19MB)

You'll need to unzip this file into the appropriate folder, which varies depending on your operating system.

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\ username \Application Data\.minecraft\saves

C:\Documents and Settings\ \Application Data\.minecraft\saves Windows 7: C:\Documents and Settings\ username \AppData\.minecraft\saves

C:\Documents and Settings\ \AppData\.minecraft\saves Mac OS X: /users/username/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves

Unzip the file into a subdirectory (e.g. U6MC).

Also inside the zip are alternate level.dat files. The level.dat file is what stores the player's current inventory and position in Minecraft. In order to make exploration a bit easier I've included lots of alternates that will place you at various places of interest. They're named level-xxxx.dat. Simply copy one of them over your level.dat file. Note that doing this will replace any inventory you may have accumulated from prior play. There's also a special level-empty-inventory.dat for people who would prefer some challenge.

See the history section below for old versions of the map and lists of changes.

Screenshots

Here you can see screen shots from Minecraft and the corresponding locations in Ultima 6. Click to see a larger version.

Ultima 6 version Minecraft version Aerial view of Castle Britannia. Sutek's castle. Trinsic. Rune of Honor in Trinsic. Ant mound desert. Random forest. Shrine of Honor. Random ocean. The depth increases the farther from shore, which you can see a little around these islands. Lava pool in Dungeon Hythloth. An underground lake. Farm animals will spawn on any patch of grass, even in a dungeon. Dragon den in Dungeon Destard. This is the largest chamber in any dungeon.



There aren't many lights in these dungeons by default. I dropped a ton of torches so there'd be something to see for these screenshots. Pirate cave treasure room! Lycaeum in Moonglow. Lycaeum basement. It's even more confusing to navigate in 3D. Gargoyle land. This was the trickiest conversion because the Gargoyle area is supposed to be on the bottom side of the flat earth, upside-down. It clearly wouldn't be much fun to make the 3D version upside-down where you couldn't interact with it, so I made it right-side up. Also, the Gargoyle area is outdoors, but I can't inject sunlight way down underground, so I made the ceiling out of lightstone to give it at least a little bit of "sunlight". I had to make the ceiling low in order for the light to reach the ground at a reasonable brightness. More compromises than I would have liked to make. Very long dungeon hall in one of the Gargoyle dungeons (name?). Statue of Mondain. Perfect likeness, eh? Moonrise over the edge of the world. View from the void back at the northwest corner of the world. View up from the bottom of the void.

Lastly, here are a couple of interesting visualizations from the Cartograph tool.



Isometric view (422KB) — This shows the entire world in 3D.

Dungeon view (387KB) — This shows all the dungeons, caves, and basements superimposed beneath the world. The large square in the near corner is the Gargoyle world. The thin, straight lines are artificial connecting hallways. These had to be added to reconcile spatial inconsistencies in the game. For example, a dungeon might have two entrances where the dungeon ladders are only a few tiles apart, but on the overworld the cave entrances are hundreds of tiles apart.

About the Project

This project started as a homegrown Minecraft editing library in Java. Then a friend suggested recreating Ultima 6 in Minecraft. I had already mapped Ultima 6 several years earlier, so I already knew how to access most of the game data. Apart from loving the game as a kid, this made a nice excuse to test out my Minecraft code. A couple months later the U6MC project was (more or less) complete.

To clarify, this is an automated conversion. I wrote a program that looks at the raw, original Ultima 6 game files and decides how to turn that into a 3D Minecraft level. It takes about 20 minutes to generate everything. There is a small bit of manual tweaking, but it amounts to like 8 lines of code to handle some very special cases. For example, I deleted two trees near Nicodemus's house because they were catching fire and burning down half of Britannia. Little stuff like that.

This project is dedicated to Felicia Day, the awesome actress/gamer/geek, because I'm a fan of hers and I know she loved the Ultima series growing up. Be sure to check out her web series The Guild if you enjoy MMOs.

Update: Hey, she saw it!



History

A list of all versions of the map.

1.1.1, Mar 22 th , 2012 Identical to 1.1, just resaved in the new Anvil format to work with Minecraft 1.2.4 and above. Alternate level.dat files included but untested. May or may not work with the new client without conversion.

1.1, Nov 27 th , 2010 World is now oriented properly so sun rises in the east. Required massive redesign of coordinate system, so hopefully everything still works! Ladders should be much better, sticking to proper walls, not getting in the way of doors. Some improved models for various U6 tiles. Performance hit seemed to be caused by huge obsidian "void" around edge of map. Makes no sense. Replaced it with bedrock wall. Uglier, but faster. Still some hitches though. Waterfalls around edge of world now cascaded completely from the start instead of making the game do the work. Added level-empty-inventory.dat for people wanting some challenge, instead of the default inventory which gives you lots of infinite stacks of items. I'm not sure if there are enough toches and such out there to make life real easy though.

1.0, Nov 10 th , 2010 Original release.



Known Issues

These are the issues I know of that I haven't quite sorted out yet. If you see something you think might be messed up, let me know, and be as specific as possible.