UO Offline

A single-player Ultima Online shard that runs entirely on your own machine. Works on Windows, Linux, and the Steam Deck. One installer sets everything up, and after it finishes you never need the internet again.

The point of it is the PlayerBots. The world is full of bots that fight, shop, bank, ride, travel the roads, crawl dungeons, join guilds, run war bands, gossip about things that actually happened, answer you when you talk to them, and log off for dinner. It plays like a busy 1999 shard instead of an empty map.

Built on ModernUO and ClassicUO. T2A era, all on localhost.

What's new — September 2026

Newest first.

• Play with friends. Clicking UO Offline now asks how you want to play: by yourself, host for friends, or join a friend. Hosting lets friends into your world over the LAN or, from anywhere, over Tailscale; joining connects the game to a friend's PC. See docs/FRIENDS.md.
• Recruit bots into your guild. Recruit a bot at your guildstone and it joins, wears your tag, and stays on the shard for good, restarts included. Guild chat works now: the bots chatter in it, say what they are doing when asked, and "anyone wanna group up" brings guildmates recalling to you to join your party.
• Thieves pick pockets. Thief bots steal from bots and from you with the real Stealing skill, at banks, taverns and in dungeons, sometimes creeping up hidden. A caught thief runs and hides, or dies to the guards if it was next to a banker. Most of them run with The Thieves Guild [TG], a bot guild only thieves roll into.
• Fighting retreats. A bot with a pack on its heels used to run to the next waypoint, get "clear", walk back, and do it again, for minutes. Now it decides at the start whether the pack is made of things it could beat one at a time. If so it runs until they string out and turns on the one in front, then runs again when the rest arrive. If not, it runs further, stays away longer, and a crawler drops the room from its rounds.
• Blues really go after reds. A blue mid-fight with any monster was never handed a red, dropped one for the first rat that bit it, and could not see a murderer hitting it unless the watch stepped in. A red now outranks every monster in the room, a red or gray attacking you or a friend is a target on sight, and more of the crowd is willing to draw.
• Mages kite instead of plinking. Magic Arrow was nearly half of every caster's spells, and it never won a fight. Casters back off to spell range now and open with the stronger circles, and a tank mage no longer drops its halberd to plink.
• Resurrection is real. Dead bots used to stand up on their own after a while, with no healer anywhere near. A ghost now walks to an ankh or a wandering healer, or gets raised by a friendly bot with the Magery or Healing to do it. Ghosts that die underground climb out first. Reds strip the bodies they make and never raise their own victim.
• Parties are bigger and look after each other. Random hunting parties were two bots and rare. They form at three to five now, scaled to how many bots are online, help any partymate against reds and monsters, and resurrect the fallen. If the leader dies, someone else takes over.
• Gossip fits the moment. Nobody shouts "red in Despise" while fighting that red, or reports on the spot they are standing. Rumours fade with distance, bystanders answer the teller, a repeat killer gets called out by name, and a red sighting gets told once.
• Deaths have killers again. Most bot deaths were being logged with no killer at all, which hid what was going on. With the names in, nearly all of them turned out to be PK gangs at dungeon mouths, which is how 1999 worked.
• See the bots' roads in-game. [showways draws the waypoint graph in the world around you, coloured by whether each node can be reached, and [hideways clears it. Handy for seeing why a bot walks the way it does.
• Spells get cast in melee. T2A cancels any spell above first circle the moment the caster is hit, and it says nothing when it does. Bots in melee chanted and nothing ever came out. At sword range they cast first circle only and step back for the rest.
• Bots size up the room. Before engaging, a bot weighs every monster in the room rather than the nearest one, pulls stragglers, and runs on numbers along real waypoints. Every bot has its own nerve, so some gamble.
• Crawlers go deeper. Most of the stairs and teleporters in the dungeons had no record of where they led, so crawlers stayed on the first floor. A discovery pass finds them and a tool authors the missing records. Wrong and Hythloth got their first floors re-done room by room.
• Dungeon doors, second half. Bots still shuffled at closed doors inside dungeons after the September 1 door fix, because the pathfinder's fallback route had never been told about bots. It has now.
• Bots buy what they say they want. A bot shouting "WTB regs" is making a real offer now. Tell it you have them and it walks over and haggles, the same as any other trade. What a bot asks for matches who it is: mages want reagents and leather, warriors want blades and bandages, everyone wants recall scrolls. They only ask for what they will actually buy, and they count their bank account when deciding what they can afford instead of just the coins in their pocket.
• Haggling holds. Talk a hawker down, hear "deal", and the trade window opens at the price you agreed. It used to quietly revert to the asking price and then refuse the coin you put down, which looked like a broken accept button. A seller who is short now says so and says how much is missing.
• Bots get into rooms. A closed door was a solid wall as far as bot pathing was concerned, so a bot would stand against the wall beside an open doorway swinging at a monster it could not reach. Every monster in the game could already walk through those doors. Bots do now too, and one that genuinely cannot reach something gives up in a few seconds instead of grinding at a wall for the better part of a minute.
• Bots get their gear back. Gathering your belongings off your own corpse is an AOS feature, and this is a T2A shard, so bots walked all the way back to their bodies, picked up nothing, and carried on naked. They collect their things and put their armour back on.
• Blues fight reds. Nothing ever drew on a murderer outside a guarded town, so a red could stand in a dungeon in the middle of a dozen blues and not one of them turned around. Adventurers and dungeon crews go after reds anywhere the guards will not, and a red in a fight goes for the people in the room before the monsters. Murderers also stay murderers now: one that died in a dungeon used to come back as a monster hunter and never hunt a player again.
• A stray corpse could lock you out of the shard. Logging in hung on "entering Britannia" and stayed there. The server was crashing as it sent the world, on one corpse of a bot that had died with nothing equipped. Any character standing near it could not get in.
• You can turn red. Killing player bots never counted against you. A murder count comes from the victim reporting the killer, the report is a window sent to a client, and a bot has no client, so you could cut down the whole of Britain and stay blue forever. Bots report their killers now, five murders turn you red, and the bank crowd yells for the guards when you walk in wearing it.
• "withdraw 5000" moves 5000 gold. The bank crowd has always said the real commands out loud and never moved a coin, so a bot with forty gold to its name would announce a five thousand gold withdrawal to a room full of people. A bot at a banker now puts away what it is carrying over walking money and draws it back out when it runs short. It only names an amount it actually has, so the broke ones say "balance" instead.
• Bots go after grays. Flag criminal in front of a crowd and the fighters standing in it draw on you, which is what happened to any gray at a bank in 1999. Killing a gray is legal, so nobody loses karma or brings the guards down for doing it. They break off the moment your flag lapses, so a fight never outlives the reason for it.
• Bank hawkers stopped going missing. A hawker that rolled a piece of armour with a protection level on it crashed partway through setting itself up, so that bot never finished spawning and the bank was quieter than it should have been. It was one bad format string. They all turn up now.
• Murderers stopped dying on a loop in town. Reds were being sent into guarded towns by three routes that never checked: the nearest-vendor supply errand, the moongate reroute for a trip across water, and the rescue for a bot with nowhere to walk. Guards killed them on arrival, a wandering healer stood them back up on the same tile, and the guards killed them again, thirteen times over for one bot in one evening. Reds now keep out of guarded towns entirely, and one who dies in one is carried to a shrine instead of being resurrected under the guards.
• Installs stopped failing at "Building ModernUO". The installer cloned the engine at whatever its newest commit happened to be, so a change upstream could break the build on a day nothing here changed. On August 30 one did, and new installs died with error CS1501 partway through. The engine version is pinned to the commit this release was tested against now, and re-running the installer moves an already-broken copy back onto it.
• Dungeon runes work. Marking a rune inside a dungeon failed with "Thy spell doth not appear to work...", which reads like a fizzle rather than a rule, and recall and gate would not take you in or out either. That is the later Felucca ruleset, not T2A, where dungeon runes were ordinary kit and recalling out of Deceit with a full pack was normal play. Marking, recall and gate all work in Felucca dungeons now, though the Lost Lands and Wind stay closed to magical travel because that part is period-correct.
• The bots hear you when you type normally. Saying "deal!" or "sold!" or "ok." to a hawker did nothing, and neither did answering a group shout with "me!". The phrase matching wanted a space after the phrase, so any punctuation stuck to the end of it hid the whole line. Accepting a price, turning one down, and answering an LFG shout all work with the punctuation people actually type now.
• Answer the bots who are buying. The bank crowd has always shouted "WTB GM hally" and "WTB regs", and it never meant anything. Now it does. Say "i have one", "i got one" or "i have a halberd" and whoever shouted it walks over and haggles for it, same as any other trade. Name your price in the same breath if you like: "i have one 5k". Only bots carrying enough coin to back the shout can be answered, so the ones you can deal with are always good for it.
• Sell your own stuff at the bank. Shout what you have and see if anyone bites. "WTS GM halberd 5k" works, so do "selling a katana 2k", "s> vanq kryss 25k" and "WTS 200 mandrake 900", and the era's shorthand is understood: hally, xbow, bm, sa, vanq, GM. The last number in the line is your price. A bot with coin in its pack crosses the floor, names its own number, and haggles from there. Answer with a number to push back, "ok" or "deal" to take it, "nvm" to walk. Then drag the item onto them and the real trade window opens with their gold already counted out on their side. They lowball, they only spend what they are actually carrying, and they will walk away. Describe a vanq and hand over a plain one and they hand it straight back. Plenty of shouts get nothing at all: reagents always move, a plain weapon off a vendor shelf mostly does not, and nobody at a bank is carrying keep-deed money. Who is standing there matters too, since a mage buys reagents and scrolls while a fencer wants weapons. When the room passes on something it stays passed on for a while, so shouting the same line over and over will not talk anyone into it.
• Horses only tire under load. A mount used to spend stamina on every step you ran, so about an hour in the saddle left you on a horse that would not move, even carrying nothing. A horse tires only when it is really hauling now: you over your own carry weight, or a pack beast loaded past what it can carry. An empty horse you can ride all day.
• Buy things off other players. Bank hawkers carry one real item, and the WTS line is built from what is in the pack, so "WTS GM halberd 5k" means the halberd is really there. Walk up to one and talk to it the way you would have in 1999. Ask what it has with "what are you selling", "what u got" or just "selling", and ask the price with "how much", "cost", or "how much for the halberd". Saying its name first works too, so "ulric how much" reads the same. Answer a price with a number to haggle, either bare ("3500", "4k", "2.5k?") or in a sentence ("ill go 3k"). Close it with "ill take it", "deal", "sold" or "ok", or walk with "nvm", "too much" or "no thanks". Then drop the gold on them: a real trade window opens with the goods already on their side, and it holds you to the number you agreed. Shouting across the bank does nothing, since this is face to face inside six tiles. Every seller has a hidden floor and a temperament, so some cave and some walk. Bots buy from each other the same way.
• Guards get called. A red walking into a guarded town no longer just scatters the crowd. Somebody yells for the guards, and T2A guards do not negotiate.
• Buccaneer's Den is the reds' town. A crowd of bots used to collect at its moongate, stand about, and leave. Bucc's Den is an island, and from that gate a bot can walk to 27 of the shard's 4,013 waypoints and 9 of its 480 destinations, so whoever gated in rolled somewhere it couldn't reach, gave up and left again. A wandering gate hop landed there roughly one time in eight, so the queue never emptied. It works the way it did in the era now: honest folk stay off the island, murderers never touch a public moongate at all (every one of them stands in a guarded town, so a red steps out of it and dies where it lands), and Bucc's Den is the only bank reds use because it's the only one with no guards over it. The standing crowd at that bank is murderers instead of bank sitters, and there are red spawns at the bank and the docks. Sailing over there is a bad idea, which is the point of the place.
• Reds turn up on their own. Drawn red spawns get placed when the server starts, so an update that adds them just has them. No [GeneratePKs to remember.
• Buccaneer's Den got built out. The island has a bank, a healer, a forge, a smith, a carpenter, a tailor and two provisioners, every one with arrival points, so reds can live there instead of it being a name on the map. Shard-wide that's 480 places bots walk to with 456 arrival points between them: the spots that let a bot stop at a counter or a doorstep instead of grinding against the nearest wall.
• Bots open doors. Walk a bot into a closed door and it opens, the same way the client's auto-open-doors setting has always worked for players. Before this they only opened doors during stuck-recovery, so a bot that walked into a dungeon room or the Britain bank stayed shut in there until a rescue timer fired. Locked doors still stay locked, and house doors still run their own access checks.
• One button sets up the world. The GM panel's WORLD tab was a 3x3 grid of setup commands that always got run in the same order anyway. It is now a single First Time Setup button, and it also places the PKs, which the old Run All never did.
• Twice as many bots. The world population target went from 800 to 1600, and the reds scale with it. Dial it back live with [SetBotPopulation if your machine complains.
• The launcher checks for updates. Starting the game asks GitHub whether there is a newer version, and if there is you get one prompt listing what changed. Up to date, offline, or GitHub having a bad day all mean it says nothing at all.
• Moongates work for normal characters. Walking into a city moongate did nothing unless you were on the staff account. New characters count as "young", and the young destination list only offers Trammel, which a Felucca-only shard doesn't have, so the menu never opened. The young player system is off now (it's a UO:R feature, not T2A), and the gate falls back to the full city list if a ruleset ever leaves someone with nowhere to go.
• Dungeon waypoints cleaned up. The underground road network carried 541 duplicate and stacked waypoints left over from generation: corridors recorded twice on the same tiles, plus blobs around teleporter pads. They're merged or deleted, the graph went from 176 disconnected pieces down to 78, and it audits clean now — no duplicates, no dangling edges, no one-way links.
• Map editor panel tidied. The side panel is grouped into collapsible sections (Layers, Live, Edit tools, Game actions) instead of one long column.
• Recall is really cast. Bots cast the actual Recall spell: a marked rune pulled from the pack, real reagents burned, real scrolls used up, real skill checks. Fizzles get re-cast like a player mashing a macro, and a trip that won't take gets walked instead.
• A real Windows installer, with Razor in the box. install.bat opens a graphical installer that shows a live checklist while it works. It also installs Razor and wires it into ClassicUO, so the desktop shortcut starts the server, opens the game with Razor attached, and logs you in.
• Crafters run a real economy. Smiths, tailors, and the new Carpenter class burn actual stock from their packs, buy the miners' ore and lumberjacks' logs for real coin, and sell finished goods to browsing bots. Each trade has its own shop talk, and gossip now spreads at walking speed instead of instantly.
• Tamers use their pets. They claim a pet at the stables and give orders out loud — "all kill", "all stay", "all follow me". Pets get vet-bandaged and fed real raw ribs, and a tamer who runs out of food watches it go wild.
• Crawlers loot, bards play. Corpses give up gold, gems, scrolls, and reagents, and a good magic drop gets bragged about at the bank for days. Bards use Provocation everywhere, and some run the Peacemaking build instead. Skill-checked, sour notes included.
• The reds got organized. PKs use the era's murderer templates, mostly Red Mages plus field dexxers with Tracking and Hiding. They hunt in gangs, ambush dungeon entrances, and drink pots and bandage mid-fight. A fresh world seeds red crews at the chokepoints automatically.
• 1999 gear. Kit is cheap exceptional crafted work, and magic items stay rare and tier-gated. A veteran's pack is the classic wall of bottles: reagents by the stack, heal and cure potions, explosion pots, trapped pouches, a spare halberd.
• Real T2A builds. Era stat caps (100/225) and seven-skill templates for every class. Tank mages re-equip the halberd mid-cast so the swing lands with the e-bolt, and two new classes joined: the Treasure Hunter and the Merchant.
• Party up with the bots. Target one with the normal party gump and it accepts. Or shout "lfg despise anyone" at the bank, ask the person next to you "wanna group?", or answer "me" when a bot shouts its own LFG and get a real invite back. Party members follow you, jump into your fights, and say goodbye when the group breaks up.
• Talk to them and they answer. Say a bot's name and it turns and responds. Greet the bank and someone greets back, or the room ignores you, which is also 1999. Ask a question and you get a shrug, because they're players, not tour guides.
• No roleplay theater. Every *emote* is gone from the shard. Bots type the way people actually typed: "gl" and "gf" around duels, "ty" when coins change hands, "vendor buy" at a shop. The whole chat corpus got the same pass.
• Banks are busy places. Every bank keeps a standing crowd of five: regulars talking trade, hawkers spamming WTS, statues who said "afk" an hour ago, someone raising resist by cursing himself over and over, someone flickering in and out of hiding, someone creeping circles training stealth.
• Stables are real places. Miners and lumberjacks stop at the stables, lead out a named pack animal, work with it, then walk it back and stable it. They don't own riding horses anymore, because you can't ride a pack animal and a working gatherer walked.
• Newbies walk. Recall scrolls scale with wealth, so a fresh Novice carries none and walks everywhere. Buying your first scrolls at the mage shop is a rite of passage again.
• The dungeon layout got ground-truthed. Every stair, entrance, and teleporter in all twelve dungeons was re-checked against the engine. Mislabeled stairs that sent "exiting" bots deeper are fixed, phantom graph edges and unstandable nodes are gone, and the cross-dungeon passages work.
• Recall is the transport. Long trips go by Recall or real scrolls, GM mages open public gates anyone can use, and a wedged bot casts its way out. Ferries are gone; they were never a T2A thing, so the outer isles are reached by magic.
• Supplies run out. Arrows, reagents, bandages, and scrolls are real and nothing refills invisibly. When a bot runs low it drops what it's doing and goes shopping, visibly, for gold.
• Guild convoys and war bands. Guildmates walk road trips together. Order and Chaos squads patrol and go looking for each other, and nearby faction-mates get pulled into the fight, up to 4v4.
• Smarter fights. Fighters bandage and cure mid-fight and retreat earlier when they're swarmed. Skilled mages answer a charging monster with Paralyze, step back, and resume.
• Gossip got personal. Bots tell their own stories in first person, war band clashes and guild outings make the bank rounds, and old news fades out.
• Era-correct clothes. Every hue comes from the classic dye tub range, with true black as the rare flex. Mana potions are gone from mage kits; they didn't exist yet.
• The shard watches itself. A live status page tracks stuck bots and rescues, and the fleet routes around road sections that keep causing trouble.

Install

The installer does the whole job: it builds ModernUO with the PlayerBots compiled in, sets up .NET, downloads ClassicUO, Razor, and the UO Classic game data (or uses an existing install if it finds one), grabs Nerun's spawn map, writes the T2A configs, and makes a launcher. It takes 15-25 minutes. Re-running it is safe, since it skips anything already done.

It builds against a pinned version of the ModernUO engine, the exact commit this release was tested with, so what you get does not depend on what upstream changed that day. If you have an older copy whose build fails, re-running the installer moves it back onto the pinned version.

Windows (easiest)

1. On this GitHub page, click the green Code button, then Download ZIP.
2. Unzip it anywhere. You'll get a folder named uo-offline-main.
3. Open that folder and double-click install.bat.

That's it. A graphical installer opens, shows you what's about to happen, lets you toggle the T2A map art and Razor, and lets you pick where it installs (Change... next to the folder, or type a path). Then it works through a live checklist. Nothing else to install first, no Windows settings to change — it fetches .NET, git and the game data itself, and none of it needs admin rights.

The git it fetches is MinGit, a portable build that lives inside the install folder. It doesn't install anything system-wide and doesn't touch your PATH, so it can't interfere with a git you already use. If you have git already, it uses yours and leaves it alone.

It defaults to %USERPROFILE%\uo-modernuo and needs about 6 GB. Any drive is fine, so a second disk works if your C: is tight. From the console version, pass the path instead:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install.ps1 -InstallPath "D:\Games\UO Offline"

That console version runs exactly the same steps as the graphical one. Leave off -InstallPath to use the default location.

Two things to expect while it runs:

• A UO Classic setup window may pop up while the game data downloads. Install to the default location and click through it. The installer carries on by itself afterwards.
• When it's done, click Play Now, or use the UO Offline desktop shortcut any time after. One click starts the server, opens the game with Razor attached, and logs you into the shard. Don't run start.ps1 directly — Windows blocks unsigned scripts, and the shortcut works around that for you.

Linux / Steam Deck

Steam Deck only: in Desktop Mode, run these once so you can install things. The first passwd sets a sudo password if you've never set one.

passwd
sudo steamos-readonly disable
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate

Then clone and run:

git clone https://github.com/Klein187/uo-offline.git
cd uo-offline
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

No git? On the GitHub page click Code, Download ZIP, unzip it, then cd uo-offline-main and run the same chmod and ./install.sh.

Keep the folder you ran it from. It is how you update later. install.sh reads the bots, the map tools and the launcher scripts from the folder around it, so it only works from inside a clone or an unzipped copy — not on its own.

It installs to ~/uo-modernuo and needs about 6 GB. To put it somewhere else:

./install.sh --install-root /mnt/games/uo-offline

Two things to expect while it runs:

• The game data is a 929 MB download. Let it finish. An interrupted download used to leave a folder of empty files that only failed later, at launch; the installer now catches that and stops, but starting clean beats restarting halfway.
• First launch takes 30-60 seconds while the world is generated and the admin account is created. That is normal, not a hang. After that it opens straight into the game.

To update by hand, from the folder you installed from:

cd uo-offline
git pull
./install.sh

Re-running it is safe. It skips whatever is already done and keeps your world, characters and accounts. On a ZIP install there is nothing to git pull, so download the ZIP again and run ./install.sh from the new folder.

If the game does not start, ~/uo-modernuo/launch.log says why, and ~/uo-modernuo/modernuo.log is the server's own log. If the game data ever downloads badly, delete ~/uo-modernuo/UOData and run the installer again.

Play with friends

Every time you click UO Offline it asks: Play by myself, Host for friends, or Join a friend. Tick "don't ask again" if you always want the same one; friends.bat ask in the install folder brings the question back (./friends.sh ask on Linux and the Steam Deck).

Hosting keeps everything as it is and lets friends into your world while your game is running. Windows asks once to open port 2593 in its firewall, and the launcher shows the address to give out (so does friends.bat). Same house: your LAN address. Anywhere else: put Tailscale on both PCs and use the 100.x.y.z address it gives you; nothing is opened to the internet and no router changes are needed. Friends' characters live in your save.

Joining asks for your friend's address, a name and a password, then connects the game there. Your account is created on their world the first time you log in. If their game is not running you get a message saying so. Full steps and fixes for "cannot connect" are in docs/FRIENDS.md.

Updates

Starting the game checks GitHub for a newer version. If there is one, you get a single prompt listing what changed, and you can update, play anyway, or skip that version for good. If you are up to date, or offline, or GitHub is having a bad day, it says nothing at all and the game just starts. Updating re-runs the installer, which rebuilds the server with the new bots and keeps your world, characters and accounts.

First-time setup

Double-click the UO Offline desktop icon. It starts the server, opens the game with Razor attached, and logs you in as admin (the account is created on first login). Make a character and pick any starting city. Razor's window comes up alongside the game — set up macros there, or minimize it and forget about it.

The world starts empty. To fill it:

1. Type [GmPanel to open the GM panel and click ★ First Time Setup. That one button lays down decor, signs, teleporters, moongates, town criers, the monster and vendor spawners, and the whole player bot population — town and road bots plus the reds — then saves. It is safe to run again later.

2. That's all. The Lifecycle system takes over from there.

The very first start takes a few minutes longer than later ones: it builds the world and bakes the pathfinding cache the bots use. That happens once. After that the server is up in seconds. Bank-sitters become shoppers and adventurers, travelers walk the roads, and bots step through moongates to other cities.

Play as a normal (non-GM) character

The admin account is a Game Master. It's how you set the world up, but a GM isn't a normal player — other characters treat you differently and it's easy to use GM powers by accident. Once the world is seeded, make a separate account to actually play on:

1. At the login screen, type a new account name and password you haven't used before and log in. The server creates the account the first time you use it.

2. Make a character on that account and play. You can switch back to admin whenever you need GM tools by logging out and back in.

Features

Bot identity. Every bot has a class (Warrior, Mage, Fencer, Archer, Tamer, Healer, Thief, Bard, Ranger, Treasure Hunter, Merchant, plus the working classes: Smith, Tailor, Fisherman, Lumberjack, Miner) and a skill tier from Novice to Grandmaster, spread on a bell curve. Skills, stats, and gear all come from class plus tier under the real T2A caps: 100 per stat, 225 total, seven-skill templates. A Grandmaster Mage really is one, usually a Tank Mage with a halberd, a full spellbook, and a hued robe.

Unique names and home cities. No two live bots share a name. Some carry surnames like "Tessa Ravenwood" or "Mara of Yew", and a few use the handles real players used, including lowercase "bob". Every bot has a home city its travels favor, so regulars turn up: keep visiting the Britain forge and you keep seeing the same smith.

Guilds and the Order/Chaos war. Thirteen era guilds ("The Undead Lords", "DOOM", "Knights of Yew") with both big-zerg and small-crew rosters. About 40% of bots wear a [TAG]. Six guilds carry Order or Chaos shields, and opposing shields fight on sight, in town, with the guards ignoring it, the way T2A worked.

Login and logout sessions. Bots don't exist forever. They log in, play one to four hours, say "gtg dinner", and vanish. The population follows a daily curve: dead at 5am, packed in the evening. Fresh spawns arrive as logins ("hey all", "what did i miss").

The event journal and gossip. The shard keeps a record of everything notable — kills, deaths, murders, duels, hunts, red sightings — and bots at banks retell real events. "Aldreth got pked at despise earlier!!" only gets said if it actually happened. Bots that hunted or dueled together become friends and greet each other by name from then on.

Hunting parties. A fighter broadcasts "LFG despise anyone?", nearby bots answer and converge, and the group walks real roads to a dungeon, goes in together, and fights as a unit until the run ends with "gg all". Parties run three to five strong, scaled to how many bots are online, and members help each other against reds and resurrect the fallen. Guildmates and friends get asked first. You can answer too: say "me" and the leader sends you a real party invite.

Play with them. The bots treat you like another player. Say a bot's name and it answers. Greet the bank and somebody greets back, or nobody does. Ask a question and get a shrug. Form a group through the party gump, by shouting LFG, or by asking "wanna group?" — members follow you, run to keep up, fight your fights, and beg off in character when they're busy. Beggars and lost newbies will latch on and follow you across the plaza.

Real deaths and corpse runs. Novices misjudge fights and sometimes die, and retreat thresholds scale with experience. Then the most famous thing in UO happens: the ghost haunts its corpse moaning OoOoOo, walks to an ankh or a wandering healer, or gets raised by a friendly bot with the skill, and comes back in a death robe, and runs back hoping the loot is still there. It gathers its belongings and puts its armour back on, or wails "WHO LOOTED MY CORPSE" if the corpse rotted.

Your guild, with bots in it. Recruit a bot at your guildstone and it joins on its own a few seconds later. A guilded bot is a permanent resident: it keeps living its life, but the session manager never logs it out, the boot purge and the regenerations leave it alone, and it comes back after a restart with your tag on. Guild chat is delivered to the guild (a T2A server normally drops it), and a guild member asking for a group in guild chat brings up to four guild bots: they answer in guild chat, recall to the asker if they have the magery, regs or a scroll, walk if they are already close, say so if they cannot come, and take the party invite when they arrive. While you are online the guild bots also use the channel themselves: random chatter, hellos answered, "what is everyone doing" answered from each bot's real activity ("heading to vesper provisioner", "in Despise L1", "with a group at Britain"), and now and then one asks for a group; its guildmates recall to it and it leads them into a dungeon as a guild crew, unless you answer "yeah" first, in which case they come to you.

Thieves pick pockets. Thief-class bots carry the NPC Thieves Guild card, and most of them also wear the tag of The Thieves Guild [TG], a player guild that only thieves roll into. They work the places people stand around with full packs: bank plazas, taverns, shop doors. One picks a mark, walks up, or hides and stealths up, snoops the pack and steals the best light item with the real Stealing skill, so gold comes off in the amounts the skill allows and a magic weapon can walk off. Most thieves only rob marks standing away from the town NPCs, because a criminal flagged within eight tiles of one gets a guard on the spot. The bold ones gamble. The lift itself always reveals the thief, so after a clean one it often hides again and slips off. Underground a thief never crawls: it works the floor it landed on hidden, moving room to room along the waypoints, robs adventurers between fights, treats a monster as something to hide from, and leaves by the stairs after a lift. A noticed thief runs, hides once it has a gap, and waits out the flag; the fighters nearby draw on it the way they draw on any gray. After every successful lift the thief goes to a bank and puts exactly what it took into its box.

Criminals are fair game. Flag gray and the fighters standing near you draw, up to three of them, and break off when the flag lapses. Tradespeople stay out of it, and the bank crowd only swings at what walks into arm's reach rather than abandoning the counter to chase you. Bots get the same treatment, so a thief who gets caught has a problem.

PKs and region danger. Reds run the era's murderer builds at Master and Grandmaster strength, in gangs that converge on victims, ambush dungeon entrances, and bandage and chug pots mid-fight. A red hunting underground goes for the people in the room before the monsters, and it stays a murderer for good. Blues hunt back: adventurers and dungeon crews draw on a red anywhere the guards will not turn out, which is everywhere except a guarded town and Buccaneer's Den. Murders heat up a danger map, and hot places empty of foot traffic. A civilian who spots a red screams "RED AT {PLACE}!!" and nearby travelers scatter. If the red is standing in a guarded town, someone yells for the guards instead, and T2A guards do not negotiate. None of it cares whether the red is a bot, so earn five murder counts and the same crowd screams about you and calls the same guards down.

A visible economy. Lumberjacks and Miners work 40 real wilderness sites, fill their packs with actual logs and ore, and haul the load to town. The matching crafter pays real gold from its own purse, and the raw haul becomes that crafter's ingots or boards. If no buyer is around, the bank takes it. Adventurers buy finished pieces off the shelf ("how much for a katana" then "800 gold" then "ty"), and the katana and the coin really change packs.

Hawkers sell what they actually have. A bank hawker carries one real item and its WTS line is built from it, so "WTS GM halberd 5k" means there is a GM halberd in that pack and 5k buys it. Stock runs from reagent lots and exceptional plate up to vanq weapons and house deeds. Ask a price, haggle it down, and drag the gold onto them — the real trade window opens with the goods already on their side. Other bots shop too: one will cross the bank floor, argue over the number, and walk off with it.

Sell to them too. The market runs both ways. Shout "WTS" at a bank with an item and a price and a bot with money walks over, names a number, and haggles for real: its ceiling is hidden, it is capped by the coin actually in its pack, and it will walk. Hand the goods over through the same trade window and it pays. It prices what you are selling off the same table its own stock is rolled from, so a GM halberd, a vanq one and a plain one are three different offers, and it looks at what lands on the table before it pays for it. Not everything sells. Demand depends on what the goods are and on who happens to be standing at that bank, and a refusal sticks for a while, so some things you just cannot move.

Answer their WTB shouts. "WTB GM hally" used to be noise. Tell whoever shouted it that you have one and they come over and haggle, the same negotiation a WTS shout starts, just from the other end. A bot only asks for what it would really buy, so what you hear tells you who is standing there: reagents and leather from the mages, blades and bandages from the fighters, ingots from the smiths, recall scrolls from everybody. It has to be able to pay, counting its bank account as well as its pack, or it keeps quiet instead.

Duels outside the bank. Two fighters call a challenge, trade a "gl", walk ten tiles clear of the crowd, and fight to low health but never to the death. Then they close with "gf" while the loser demands a rematch or blames lag. Legal in town, as it was.

Recall is the transport. Casters keep travel Magery, and established characters carry recall scrolls scaled by wealth. Long trips go by magic scaled to distance, GM mages open real public gates anyone can hop through, and the gateless outer isles — Valor, Humility, Dagger Isle, Fire Isle — get their pilgrims by Recall, since that's the only way short of a boat. A hopelessly wedged bot recalls out too.

Supply runs. Bows eat arrows, casts eat reagents, bandages get used up, and nothing refills invisibly. When a bot runs low it leaves what it's doing and goes shopping: the bowyer for arrows, the provisioner for bandages, the mage shop for reagents and scrolls, or its own bank box. The purchase happens on arrival, visibly, for gold.

Permanent bank crowds. Every bank keeps five people standing around: regulars talking trade, hawkers spamming WTS for goods they are really holding, statues who went afk an hour ago, someone casting curse on himself over and over to raise resist (real spells, real reagents, refilled from the bank box when the pouch runs dry), someone hiding, and someone training stealth. Individuals die and get replaced, but the crowd never goes away. The bank commands they say out loud are real: "withdraw 2000" at a banker moves 2000 gold into that bot's pack, and what a bot carries over walking money goes into the account it came out of.

Guild convoys and war bands. Guildmates muster and walk road trips together ("guild trip to trinsic, who walks with me?"), fight as a group when the road bites back, and split up on arrival. Order and Chaos squads patrol to faction spots and set intercept courses on enemy patrols. When shields meet, nearby faction-mates get drafted in, up to 4v4.

Pack animals at the stables. Miners and lumberjacks own no riding horses. Heading out they stop at the stables, lead out a named beast, load double the haul onto it, and after selling in town they walk it back and stable it. Tamers use the same counter for their horses.

Treasure hunts. Maps change hands before anyone digs, bought off the bank crowd or off a fisherman at the docks, and the rolled-up map rides in the pack for the whole trip. The hunter walks to one of 24 dig sites, digs with real shovel swings, and the guardians erupt mid-dig. Fight them down, open the chest, pocket the coin, and carry the story back to the bank.

The fishing SOS. A fisherman on a pier occasionally reels in a corked bottle with a map in it and hawks it on the spot ("i fish, i dont dig. map for sale"). If an adventurer is nearby, the map changes hands and a real hunt sets out. If not, the story still makes the rounds.

Visible taming. Tamers stalk wild animals and work them with the classic client spam ("I've always wanted an animal like you"). Sometimes the beast shies away, sometimes it submits. Tamed pets follow their master through town, get hawked at the bank, and either sell to a bystander or get released. No bot accumulates a permanent pet.

Bot homesteads. Small era houses — stone cottages, log cabins, thatched-roof cottages — sit along the wilderness roads, placed with the real house placement rules. Each has a locked door and a named sign. They're ownerless, ageless, and removable with [BotHouses scatter/clear.

Gear progression. Dungeon runs pay. Survive three and the next bank visit is shopping day: a visible tier promotion with better skills and kit ("finally saved up for new gear"). Regulars get better over weeks.

Street characters. Banks grow their own street life. The beggar ("gold plz") and the lost newbie ("how do i get to minoc??") will both latch onto a real player and follow them across the plaza.

Chatter with texture. Era voice throughout ("ne1", "thx m8", the odd all-caps drama), late-night lines after 9pm, nervy lines inside dungeons, gossip about real events, and the occasional "asdf" or "oops wrong window". No bot ever types an emote in asterisks. Ghost speech garbles for the living.

Shard status page. Data/Live/status.html rebuilds every minute: who's online with names, guild tags, class and tier, what they're doing and where; population against the daily curve; live counts of parties, convoys, and war bands; a news feed from the event journal; and a "Stuck & Rescues" section.

Equipment, strictly era. Beyond class signatures, every bot rolls accessories from the classic 1998 set: floppy hats, jester hats, feathered caps, tricornes, cloaks and sashes dyed only in colors the T2A dye tub could mix, with true black as the rare one. Metal armor is iron or genuine colored ore. Magic gear uses the real era system, Ruin through Vanquishing, with exceptional maker's marks that GM crafters announce when they pull one off. Nothing on anyone's back postdates 1998.

Mounts. Most bots spawn on a horse, ostard, or llama. Working folk are the exception: gatherers walk with their pack beasts, and fishermen work the pier on foot. Coat colors vary, mounted bots move at proper mount speed, and mounts despawn cleanly with their rider. A horse only tires when it is hauling something: a rider over their carry weight, or a pack beast loaded past its own.

Behaviors. Bots run one of many behaviors, swapped by the lifecycle system and by arriving somewhere that calls for a different one:

• Idle / Wander — light local movement.
• BankSitter — stands at a bank and chats, and sometimes starts a duel or closes a WTS deal.
• Traveler — walks or rides between destinations on the waypoint road network.
• Shopper — browses a vendor area, then moves on.
• Crafter — settles at its station (Smith to forge, Tailor to shop, Carpenter to carpentry shop, Fisherman to dock) for long working sessions, making real goods from real materials and restocking when the shelf empties.
• Gatherer — works a wilderness site with real chop and mine animations, then hauls the load to town.
• Adventurer — full combat: melee, archery, and real magic up to Flamestrike, with kiting, target switching, and threat assessment. Retreat thresholds scale with experience.
• DungeonCrawler — enters through the real teleporters with a torch lit if a hand is free, sweeps floor by floor (novices stay shallow), loots the gold off its kills, camps respawns, and climbs out when the timer or the supplies run out. On the way up it only fights in self-defense, because leaving should look like leaving.
• PartyMember / Duelist / Ghost / CorpseReclaim / Beggar / Newbie — the hunting-party follower, the bank duelist, the death story, and the street characters.
• PlayerGroup — a bot in your party: follows your lead, fights your fights, says goodbye at the end.
• TreasureHunter — dig, fight the guardians, open the chest, walk home rich.
• Tamer — stalk an animal, tame it, parade it to town, sell it.
• PK — hostile player-killer, and the reason civilians scream RED.

Destinations, waypoints, and zones. Travelers go to actual places, not random spots. Three layers describe the world:

• Waypoints — the road network. A graph of nodes that Travelers thread with A*/Dijkstra routing. Hot-reloadable with [ReloadWaypoints.
• Destinations — places of interest (banks, vendors, taverns, healers, moongates, dungeon entrances), weighted by class so Bards prefer taverns and Crafters prefer forges.
• Zones — painted areas like bank plazas and docks where a behavior happens throughout, plus portals for doorway thresholds. Hot-reloadable with [ReloadZones.

Arrival points. This is what lets bots reach places they can actually stand on. A destination can carry several arrival points, each a specific reachable tile — a vendor counter, a doorstep, a moongate — with its own preferred route waypoints. A bot picks one, routes to the nearest of its waypoints, and arrives on a standable tile instead of grinding against a wall trying to reach an unreachable interior coordinate.

Moongate, Recall, and Gate travel. Bots that reach a moongate usually step through and come out at another city's gate, which circulates the population around Britannia. Long hauls reroute through the gate network automatically, and cross-water trips split between Recall and the moongates so the gate plazas keep their crowds. Casters Recall on mana, scroll users spend their stack carefully, and GM mages open a real Gate Travel pair that lingers for anyone, players included, to hop through.

Combat. Adventurers fight with class-appropriate tactics: melee bots fan around a monster instead of stacking on it, archers and mages kite, and the spellbook runs from Magic Arrow to Flamestrike with era openers, including Paralyze against a monster closing on a skilled mage and cure potions when poison lands. Fighters bandage mid-fight on a fast combat pulse and the bandage actually completes. Retreat thresholds scale with experience and with how many monsters are piling on. After a rough win, fighters bandage up and casters meditate. Nobody attacks innocents or wildlife.

Stuck recovery. When a bot gets pinned against terrain, it gets nudged toward walkable ground, doors in the way get opened, and it repaths — escalating through sidesteps and wedge extraction to a full recall-out if it can cast or has a scroll. Every firing feeds a telemetry ledger: the status page shows trouble hotspots, Data/Live/stuck_report.json feeds tooling, and road edges that keep defeating bots take a temporary routing penalty, so the whole fleet detours around chokepoints on its own.

Navigation. Short-range pathfinding uses ModernUO's A*. Long-range uses the waypoint graph. A distance-field final approach carries bots the last few tiles into an area. Bots fire dungeon and moongate teleporters by stepping on the tile, with no fake "go inside" magic.

Lifecycle. Every bot has a personality: weighted leanings toward each behavior plus optional traits (Restless, Homebody, Brave, Cautious, Wealthy, Rough). The lifecycle manager checks each bot periodically and moves it to a new behavior when its current phase runs out.

The map editor

A browser-based editor for the world's navigation data and population, served live from the running shard.

The installer sets it up for you — it's one of the tick-boxes on the first screen, on by default. Untick it if you only want to play. On Windows it needs Python; if you haven't got one, the installer fetches the small embeddable build rather than making you install anything.

# Windows — double-click the "UO Map Editor" desktop icon
#           (or run map-editor\uo-map.bat inside your install folder)

# Linux / Steam Deck
~/uo-modernuo/map-editor/uo-map-launch.sh     # serves on http://localhost:8777

Skip it at install time with --no-map-editor on Linux, or by unticking the box on Windows.

It draws the full Felucca map with your waypoints, destinations, zones, and spawns on top, read live from the shard's JSON on every refresh. In EDIT mode you can:

• Waypoints — click to add (snaps to walkable road and auto-connects neighbors), drag to move, link or sever edges, delete.
• Destinations — drag to move, enable or disable, paint areas over them so the shape becomes the destination, or create new ones.
• Arrival points — drop them on reachable tiles, including interior floors, drag and delete them, and link each to route waypoints by clicking the gold marker and then a waypoint.
• Spawns — place spawn points of every kind (PlayerBot fixed-role, PlayerBot lifecycle, Monster, NPC, Vendor) with a count, range, and respawn timer. Filter by kind, drag, edit, delete. [GenerateCustomSpawners turns the saved spawns.json into real in-game spawners.

Two read-only overlays help you debug:

• Live entities — polls the running shard ([LiveMap on in game) and draws every bot and creature where it really is, colored by behavior, filterable, with a density heatmap and click-to-inspect. Click a traveling bot to see its planned route: magenta is remaining, grey is traveled.
• WP coverage gaps — shades the map by distance to the nearest waypoint. Yellow is marginal (28-38 tiles), red is a real gap (over 38, where bots can strand). It shows exactly where to extend the roads next.

Changes write straight to the shard's JSON, with backups. Two buttons apply them in the running game without alt-tabbing:

• Reload in game — hot-reloads waypoints, destinations, and zones.
• Regenerate bots in game — re-lays the whole bot population, so bank and shop crowds move onto your current arrival points.

These work through a small token-file bridge the game polls. You can still run the [Reload commands by hand if you prefer.

The map background PNG is generated. If it's missing, rebuild it from your UO client's map files with make_interactive_map.py.

GM commands

Marking the world as you walk:

• [MarkWay <name> — record a waypoint where you stand, walkability-checked, auto-connecting to neighbors within 38 tiles.
• [MarkSpot <type> <name> — record a destination (Bank, Tavern, VendorSmith, and so on) with the city and nearest waypoint filled in.
• [RecordWay and [RecordWayStop — drop waypoints automatically as you walk a route.
• [DelWay / [DelSpot — remove the nearest waypoint or destination, with confirmation.

Graph maintenance:

• [ResyncWaypoints — recompute every destination's nearest waypoint against the current graph. Dry-run by default; add apply to write.
• [AuditEdges — flag waypoint edges that are blocked, too costly, or too far.
• [ReloadWaypoints / [ReloadDestinations / [ReloadZones — hot-reload the data files.

Diagnostics:

• [BotInfo — target a bot and dump its class, tier, stats, skills, notoriety, behavior, and destination.
• [BotWhere, [hpacomponents, [hpaedges, and the field-debug commands.
• [CombatDebug on|off — verbose per-cast combat logging at runtime.
• [showways [radius] [nolinks] / [hideways — draw the waypoint graph in the world around you, coloured by reachability.
• [MapPads — find teleporters and stairs that have no destination record, for authoring with tools/author_stairs.py.

Living shard:

• [BotGuilds — guild rosters with live member counts.
• [BotSessions [on|off] — session layer status, live against the curve target, or toggle it.
• [BotParties [form | convoy | warband] — list live parties, or force-form a hunt, a guild convoy, or a war band.
• [BotFactions [fight] — Order/Chaos counts and active fights, or force a street fight.
• [BotDuel — force a bank duel near you.
• [BotTrade — force a trade scene.
• [BotDanger — list places with recent murder heat.
• Headless test tokens for soaks, no client needed: drop a number into Data/Live/party_request.txt, death_request.txt, faction_request.txt, or gossip_request.txt, then watch the console or the matching *_ack.json.

Admin and population:

• [GmPanel — the central GM gump: world setup, spawning, teleporting, cleanup, with confirmations on anything destructive.
• [GenerateBots — re-lay the ambient population: BankSitters on bank arrival points, Shoppers on vendor arrival points, the rest roaming Travelers.
• [GenerateCustomSpawners — turn the spawn editor's spawns.json into real in-game spawners.
• [LiveMap on|off [seconds] — stream a live entity snapshot to the map editor.

Currently being worked on

Cities — the mainland is done. All eight mainland cities have their road networks, destination clusters, arrival points, and painted areas live:

Done	In progress / planned
Britain	Magincia (markers only)
Trinsic	Nujel'm (markers only)
Vesper	Buccaneer's Den (town built, no painted area yet)
Minoc	Occlo
Yew
Moonglow
Skara Brae
Jhelom

The island cities still need their own waypoint pockets and arrival handling. Six virtue shrines are live as walkable pilgrimage destinations (Chaos, Spirituality, Compassion, Sacrifice, Justice, Honor), each with a server-verified overland trail. Valor and Humility sit on gateless isles and get their pilgrims by Recall. Honesty's island hasn't been authored yet.

Dungeons. Still being worked on, mainly the waypoint network the bots walk underground. Wrong and Hythloth are being re-authored floor by floor. Crawlers can reach the deeper levels now, but most runs still end on the first floor.

Credits

• ModernUO — the game server emulator. GPL-3.0.
• ClassicUO — the open-source UO client. BSD.
• Nerun's Distro — the pre-T2A spawn map. Decades of community work.
• mirror.ashkantra.de — community mirror hosting the EA UO Classic installer.
• Origin Systems / Electronic Arts — for making Ultima Online in the first place.
• Richard Garriott — for the world we're all still playing in.

The PlayerBots system was built for this project. GPL-3.0.

Ultima Online is © Electronic Arts. This project doesn't redistribute any EA-copyrighted assets; the installer downloads them from a third-party community mirror.