Okay, I could use some help with Ultima 3. I've had to start over three times already simply because I'm just not making enough money to keep my party fed. I've been trying to fight as many monsters as I can on the mainland, but there just don't seem to be enough of them. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make more money at the beginning of the game?

Create a party of throw away characters and transfer everything (weapons, armor, gold, and food) from three of them to the first character, then save and restart the game. Disperse the party and delete the three emptied characters. Repeat as many times as you feel needs to be done.

As for a non cheap/cheat way? I have no clue. I've always run into the same issue... :/

Well, one thing to remember is that Ultima III is pre-Avatar/karma. I don't know if you'd consider it a cheat or not, but I would always go west from Britain to the town that is sort of hidden in a forest (can't remember the name). IIRC there are no guards in the town. So, I'd go in, slaughter and loot everything, exit and repeat (all the NPC's come back).

I don't think its a cheat necessarily, though its certainly not a very nice thing to do!

Yeah that would be YEW, you have to go there to learn pray if I recall(or am I mixing that part up with the NES version?) but it's easy to go on a killing spree there as they are all low level clerics. I personally managed to finish the game without doing that, worse case go dungeon crawling there's a easy dungeon a little ways west of castle Britannia hidden among a mountain pass you can also fine the mark of fire there on the first floor.

I just hang out on floor 1, kill monsters and then head up when I need to recover, head back in kill some more, lather rinse repeat. Just don't go too far if you don't have much food as there be hidden gremlins in there dungeons and they will steal all your food if your not careful.

This is a common problem with U3, and the way I've seen it solved is to create new party members, steal their food and money, then boot them from the party. IMHO, U3 is a bit unbalanced.

Incidentally, I've actually coded a "balance fix" to the U3 Upgrade that I was planning to release with v3.1. It decreases the food consumption rate and increases the monster generation rate.

I agree, this would be nice