Hello,
I am currently playing UW 1, a real masterpiece of its time. Now I've stumbled over a really bad bug: I am on level 6 trying to get the famous VAS-rune in the eastern room. The problem happens, if I get it: When I put it in my rune bag, it duplicates - but with the strange duplication of the rune, which lies in my inventory, a lot of items disappear tracelessly... I've tried it again and again - in one try, after reloading, my full armor disappeared, in another try, some of the very important items (talismans) disappeared. Does anybody know the bug and is there a solution?
Thanks in advance for your help

edit: I just found out that I got some of the talismans by chance - the book of courage and the wine I got without talking to the mages first. Could that be a reason?

edit2: ok, it gets stranger and stranger: I have a goldchest in my inventory, filled with the talismans and other stuff. When I talk to a some of the mages on lvl 6, there happens a random (i think) transformation of items in the goldchest: One time a talisman changes to a pile of gold, another time to a potion...

edit3: now I remarked that one of the bags in my inventory has duplicated with its items inside. Two runes appeared out of nothing in one bag... am I cursed by this game?

Unfortunately, it sounds like your game has become corrupted somehow. If you can revert to an earlier save before any of this happened then you might be able to avoid it, but the root of the problem could have occurred so long ago that there's no way to fix it short of a restart.

The only other (very faint) hope would be to see what happens if you go back to a save before the first instance of items disappearing/changing and try removing everything from every container to see if it still happens.

Hi Garran, thank you for your answer,
I've tried everything... I loaded the latest savegame before it occurs, emptied the whole inventory, put my most precious items (talismans) out of their containers and put them on the floor. One time, even one of the talismans on the floor changed into a extremely bizarre "item", that looks like the effect, when you hit a wall or a door (and it says therefore "you see a damage"). It's really very bizarre.
But when I saw, that such strange errors seem to occur in earlier versions of Ultima Underworld, I patched my (1992-)version to a more recent 1993-version by simply replacing the uw.exe. Now there seemed to be no remarkable anomalies, so I played with an earlier savegame from lvl 5 down to lvl 6. After a short time of playing without any errors, there must have happened something again: when I load one of my savegames - even earlier ones now - there is now the message: "Underworld internal error Problems in object list". Could it be that the patch does his own damage?

edit: ok, now I dug out my old version from the Ultimate RPG Archives and the message disappears. The uw.exe there is from june 1993, I think that's the latest version. I'll give it a try. Thanks for your help.

I've seen that message in my own playthroughs with the GoG version (and way back, with a CD compilation version), but it never seemed to cause any problems. The earliest it occurred was level 2, so I assume there's something 'off' on that level that can (one way or another) trigger the message. It's possible that it's also the source of whatever corruption you were experiencing with the unpatched version.

In my case, the message happens sometimes (but not all the time) when I load a savegame or when I change from one level to another. It also happened, when I used a "gate travel"-scroll. As far as I see it, there are no items changed or away. I will try to continue my quest because to begin anew is no option for me (on level 6/7 of the abyss). I feel uneasy however...

I pleyed the GOG version of UU recently and had no problems whatsoever. No error messages, no bugs and no items disappearing.
I kept "depots" of items first at the dwarves and later in the knights' armoury.
As usual it's advicable to not install the game in the Proram Files folder is you are using Vista or Windows 7. Being a relic of the past I'm still on Windows XP.

The inventory system in UW1 (object list) is known to bug out every now and then. There's not much one can do about it. Sometimes it doesn't affect game critical items, then one can proceed and sometimes it does and then one is screwed.

When whole bags and their contents are duplicated it's a pretty major fuck up. One can try to eliminate the double items by throwing that bag into water but the best solution would be to start the game over. Since the object list is more likely not to bug out then to bug out, chances are you'll get a clean run the next time. But as I said, every now and then it happens. Even if using the latest patch, which seems to reduce the probability of the bug occurring, but it doesn't solve the problem completely.

I've finished the game today, sometimes the error message came up when I changed levels or loaded savegames, but nothing bad happened again. A great game indeed, now I'll go on to part II. Thank you for your help.