I've been getting into the series by starting with Ultima IV. I have it running under XU4, but was wondering about the game enhancement settings. I have no idea what most of them do. I think the only one I have a clue with is Ultima V Spell Mixing. Was wondering if anyone here knows what these settings are.

Here's a list of them:
Battle difficulty
Fixed chest traps (I assume this makes trapped chest always be trapped even when reloading a save game)
Gazer spawns insects
Gem view shows objects
slime divides

automatic actions (open, jimmy, etc)
set active player
smart 'enter' key
text colorization
Ultima V shrines

Any help would be appreciated. I couldn't find any XU4 documentation anywhere.

I know this is an old thread but by using Google I found out what fix chests trap does, apparently in the original the only chest traps that were there were acid and poison, fix chest traps makes the others work like sleep.

Battle difficulty I assume might make the monsters have more HP or similar. Gazer spawns insect, if you kill a gazer with it on (an eye monster) an insect will spawn you have to kill as well. It won't spawn an insect with it off. Gem view shows object is obviously related to peer gem, I assume it would show things like monsters and chests in dungeons maybe with it turned on. Slime divides is, sometimes when you attack a slime it will spawn another one. With this off it won't.

Automatic actions, I haven't tried it yet, but maybe it's something like walking into a door automatically unlocks it, and walking over a chest automatically opens it? Don't know.

Set active player, is some actions you can pick a player to perform the action, like normally when you try to open a chest with multiple players it asks you to pick someone. By pressing 1-8, a dot appears next to that party member in the roster, that's the active player who will do those actions automatically without the game asking who you want to do them in advance.

Smart enter, don't know. Text colorization hightlights game text with the selected color, Exult for Ultima 7 has this as well. As for Ultima V Shrines, I tried this at a shrine and the only difference I notice is the avatar kneels when meditating similar to Ultima V. Sorry for the late response but I hope that helps. :-)

Okay I JUST figured out what Smart Enter does, luckily I saved on top of my ship and I tried pressing Enter and it boards the ship automatically, So apparently pressing enter with the option on will perform actions automatically, like boarding ships, entering places, getting chests, etc, etc.

It's worth adding for anyone interested if XU4 works with Windows 10 Pro 64bit : yes, though Ultima IV doesn't without XU4. You can download XU4 at UltimaCodex.com in the Ultima IV section.

I know sleep and bomb and acid and poison all worked in the original Apple ][ Ultima IV, so perhaps the Fix Chests Traps has to do exclusively with the DOSbox version or the PC version.

I have tried XU4 in the past. The only thing "battle difficulty" seems to affect is the chance of the player's attacks hitting. On the highest difficulty, your attacks will miss more often, which I consider to be a poor (and rather frustrating) way of increasing the difficulty.

One thing I did notice about XU4 when I played it is that enemies did significantly less damage than in the original Ultima 4. I don't know if this was ever fixed.