UO Second Age

From 96/97-2000 I actively played Ultima Online on Napa Valley. I am positive that Buc's Den had a public moongate in at least part of the Second Age era. My playing pretty much came to a halt shortly after UO:R was released & before that time the Buc's Den public moongate was a hotspot for murderers. It has proven to be somewhat difficult to substantiate this claim but I did find one example. Unfortunately, it is from a shard that had a different rule set than other shards. The following link mentions not having the portal which definitely existed on Napa Valley.

http://www.uoguide.com/Siege_Perilous

Next on the list is gate stacking. There are some players here that opt to town gate PvPers VS facing them head on in combat. One method I have noticed is opening a town gate on top of an existing gate which is thought to be safe for a murderer or criminal aggressor. I'm pretty sure that the ability to do this is not era accurate. I think I was able to confirm this to be true after looking through some old patch notes. In Febuary of 98, the ability to open gates on moongates was removed. No changes are mentioned in patch notes from this time through UO:R. I am not entirely sure if it is referring to public moongates alone or casted as well. I experimented on the Trinsic moongate and my gate did in fact stack.

http://wiki.uosecondage.com/1998_Patch_Notes

Last is the ability to single click a moongate and see what lies on the other side. This was only around for part of Second Age.

http://www.uoguide.com/Publish_3#Moongates

Unfortuantely, there isn't really any solid information that shows that Buccaneer's Den actually received a moongate until some time during UOR. In fact, a lot of information points to the fact that it did not have a moongate until they introduced the selectable moongate system in 2001. A way to confirm that the moongate existed at least as early as February 2000 is to check to see if a moongate message exists for Bucs Den when the gate was single clicked. If no such message exists, it's extremely likely that such a moongate never existed when those messages were in use (this means before the introduction of the selectable moongates in 2001). Some relevant information on the subject of public moongates can be found http://www.uoguide.com/Moongate and http://uo.stratics.com/content/basics/moongate/moongate.shtml.

As for overlapping gates, this is a known problem that needs to be fixed on UOSA. On the demo, if a player attempts to place a gate over an already existing gate, the spell will "succeed" in the sense that they will hear the moongate sound, lose the mana, and use the reagents, but the moongate itself will simply not appear to be used. Of course, it never hurts to bring up the subject once in a while.

It's interesting that the the non overlapping mechanic exists for all field spells (fire, poison, paralyze, energy, wall) except for the moongate, which is of course dispel-able with the "dispel field" spell. All of these field spell's currently work just as Kaivan has described, with the exception of the moongate of course.

Hope it gets fixed soon

I remember the Bucs Den moongate from this era. I made a character with a guild mate specifically FOR fights at the Bucs Den Moongate. It was located here:

As it currently stands, there is no information that suggests that Buccaneer's Den had a moongate during T2A. Thus far, all evidence points away from that.

WizKid wrote:From 96/97-2000 I actively played Ultima Online on Napa Valley. I am positive that Buc's Den had a public moongate in at least part of the Second Age era. My playing pretty much came to a halt shortly after UO:R was released & before that time the Buc's Den public moongate was a hotspot for murderers. It has proven to be somewhat difficult to substantiate this claim but I did find one example. Unfortunately, it is from a shard that had a different rule set than other shards. The following link mentions not having the portal which definitely existed on Napa Valley.

I remember the gateway to vesper/bucs being a hotspot for action during this time, sure ya'll arent thinking of this? I guess I quit before a moongate got put there, never remembered one being there.

Nickodemuse wrote:

WizKid wrote:From 96/97-2000 I actively played Ultima Online on Napa Valley. I am positive that Buc's Den had a public moongate in at least part of the Second Age era. My playing pretty much came to a halt shortly after UO:R was released & before that time the Buc's Den public moongate was a hotspot for murderers. It has proven to be somewhat difficult to substantiate this claim but I did find one example. Unfortunately, it is from a shard that had a different rule set than other shards. The following link mentions not having the portal which definitely existed on Napa Valley.

I remember the gateway to vesper/bucs being a hotspot for action during this time, sure ya'll arent thinking of this? I guess I quit before a moongate got put there, never remembered one being there.

There's a chance some shards added this moongate while others did not (at the time). Nujel'm on some shards received a moongate when others did not. I think Buc's Den appeared on the moongate system when they revamped it, allowing you to pick your destination. This is when it stopped being an actual moongate system (based on the phases of the moon) and became a travel center. There's a reason there's 8 rocks surrounding these moongates.

Here's what information I have regarding the Bucs Den moongate or lack thereof:

First, we have the demo information. The demo designates a total of 8 different moongate destinations as follows:

Destination 1: 4467 1283 10 - Moonglow
Destination 2: 1336 1997 5 - Britain
Destination 3: 1499 3771 5 - Jhelom
Destination 4: 771 752 5 - Yew
Destination 5: 2701 692 5 - Minoc
Destination 6: 1828 2948 -20 - Trinsic
Destination 7: 643 2067 5 - Skara Brae
Destination 8: 3563 2139 34 - Magincia

This is the list of moongate destinations that was found as part of the moongate system pre-2001.

The second source linked in my first reply references the messages that moongates gave when they were updated to give descriptions of what was seen on the other side in February 2000. It is noteworthy that the descriptions only show 8 total destinations, which is the same number as the demo, and doesn't include a description for Bucs Den. While this doesn't mean that Bucs Den didn't receive a moongate prior to this, it is extremely unlikely that they would have simply missed the description starting in February 2000, and never corrected it.

Third, we have some information from the newsgroups that is relevant from a timing perspective. This first post from 9/6/00 says the following (in reference to a question about how to get to Jhelom and Nu'jelm):

:Use the static moongates (or get a friendly mage to gate you). Same
:as for Magincia and Moonglow.

Errr... there's no Moongates to Nu'jelm or Buccaneer's Den

:I don't believe there are any ferries or other static "teleporters"
:to get you there.

Another post from 10/30/00 confirms this:

Easiest bits first,

Nujel'm doesn't have a moongate, and afaik is only accessible by boat (or
recall/gate obviously)

Buccaneer's Den doesn't have a moongate, but it does have a teleporter. The
teleporter is to the south east of the entrance to dungeon Covetous, just
where the path splits up.

Serpents Hold doesn't have a moongate as well, so is only accessible by
boat, recall/gate OR if you're more adventurous, you can get to it by going
to T2A lands, traversing thru Fire dungeon and there's an exit to serpents
hold from there.

Instead of using your paper maps, you might want to take a look at UOAM (UO
Automap). It automatically tracks your location on a map of britannia
(including towns/dungeons/T2A lands), and has all npc buildings marked on
the map etc etc. A very useful app, can be found at
http://uo.stratics.com/uoam (i think), failing that just do a search on
uo.stratics.com

The places are all still there, merely that they arent in the new (heh...)
manual.

The UO manual is notoriously pants. )

Finally, a post from 4/26/01 gives us information that is likely the most relevant information about the moongate:

> Thanks, didn't know that Ilshenar is handled like or as a facette.
> Guess I should stop looking at the UO:3D cd and actually play the game.
> Oh, maybe I got confused because Ilshenar is often said to 'exist' on
> Trammel only, meaning the Trammel rules are valid there.
>
> Takarrh
> (aka Lynn Marleen)
>

Yep, it just means tram rules, with the exception of allowing reds to enter
directly from the bucs den moongate in fel.

This last quote straddles the introduction of the new moongate system in January 2001, which provided access to Ilshenar via the Third Dawn client. This is noteworthy because without such a moongate, murderers could not reliably enter Ilshenar without risking instant death for attempting to do so. Thus, it is reasonable for reports of such a moongate to show up at this time, because it was necessary to provide access to the new lands for all those that they intended to have access.

Anyway, that's all of it thus far. As it stands, all of the evidence that we have points to Bucs Den having no moongate during the T2A era.

There's a chance some shards added this moongate while others did not (at the time).

Could be. I was on Great Lakes, the greatest of shards.