* In ''VideoGame/UltimaI: The First Age of Darkness'', if one created a thief character and through racial and point allocations increased your Dexterity to a high level, one could obtain the two most powerful pieces of equipment in the game, the Reflect Suit and the Phazor, by attempting to steal from the armor and weapon shops of any store (Even if they weren't purchasable at the time), thus obtaining a sizable amount of money (By selling their own goods back to them) and end up with the most powerful gear before you even fight your first creature or enter your first dungeon.
* In ''VideoGame/UltimaV: Warriors of Destiny'', if the player knows where to get the flying carpet, they can get 5 skull keys that can be used to open any magically locked door in the game for 100 gold from an NPC. Normally this NPC only has the 5 skull keys to sell, but by exploiting a bug in the game, the player can keep on buying the skull keys indefinitely (assuming they have the money). The keys can be used to break into the storeroom in the basement of Castle British and steal the randomized loot there, which can earn you some decent armor and Magic Axes with a bit of luck. The latter are the best ranged weapons in the game (doing a very respectable 20 damage per hit and never running out of ammunition) and will easily serve you throughout the whole adventure. Repeated acts of larceny tend to eat your Karma very quickly, but you can easily sell any extra equipment found for cash and then convert said cash into Karma via shrines or the beggars in Minoc and Cove, putting yourself back on the straight-and-narrow with only an hour or two of work. Somehow, I don't think this is what Lord British had in mind when he created the Virtues...
** Five respawning Skull Keys can also be found for free once per day in Minoc if you know where to look, making this even simpler since you can get there via moongate; no magic carpet required. You can also get a free magic axe in Jhelom, hidden in a tree stump just outside the east wall, which is accessible via a hidden passage in the northeast tower.
** Maxing out your characters' stats by exploiting the leveling system will give you a pretty big edge, and it's actually pretty easy to do. Dying lowers your experience, which can potentially cause you to level down if you fall below a level threshold (100 for 2, 200 for 3, 400 for 4, 800 for 5, et cetera). However, when you level down in this way, your base stats ''will not decrease''. So, gain a level, die to lower it, gain XP to put yourself back over the threshold, and rest to level up again and gain more stats; repeat as necessary. This process is a bit tedious (especially since leveling is a semi-random event; wearing the Ankh before you rest boosts the odds, though), but it will make the later challenges much easier.
*** You lose more experience the lower your Karma is, so this actually synergizes quite well with the storeroom trick above. A strange irony; the best way to save Lord British and restore his rule is to defy his Virtues, rob him blind and exploit his charity for personal gain.
** Both this game and ''VideoGame/UltimaVI: The False Prophet'' allow you to import your character from the previous game(s), carrying over half of their stats and 1/10th the experience they earned there. If you max out your character in 4, importing them to 5 or 6 will start you with 25 in all stats (the maximum amount is 30 from Ultima 5 on) and 999 experience, which lets you begin the game at level 5. Importing from 5 to 6 keeps your stats untouched, meaning you can potentially begin Ultima 6 with a maxed out character who can cast fifth-level spells.
* In ''VideoGame/UltimaVII: The Black Gate'':
** There is a house southwest of Trinsic, the starting town, where you can line up crates to form a stair to the rooftop. If you go behind the chimney and then south, you will end up on The Cheat Room. It has 8 suits of Magic Armor (the same number as maximum party size), 2 Death Scythes, a Juggernaut Hammer, a Bird (it's a weapon), 2 Magic Axes, lots of Magic Rings, a Spell Book with all the Spells, 1000 Gold, 100 Lockpicks, 100 of each Reagent, a Purple Wand, three Prisms and a Hoe of Destruction. There are also teleporters to most all of the major locations in the game plot as well as nearly every item critical to finishing the game.
** If you you know the way, you can get the Magic Carpet, which is not only free, but also allows you to travel almost anywhere in right after getting in Britain, the third city in the game.
*** You can also get the Hoe of Destruction, the second best weapon in the game, right after getting to Britain. It's located just east of town in Mack the farmer's shed. You can either track down the key (inside a fish near the polluted Locke Lake) or, if you're impatient, just acquire a barrel of gunpowder and blast the door off its hinges.
*** There is also a hard-to-spot chest under a tree just south of Trinsic. Picking or breaking it open nets you a full set of magic armor, a pile of 600 gold coins, some magic rings, a Fire Sword and Sword of Defense, and a bunch of magic bolts, all within a few minutes of starting the game proper.
** The expansion, ''VideoGame/UltimaVII: Forge of Virtue'', contains a dungeon whose payoff is the Black Sword, a weapon far more powerful than any in the original game, as well as boosting the main character's stats to the maximum (''twice'' the maximum in the case of the Strength stat). Although the main character doesn't discover how to find the new area until about halfway through the main game, if the player knows where it is they can access it almost immediately, although at least a little levelling-up is required in order to avoid a near-certain PartyWipe in the Test of Courage.
*** In the Test of Love, flip the switch next to the Stone of Castambre. Then go back into the caves to the north. A secret passage will have opened that leads to a room with a Death Scythe, 9 Glass Swords and a Firedoom Staff.
** Remember blue (sleeping) potions from VideoGame/UltimaVI ? While functionally useless in that game, in VideoGame/UltimaVII, you can shove them down anyone's throat. Is a dragon selfishly guarding its horde of cash, gems, and magical goodies? Force a blue potion into its mouth and rob the poor thing blind, and kill it while it sleeps for good measure.
** However, even the Black Sword pales in comparison to the biggest GameBreaker in the series: the dirty diaper. Use a clean diaper on any baby you encounter (or, if you're of a particularly twisted bent, keep a baby in your backpack) and they'll soil it. You can then proceed to laugh raucously as you toss it at your enemies, causing them to ''run screaming and begging for mercy'', not even taking the time to defend themselves.
** In the SNES version of the game you can rush to Lord British's castle, retrieve your spellbook, and then head back to Trinsic. Cast Lifting on the north fountain to find a Morning Star (one of the best weapons in the game) and head outside the south gate, following the wall west and up to a dead end with a rock. Lift it as well for some chain mail, which is a very nice set of armor. With these two items you can easily make your way through much of the game unimpeded, save for the parts when you absolutely need to use something else to proceed.
*** Also in the SNES version, one can also Levitate onto the roof of Lord British's castle to find the Boomerang, which is the second-best ranged weapon in the game.
* In ''VideoGame/UltimaVIIPartII'': The Serpent Isle, an effective (if exceedingly evil) means of arming yourself early on is to kill the Pikemen in Monitor. Not only can you swipe their armor and halberds for yourself, but Renfry at the crematorium will pay you 100 Monetari for each Pikeman you cremate. This can be a bit time consuming as you must skim through his dialog in between each cremation, but somehow he never grows suspicious of the fact that another dead pikeman shows up on his doorstep every other hour or so...
** A less evil, but no less effective, version of this is to go to the abandoned mansion east of Monitor. Trolls spawn there infinitely and each troll has about a 50% chance of dropping a small handful of gems. Devra (at Sleeping Bull, another short walk from Monitor) will give you 25 monetari per gem before taxes. Since trolls spawn in groups and are easy to kill (they don't even carry actual weapons) amassing large amounts of money is essentially trivial. This is made even ''more'' effective if you exchange your gems for 100 guilders (with no fees) with Topo in Moonshade.
* In ''VideoGame/UltimaVIII'', you can grab the Slayer within minutes of starting the game if you know where to look. Granted, the dungeon it's in is a dangerous one to traverse and you're trapped there until you go all the way through it, but it's worth the risk; not only is the Slayer the second-strongest weapon in the game in terms of damage, but every blow has a ten percent chance to instantly kill its target.
** You can also just grab any melee weapon, visit Devon just outside of Tenebrae, and whack him repeatedly to quickly raise your Strength and Dexterity stats. He's invincible, doesn't fight back and one of the few [=NPCs=] in the game who won't call Beren to smite you for any perceived slight, so go for it. You can easily have both stats maxed out approximately twenty minutes after starting the game.
* ''VideoGame/UltimaIX'' has one too, though it is a bit of an exploit. There is a crypt on the cliffs above Paws that you aren't supposed to access until significantly later in the game, but if you climb up via bottles, sticks, et cetera using the game's, ahem, ''creative'' physics, you can collect some decent pieces of armor, a few potions and a two-handed sword (fifth-strongest weapon in the game). The enemies inside are quite dangerous and can easily kill you, but some clever footwork or an invisibility potion or two will easily solve that.
** Favoring the virtue of Humility in most Ultima games usually starts you at a major disadvantage, with weak stats, a poor starting position, poor equipment choices, or all three. That's true to a degree in IX (you begin with a 1 in all three stats and are therefore the only class that can't max them out during the game), but you also begin with the Shepherd's Crook - the fourth most powerful weapon in the game that charms enemies on hit. This is more than enough to carry you all the way to Trinsic despite your lessened HP and magic.
* The little-spoken-of spinoff game ''UltimaRunesOfVirtueII'' has a couple of its own, too. Saving your money at the start and doing a run or two of the first two dungeons can easily leave you with over 75 gold. Then you can take the Yew moongate to Moonglow, wait for a pirate ship to attack you, claim it for yourself (which entails a fairly tough but manageable fight against a large band of pirates), and sail over to Jhelom to purchase the plate mail armor. This will greatly reduce the damage you take from all attacks and make the game considerably easier up until you hit Pride.
** Moonglow is also the source of the cheapest potion-seller in the game (10 gold), and having access to a ship also let's you visit New Magincia, where food is equally cheap. Just keep your ship parked near LB's castle and you can stock back up between dungeons and side missions. Makes dealing with floors packed to the brim with tough monsters and sawblade traps much less of a hassle to deal with!
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