Steam edition · v1.5.0
Twenty years on, the game still crashes when a catapult hits a mounting knight, still makes you click a hundred times to raise an army, and still shows you a sliver of your own castle.
This patch fixes all of it. One file goes next to the game. No installer, no settings to learn, and deleting that one file puts everything back exactly as it was.
Not one of the game's own files is changed. The patch sits beside them and corrects things while you play.
No installer and no uninstaller. Remove the file and the game is exactly as it was a minute ago.
Saved games, campaign progress and custom maps all carry on working, with the patch or without it.
Almost everything here works in multiplayer whether or not the other players have the patch. Each fix says which.
Two minutes, three steps
If you can find a folder and drag a file into it, you can do this. There is no installer to run and nothing to configure.
Grab the newest release and unzip it. Inside you will find d3d9.dll — that is the patch — along with an optional settings file you can ignore for now.
That warning appears for any small program not signed by a company that paid for a certificate — which no free community project does. It is not a sign that anything is wrong with the file.
Every release is built automatically from the public source code, and each download is published with a checksum and a build record proving which code produced it. Both are on the release page if you would like to check.
Drop d3d9.dll into the folder the game itself lives in — the one containing Stronghold2.exe. Not a subfolder, not your documents. Right beside the game.
On most machines that is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Stronghold 2That is the whole installation. Launch Stronghold 2 through Steam and the patch loads by itself — no menu to open, nothing to switch on.
You should go straight to the main menu without the Firefly logo video. That is how you know it is working.
Delete d3d9.dll from that same folder. The game returns to exactly how it was, and every save still works.
The download also contains sh2-unofficial-patch.ini. Copy it next to d3d9.dll only if you want to change the shortcut keys or switch on the optional camera features. You never have to open it — the keys can also be changed from inside the game with Ctrl+Shift+O.
Prefer to watch
Each video goes through the fixes in a release and shows them happening in the game — the crash that used to happen, and what it does now instead. If reading a list of changes is not your thing, start here.
New videos cover fixes one at a time, so you can jump straight to the one you care about.
Everything it does
Pick a category, or click any card to see the detail — what went wrong before, what happens now, and how to use it.
Only if you want to
Everything below already has a sensible default. Change something only if you want it to behave differently — the file is plain text and every line is explained inside it.
To change the patch's keys, you do not need this file at all. Press Ctrl+Shift+O while playing, click the shortcut you want to change, and press the key you would rather use. It saves itself.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
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Before you ask
The full list
Every release so far, newest first.
One file, two minutes, and twenty years of rough edges gone. It is free, and it always will be.