Patches
Patch Pack
Introduction
The first major unofficial patch that was released was the patch pack. It was mainly developed by The Knight and The Barbarian and offered a bunch of welcome fixes to the game that was in quite a broken state at this point.
This patch was not actually initially released as a single patch, instead there were smaller fixes released at first and then on July 4, 2004 these smaller patches were combined into a bigger package that also included a bunch of new fixes to the game.
Development
The development of this patch got pretty much started by the fact that Jan van Kranendonk released an unofficial terrain editor for the game. Very shortly after this release, The Knight used this editor to fix a problem in the 10th mission in The Peasants Rebellion campaign where one allied farm wouldn't appear due to uneven terrain. This very first unofficial “patch” was released for the game on May 8, 2003. At this point the name Patch Pack had not yet been commissioned, it was just a simple file fix for one map of the game.
Possibly inspired by the ability to fix one bug in the game, The Knight continued researching how the game files worked and eventually stumbled upon the fact that the three missions in The Shattered Kingdom campaign which were broken in The Peasants Rebellion were actually simply caused by the fact that the mission files were duplicated by those used by the new campaign.
Discovering this, he cooked together a smaller fix which took these mission files from the old 1998 release of the game and noticed that the missions now worked properly. With this, he went ahead and released the first unofficial patch for the game, called Patch Pack 1 (or PP1). This was released on November 3, 2003. In addition to fixing missions 4, 5 and 12 of The Shattered Kingdom campaign, it also included the terrain fix for mission 10 of The Peasants Rebellion campaign.
The release of this patch drew the attention of another person interested in digging through the game files, The Barbarian. He had already found his way in to the actual mission files and as such it was announced on December 21, 2003 that a new patch pack would be released and that one of the fixes would be to make the completely broken mission 14 of The Peasants Rebellion campaign actually playable.
Initially plans were to have the new version of the Patch Pack ready for release by January 2004, and the patch also reportedly entered beta testing in that very month. On the very last day of January The Knight issued an update that the patch pack would support Polish and Dutch in addition to German. Furthermore he also reported the frustrating news that he could not release the patch yet as ZuXXeZ had not yet given the go-ahead.
More and more time passed by and yet ZuXXeZ would just not budge and they remained firm in their position that the patch was not yet to be released. Furious by this, The Knight thought of a way to get around this. Instead or releasing the proper Patch Pack, he instead made another smaller collection of fixes he called Patch Pack 1.1. This update was released on June 3, 2004.
In addition to the fixes in the previous release, it reverted the third mission of The Shattered Kingdom campaign so that it was like in the original game. Furthermore mission 13 was fixed so that the menu buttons were properly deactivated since it was a battle mission. Mission 14 of The Peasants Rebellion campaign now had the enemies properly set to be enemies with you as well, so they would counter-attack when you started fighting them. Finally a small terrain error was fixed in the “Wilderness”/“In a Strangle Land” map where a tile of water was mysteriously present in the middle of a swamp.
Even if ZuXXeZ wouldn't budge, The Knight still had another trick up his sleeve. He contacted Joymania, and they were nice enough to give him the go-ahead to release the full version of the patch. As such, the first real Patch Pack was released on July 4, 2004. It included further fixes to the ones that had already been released in Patch Pack 1.1.
There was one further development for the Patch Pack after this. There was an unofficial English translation created by the team during development. However, as ZuXXeZ would have it, these files were initially not to be released. Instead they were available only on request by email. On November 28, 2004 all of a sudden ZuXXeZ changed their mind and the English translation was released by the team.
List of Changes
General Improvements
- Text formatting has been improved; messages use the full width of the available boxes
General Fixes
- Mysterious empty lines will no longer appear in messages
- Reduced line height in messages so that the sixth line will no longer get cut in half
- You now receive the proper messages in The Shattered Kingdom Campaign (
) - The fisherman now has an actual description (
, 
)
General Changes
- Unicode version support dropped
Graphical Changes
- New icon for the woodcutter's hut
Text Changes
- The script used by the game is now based on the one used in the original The Shattered Kingdom release ()
- Added a missing mention that you can build the fisherman's hut during the tutorial ()
Mission Changes
Town Tutorial
- Added the messages from the English 1.32 patch
Battle Tutorial
- Now uses its own proper messages
The Shattered Kingdom
- Mission 3 is now identical to that of the original game release
- Mission 4 now works properly
- Mission 5 now works properly
- Mission 12 now works properly
- Mission 13 now requires you to also defeat the southern crossbowmen to win the mission
- Mission 13 now has the menu buttons properly deactivated as it is a battle mission
The Peasants Rebellion
- Mission 10 now properly shows one of your allied farms
- Mission 14 reworked; altered amount of starting wares, disabled quarry and made the enemy fight back in case of an attack
Skirmish/Multiplayer
- “Wilderness”/“In a Strange Land” has a small terrain fix; there was a piece of water in the middle of a swamp
Miscellaneous Changes
- The game icon has been replaced by the official The Peasants Rebellion icon
Footnotes: This patch does not include some of the changes made in the 1.53 Polish patch, so you should install it before installing this patch if you intend to use it.
There were also two changes that were supposed to be part of the patch but they didn't end up working correctly. The carpenter was supposed to get back his voice in this patch, but the fix did not work properly. Furthermore there were hopes to fix the button problems in the town hall; this fix never surfaced.
Screenshots
Credits
| Coordination: Attila “The Knight” Arnold Programming: “The Barbarian” Graphical Editing: Attila “The Knight” Arnold “The Barbarian” Mission Editing: Attila “The Knight” Arnold Jan van Kranendonk “The Barbarian” |
German Scripts: Attila “The Knight” Arnold Dutch Translation: “The Barbarian” Polish Translation: “Lubach” English Translation: Attila “The Knight” Arnold Luís Freitas |
Downloads
Sadly Patch Pack 1.1 seems to have been lost to the mists of time. But both the very first release and the first major release of the patch are still available and you can get them from below.
Patch Pack 1.0
The very first unofficial patch pack ever released. This patch was created back when the actual file formats of the game were still largely unknown and as such the changes are quite meager. But it was the start of something bigger.
[ Download ]
Patch Pack 1.58.69/94
The first major release of the Patch Pack. If you want to experience what the first unofficial patch was like, this is your chance. Here are the downloads for the languages that were supported by the patch.
[ Download ]
[ Download ]
[ Download ]
English Language Pack
The first proper translation of the game into English (that was available to the public at that time). Here's your chance to try it out. Note that you have to patch your game with the patch available above for the translation to work properly.
[ Download ]