The Settlers II map files documentation

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The Settlers II features multiple variations of map files. In each version of the game you have two formats: the “raw” map files with no saved data, and saved games. The shared parts of these two formats are mostly compatible with each other, however regular maps cannot include saved game data when being loaded as a starting point for a new map as some crucial information would be missing which is set into additional files when a map is a saved game.

Veni Vidi Vici releases

This includes versions 0.15, 0.16, 1.00, 1.01, and 1.02 of the game. Each beta and demo was setup with the following files:

DATA\MAPS\CONTI200.DAT
DATA\MAPS\WORLD200.DAT
DATA\MISSIONS\MIS_0000.RTX
DATA\TXT\MISS_001.ENG or DATA\TXT\MISS_001.GER
SAVE\CNTRL800.DAT
SAVE\COMPY800.DAT
SAVE\CONTI800.DAT
SAVE\DESKT800.DAT
SAVE\MAILS800.DAT
SAVE\TRANS800.DAT
SAVE\WORLD800.DAT

The beta and demo executables load the 800 variant through their added option to start a demo, while WORLD200.DAT is usually the first Roman Campaign mission, “Off we go!”. Saved games use 900 variant so they are WORLD900.DAT etc. within the SAVE directory.

Put other way, the missions exclusive to the beta/demo version are saved games. This means you can create a saved game in a later version of the game with any map you desire, and then copy and rename those files to the beta/demo versions and see what happens. Of course you will not have success porting Winter World to pre-1.51 versions of the game as that terrain set was introduced in V1.50, however Wasteland might work. There are texture differences in the early versions especially with Wasteland.

As of writing this I have not done this experimentation and there can be blockers, for example there is less data in some of the earlier beta/demo version saved games.

Save game documentation

The saved games appear to be direct memory dumps of the game’s internal organization of data, and if you have the know-how you can probably inspect the data in real time from computer memory and see it being organized exactly as in the saved game files. For now you can take this claim as “an educated guess” and a pinch of salt as this is something that has not been verified.

COMPY###.DAT, DESKT###.DAT, MAILS###.DAT and TRANS###.DAT to be analyzed.


You can use World Editor to drag’n’drop saved games there and convert them to WLD/SWD. It supports savegame maps from any version of the game.

Version 1.51

The final version of the game was released first as Mission CD (Mission Disk) and later as a Gold Edition with no gameplay changes.

This version of the game introduced a Map Editor S2EDIT.EXE which used WORLD directory as a target for SWD files. During this change the old DATA\MAPS files were also converted to the new format however their extension was WLD, thus MISS_200.WLD. As a file format there is no real difference between WLD and SWD, they are the same thing.

The WLD/SWD file format combines the old CONTI###.DAT and WORLD###.DAT files together and adds in an additional header, and has an optional footer for animal data.

The game does have a difference in how it handles Roman Campaign, World Campaign, and Unlimited Play / Skirmish loading. Harbor building is enabled only when loading Roman Campaign maps. World Campaign is unique in that it uses leader data from the map files, although despite there being an option for it you cannot change player from being Octavianus.

In other words, the included header and footer data are used as meta information during loading of WLD/SWD to initialize a saved game.

WLD/SWD documentation

Credits