The Settlers III

What works

• Installation
• Singleplayer
• Multiplayer (requires "winetricks directplay")
• Saving & loading
• World Editor
• aLobby

What does not

-

Workarounds

What was not tested

-

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Disabled the intro in the settings. Running on a Core i7 with NVIDIA blob.

The game installs and runs smoothly in singlepayer mode, but only with the latest patches. To make sure the game works, install it in the following way:

1. Install the retail The Settlers III game
2. (optional) Install the Mission CD (only, if not using S3 Gold)
3. (optional) Install the Amazons addon (only, if not using S3 Gold)
4. Download and install the 1.60 patch - required only, if the game is not already at the 1.60 patch level, as otherwise this may break stuff
5. Download the WinXP patch and copy it to the Setters3 directory (e.g. "C:\BlueByte\Settlers3") by overwriting the original "s3.exe" file

To get multiplayer (LAN and/or Internet) working in general do:

winetricks -q directplay

As of the end of September, 2011, the BlueByte Settlers 3 Multiplayer Lobby is offline. The "unofficial" replacement for online play is the "aLobby". The current aLobby version works flawlessly under Wine after installing the following:

winetricks -q corefonts vcrun2010 vcrun2013 vcrun2017 quartz

You need to configure Wine to "Emulate a virtual desktop" for the alobby.exe, as otherwise it will not work properly.

If you want to play using the aLobby VPN, you need to have the native (Linux/OSX) 'openvpn' package (the 'openvpn' binary needs to be in your PATH) installed. You will also need either 'kdesudo' or 'gksu' package if your system does not support 'pkexec'.

sudo apt-get install openvpn gksu

Additionally: to play using the aLobby VPN outgoing connections from the S3.exe, S3_alobby.exe (and S3_multi.exe) on port 1900 UDP must be blocked - otherwise joining or hosting games may be impossible! For example you can use the 'Gufw' firewall UI to do that.

Only in case you want to play over the Internet (so not via VPN or in a LAN environment):

The ports that need to be forwarded on your router for Internet-gaming are:

• 2300-2400 TCP
• 2300-2400 UDP
• 47624 TCP

More detailed instructions for your router model can be found here.

If entering an Internet-multiplayer game is not possible, then something must be wrong with your port-forwarding settings or the LAN-router. It is not a Linux/Wine problem for sure.

The Settlers 3 and the aLobby work without major issues only with the following Wine versions* (as of 2024-08-05):

• 8.15+ (and probably some earlier 8.x versions)
  
• 5.19-5.22
  
• 5.0-5.5
  
• 4.5-4.21
  
• 4.0.2-4.0.4
  
• 1.7.53-1.7.54

* tested versions were usually the "Staging" versions

Below is a list of versions known to cause major problems:

• Wine versions starting with 8.16 introduced some strange problems when trying to start the VPN of the aLobby for Multiplayer gaming
  • Fixed with newer aLobby versions
• Wine versions starting with 6.0-rc1 introduced major crash issues ("Structured Exception" / "SE") into the game
  
• Wine versions between 5.6 and 5.18 cause mouse problems when starting the game (bug 49347)
  
• Wine versions 5.7 and 5.8 cause problems with the aLobby. Fixed in Wine 5.9.
  
• Wine version 5.6 breaks the aLobby VPN (bug 48937). Fixed in Wine 5.7.
  
• Wine versions starting with 1.7.55 and below 4.0.2 (on the stable branch) and below 4.5 (on the devel-branch) introduced major mouse problems into the game (bug 38087)
  
  • On the staging-branch the affected versions are all below 1.9.0
• Wine versions below 1.7.53 crash on the Settlers 3 intro-movie (bug 5771) (the workaround for this bug is to disable the intro in the S3-settings)
• Wine versions below 1.5.26 cause freezes in multi player games (bug 29499)

This game requires much more processing power than it should, so unless you are using a relatively fast computer, it may run slowly (Bug 32478 and Bug 38169).

The used graphics card may also be of importance here: with NVIDIA (binary driver) the game is the fastest on Linux, with INTEL the slowest.

A workaround which makes at least the lag occurring every few seconds go away, is to start Settlers 3 on 1 CPU only with:

taskset -c 0 wine S3.EXE

If you want to play online using the aLobby, you have to start the aLobby the same way:

taskset -c 0 wine alobby.exe

Hint: taskset is only available on Linux, not on macOS

Only applicable to old Wine versions (< 8.0):

• Disabling CSMT (only easily possible with Wine Staging) increases the performance
  
• ATTENTION: Using the above taskset command without CSMT disabled decreases the performance instead of improving it!