Blog
Notes from building the game — what the reference engine does, how it was reimplemented from scratch, and the decisions that turned out to matter.
- Games like Settlers II, and where the genre it started wentWhat made Settlers II's indirect-control economy different from its real-time strategy contemporaries, how the series changed after it, and where city building and RTS sit today.
- Return to the Roots, and Settlers II's open-source afterlifeHow Return to the Roots (s25client) kept Settlers II's engine documented and alive after its publisher moved on, and why that documentation is Expeditions II's behavioural reference.
- Settlers II, from 1996 to a browser tabThe history of Blue Byte's 1996 economy classic The Settlers II, why it is still searched for today, and how to play a from-scratch browser reimplementation with no install.
- Reading 1996 archives in a browser tabHow the original Settlers II file formats — LST containers, BOB sprite sets, paletted bitmaps and SWD maps — are decoded in TypeScript and packed into a WebGL texture atlas.
- Determinism is the featureWhy the simulation may not read the clock, why every random number comes from one seeded generator, and what that buys — saves, replays and lockstep multiplayer.