Client Changes

The client you download is the stock 2003 game with a handful of files removed, one config rewritten, and one program added. Everything here is checkable in your own game folder.

Why there is a launcher

The stock client ships a patcher chain: Shadowbane.exe calls PatcherBounce.exe, both driven by ShadowbanePatcher.cfg. In the copies circulating before August 2026, that config pointed at a third party's patch server. Running it rewrites your Config/ArcaneIP.cfg to their shard, restores the intro movies, and reverts our client-side changes — and it syncs its own config, so a repointed install keeps repointing itself. This was confirmed happening to players on 16 August 2026.

So the Shadowbane.exe in our download is not the retail patcher. It is our launcher, and it does four things:

• It reads a manifest — a list of every file in the client with its checksum — so it downloads only the pieces that differ from what you already have.
• It fetches those differences in 1 MB pieces, so a small change inside the 1.72 GB Textures.cache costs about a megabyte rather than 1.72 GB.
• It updates itself before it updates anything else, then restarts and carries on.
• It repairs a hijacked Config/ArcaneIP.cfg exactly once. Normally it never touches that file — your edits are yours — but an install that was repointed elsewhere gets one forced correction the first time our launcher runs, after which your edits are respected again.

Then it starts sb.exe and gets out of the way. If your zip predates 16 August 2026 it still contains the real retail patcher; re-download, or at least run our launcher once.

What is different from the original

• Config/ArcaneIP.cfg points at our server and login port, so a fresh install connects here with no editing.
• The retail Shadowbane.exe and PatcherBounce.exe are gone, because they are the mechanism that quietly repoints you at someone else's server. Our launcher takes the Shadowbane.exe name so the obvious double-click is the correct one.
• ShadowbanePatcher.cfg is neutralised to a dead local address. It stays on disk rather than being deleted, so anything that still reads it finds nothing to talk to.
• Cinematics/ is removed. The two intro movies are not needed and you reach the login screen faster without them.
• SBGLFIX1.dll, a Mac compatibility shim, is deliberately excluded; it has no business on a Windows machine.
• Logs/, verscache/, cache/Binary/ and PatchLog.txt are stripped — stale leftovers from whoever packed the original copy, and PatchLog.txt alone was 1.1 MB.

What we changed in the game itself

sb.exe carries exactly one patch, and it is worth knowing precisely what it does.

Swimming. This was broken in a way no server change could reach. The server floats you at the surface and marks you as swimming, and other players always saw you correctly — but your own client works out its own height for your avatar, and it never sampled the water surface at all. Your camera stayed down on the seabed while everyone else watched you swim across the top. The patch makes the client read the water surface and float you just beneath it, using the same measurement the server does. Shallow water is unaffected: you stand on the bottom where it is genuinely shallow and float only where it is deep.

That is the whole of it. Nothing else in the executable is altered, and the publishing pipeline checks the patched file against its expected checksum every time, so an unpatched or differently-patched client cannot go out by accident.

You get this the next time you run the launcher. An earlier attempt at the same fix, based on a different theory of the bug, changed nothing at all and was discarded rather than shipped.

In the workshop, not shipped

Two client-side fixes exist and neither is published.

Contract tooltips. A rewrite of two tooltip lines in Config/DataStringENGLISH.txt exists but is not applied to any client, including yours — the file you have matches the unpatched original.

Mercenary item entries. Five contract items with their own client entries exist as a draft and are applied nowhere.

Why custom items look like something else

The client can only draw items it already knows about; one it has never heard of renders as nothing at all, an invisible inventory slot. So the server hands you mercenary contracts wearing a stock contract's appearance. The rolled name is the real one, so you can still tell your contracts apart; the icon and the tooltip text belong to the item whose appearance it borrowed.

Platform support

Windows only, and the only platform we test on. Mac is not supported: under Wine on Apple Silicon the client hangs on a black window, and the known fix needs both the compatibility shim we deliberately do not ship and a modified sb.exe — which our launcher would overwrite on the next run, bringing the black window straight back. Linux is untested and undocumented, so we make no claim about it.