A long time ago I wrote about the lost Trojan song that was released with the Community Pack. I also mentioned two unused Viking tracks that were in the game’s files. Turns out there is also a problem with the Mayan – which has been gathering a lot of interest from the community in the past few months!

So why not talk about this specific Bug a little more in-depth? Oh, and don’t worry; if you just want to fix it, – or any of the other two bugs- feel free to check my quick guide here.

It’s funny how such a relatively simple system can break in so many ways:

Each race has three different track types: Settlement, Sea, and Fight,

If the camera is showing you your Settlement, play Settlement,

If the camera is showing you the sea or neutral territory, play Sea,

If the camera is showing you a fight, play Fight,

Additionally, if the camera is hovering over dark land, play Dark Tribe.

But what should be a simple system does not work on many levels:

The game has no check for neutral territory or sea, so it has to resort to playing both Settlement and Sea tracks in regular gameplay,

The Trojans are lacking one track,

The Vikings are lacking two(!),

Viking fighting music plays in regular gameplay,

After the Fight music, Mayan music doesn’t revert back to Settlement or Sea. The music stops playing altogether,

After some instances of Fight or Dark Tribe music playing, the game will play two tracks simultaneously.



Fortunately, there’s been an increased activity around the whole The Settlers Series as of lately, which has pretty much exploded since the release of the History Collection. And some of these problems got fixed.

Originally I wanted to cover all three errors I offer fixes for, but because of the length of the explanation, I’ve decided to focus only on the most interesting one – that I haven’t covered yet.

Nonetheless, Download Links and Brief Explanations on all fixes can be found here, as stated before.

The Mayan Music Bug

This error has arguably been the most heavily discussed one in the game lately – mostly because it is easy to fix, and how long it took for the developers to notice and for the History Edition (plus, it never got fixed in the original game).

I’ll try to make the explanation as simple as possible while leaving out as little information as I can.





The Problem



After a fight or hovering over dark land when playing as the Mayas, the game stops playing music altogether. A common (if tedious) fix is to go to the sound menu and either enable and disable custom music or change the volume. This allows the music to be played again but has to be done every single time.

You can see this bug in action in the following video:

If you’ve ever heard about a salty Settlers-IV-fan criticizing Ubisoft’s inability to fix copy-paste and typing errors, chances are they are speaking about the Mayans.

A long time ago, a user named Csimbi managed to extract some configuration files that are usually hidden from the player. One of these was Soundtracks.cfg.

This file basically tells the game what track to play at any given moment.

Lo’ and behold, german Youtuber UltimateSpinDash discovered that the problem was fixable and that the error could be found in this file.

The Cause and Solution



There are two problems that contribute to the Mayan Music Bug, although only one is the cause of the most well-known problem. If you have a copy of the SoundTracks.cfg file, you can follow along.

First of all, the game requests a music file:

I am playing as the Mayans and aren’t fighting

SoundTracks.cfg looks it up and tells the game what track or tracks it has to play:

Play the MAYASOUNDTRACKS_SETTLE songs

The game plays those until it has to change:

Okay, I’m going to fight now! Give me the fading times for these songs and the next ones, please.

And SoundTracks.cfg obliges:

Fade that song and play MAYASOUNDTRACKS_FIGHT next

The problem here seems to be the fading times before returning to the Settlement music, as here’s a typing error:

As you can see, it says “SETLLE_FADETIME” instead of “SETTLE_FADETIME”.

Because of this, when the game wants to know the fading times for the Settlement tracks, SoundTracks.cfg can’t locate them, and the value defaults to 0.

This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for another bug: instead of changing the music abruptly (as a fading time of 0 should do) the game doesn’t know what to do

and stops playing music altogether.

This wouldn’t happen if the game would read the values, had a way of handling fading times of 0 or defaulted to another value. Unfortunately, the combination of these factors is the cause of this infamous bug.

Changing SETLLE to SETTLE patches this, as it gives the game a solution to one of these three problems.

There’s also another error that’s presumably caused by the developers copypasting the information from one race to the other. While I am not 100% what problems this causes, it’s best to be safe than sorry and fix this one as well – changing ROMAN to MAYA.

And this is it. The Mayan music bug explained and fixed. Remember that a download for this and more music errors can be found here. It’s just some zipped files, so they are pretty easy to apply.

Thanks for reading, and have fun playing!

UPDATE: The original post had an error that InstantMuffin explained to me in detail. If you find any errors on this or any other posts, let me know!