Extracting Audio Assets from Stronghold 3

By Lord_Chris

Stronghold 3 consists of over 700 Megabytes of audio, which ranges from voice assets to music and practically everything else. Unlike the previous games in the series however, all these files are compressed in .fsb archives. You may think this makes it harder to get to the files at first glance.

And at first glance you are correct - however, because they are archived, it is fairly easy to extract the data from the .fsb and have it in a easily readable state once more. Firefly have since reused the same method of storing sound files in Stronghold Crusader 2, and therefore this tutorial will also unarchive the sound files in Stronghold Crusader 2 as well.

Before we can begin, we must find where the files themselves are located. This does however, depend on where Steam is installed on your machine. The default directory is in Program Files on a 32-bit machine, or Program Files(x86) on a 64-bit machine.

You can find out which type of system you have by going to start -> Right Click on "This PC" or "Computer" -> Properties. However, I will show you an easier way. Go to the start menu, type 'Steam' in the search box, right click on it then select 'Open File Location'. From there go to:

SteamApps -> common -> Stronghold3 -> assets -> sound

This folder holds all the audio for Stronghold 3, however this tutorial will only focus on the music. Do note however, that the rest of the audio is extracted exactly the same way as shown here. And as always, if you have any further questions, please feel free to ask in our Stronghold 3 forum.

In Stronghold Crusader 2, the audio directory is as follows:

SteamApps -> common -> Stronghold Crusader 2 -> assets -> sound

You can also ask for support in our Stronghold Crusader 2 forum for issues in Stronghold Crusader 2.

Extracting Sound

In order to extract the audio files and restore them to .mp3 files, you can download the following audio extractor from our downloads section. This tool is completely open source and can also be downloaded from the official website, here to get the latest version.

Note that the version used in this tutorial is 0.3.3, while the version uploaded to our downloads section is 0.3.8. Both work adequately as well, although no future versions of this tool have been tested, and may not work as intended.

The program does not require any kind of installation, simply extract the compressed folder and run it. As always however, it's easier to copy the relevant files into another directory (i.e. your desktop or downloads folder) so firstly, you don't get no permission errors (a possiblity if you're using a non-admin account) and secondly, you still have a backup in the unlikely event something goes wrong.



The interface looks similar to the command prompt, however you are very soon greeted by a familiar GUI file select screen. Simply select the archive you wish to extract sound from, then another screen will appear. This time, select the folder (not file) to contain any files extracted, and the program will automatically extract them to the given folder. It is recommended you create a new folder on your desktop and select that. After a few seconds the program will show you the files converted, and you can press enter of the red x to exit.



You can then browse to the folder you selected, and the files extracted will be there:



Enjoy a new Stronghold 3 modding experience!