If you have updated your version of Dungeon Souls, you'll probably know that the past two patches have been disastrous for the game where new bugs have been found, old bugs have been reintroduced and access to certain late game areas has been removed due to bugs. One of these patches made it impossible to access the ‘judgement’ levels which in favour also prevent access to an area called ‘Rockstone mountain’ and also made the crafting materials gained in these two areas impossible to get.

On top of it being impossible to access certain areas, The latest patch has made certain parts of the game unplayable where even a simple action such as opening a cursed chest or using a skill as a certain character will cause your game to crash. Fortunately, we can fix all of these problems by rolling back to a previous version of the game where everything actually worked as its supposed too. This guide will help you do that!

This specific guide has been tested on Windows only so I am unable to confirm if this will work on MacOS and Linux and I don't have any plans to test on these operating systems. Please note this guide contains screenshots of when i was still running windows 8.1 but this should work on windows 10 completely fine.

I also highly recommend that you backup your save file and disable the steam cloud for Dungeon Souls before following this guide as there is a known issue where the Steam cloud will overwrite your save data due to the version change.

To Rollback Dungeon Souls to a previous version, we must first enable steams hidden command console. To do this, you must first close steam completely and create a shortcut to Steam on your desktop. Once you've done this, right click on the steam icon and click on properties then navigate to the shortcut tab. Here you will see a box labelled 'Target'. To enable the steam console, simple type -console into the target box AFTER any text thats already within the box. The text in the target box should look like this.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -console



Once this is done, close the steam shortcut properties and relaunch steam using the desktop shortcut. You will know if you've done this correctly as you will now see a new tab in your client called 'CONSOLE' which is positioned next to your username tab. Congratulations, you have enabled the steam console!


You won't need the steam console for anything else and you can go ahead and disable it if you want to. You can do this by once again right clicking on your steam shortcut, going into properties and then remove the -console from the target box.

Once you've enabled steams console, the next step is to download the games previous version. A steam user by the name of Rubone somehow managed to search steams database and all the information required for Dungeon Souls before the broken patches were released which resulted with this command line:

download_depot 383230 383231 1016648758900112880

EDIT: The download command above now no longer works and so the screenshot below is slightly outdated. If you still wish to follow this guide, please use this new download command: download_depot 383230 383231 8088826059726846662. Many thanks to Valiente in the comments section for providing this!

You will need to COPY and PASTE this command into the steam console and press enter. Steam will then download the previous version of the game. The time this takes will heavily depend on your internet download speed, but it doesn’t take very long as the file is only around 85 MB. Once the download is completed, the console will show you where the files have been downloaded too.

Once the console has finished downloading the previous version, navigate to the folder that the console downloaded the files too. For me the files were located in the place shown in the image above, but for you it may be different. Pay attention to what the console says for the files locations!. You should see two files here named .DS_Store and DungeonSouls.exe.

After you've found these files, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dungeon Souls. Once there you should already see two files with exactly the same names. These files can just be deleted. Once you've done this, copy and paste the two files that the steam console downloaded into the Dungeon Souls folder. Once your done, your folder should look like the image below.

Doing these three steps should completely fix any game breaking bugs or problems you had with the game before and also allow you to play the judgement levels again and generally have a much better experience with less bugs. Doing this fix doesn't remove any content from the base game, it just fixes the bugs. You will need to test the game yourself to see if the problem you were having before has been fixed. If you encounter a problem or perhaps a crash report, note it in the comments below and I will update the guide. Congratulations you've fixed your Dungeon Souls!


If the developers ever decide to care about this game again and release another patch to try and fix these game breaking bugs and problems, then this guide might not be needed in the future. However if another patch is released that breaks this game even further, due to how steam can auto update games, you will need to perform the steps in this guide again if you want a bug free experience (Why wouldn't you!) This patch also doesn't affect your steam achievements and you will still be able to earn them if you want too.

After applying this fix, if your game crashes and produces this fatal error, there are two more files that need to be deleted which are related to the save file. A common issue when downgrading a game is that some files may not be fully compatible with the old version, so they just need to be removed so the game can recreate them for the rolled back version.
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Alarm Event for alarm 0
for object obj_Achievements:

Push :: Execution Error - Variable Index [0,56] out of range [1,50] - -5.recipe_required(100215,56)
at gml_Script_check_has_all_recipes
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stack frame is
gml_Script_check_has_all_recipes (line 0)
gml_Object_obj_Achievements_Alarm_0

To fix this particular error, navigate to AppData\Local\Dungeon Souls. If you CANNOT find your app data folder, it might be hidden by windows, if so press the start button and type %appdata% and press enter. This will bring you to a folder called 'appdata roaming' however this is the incorrect folder. To navigate to appdata local, click on appdata shown in the image below, which will take you to the main appdata folder. From here, click local then find and click on the dungeon souls folder.



Once you've navigated to this folder, you need to find and delete two files which are called DGS.back.ds AND arc_frg_rcp.ds Doing this should fix your problem, however after doing so, you may have lost the recipes you've collected during your play-through. Unfortunately this is a unavoidable side effect and you will need to recollect the recipes.

After applying the patch, if you find that your save file is completely missing and everything you unlocked has locked again, unfortunately this is a issue that cannot be fixed. This may either be a issue related to the steam cloud or the game not liking your save file after downgrading. While this is unavoidable, You can turn off the steam cloud for Dungeon Souls just in case it happens again. To do this, navigate to your steam library and find dungeon souls, right click it and select 'properties'. Navigate to the 'Update' tab and UNTICK the 'enable steam cloud' box.

A very brief version history of the changes I have made to the guide. This is just so i can keep track of the changes that were made. As of 14/06/2020, this should be the last version that i will need to produce.