UPDATE - We have temporarily rolled back the changes to the Automatch map pool until we can resolve the conflicts between the Automatch maps and legacy mod maps. The new community maps will continue to be available in Skirmish and Multiplayer. You may still encounter issues playing the new maps in multiplayer if only some players have the legacy mod maps.
We’re excited to reveal that today’s update will bring five community-made maps into the official map pool. Additionally, we have improved our translations for Japanese, Russian, and Polish. We have also done a tuning pass of flamer weapons after their recent visual and behavior improvements in update 2.5.0. You can find more details and the list of other fixes and changes below.
As we approach the end of 2025, we want to thank all the players who have supported Relic and our games. The response to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition has been fantastic, and we are so pleased to have you all on this journey with us. What started as a small project to refresh this beloved game has taken on a life of its own, and that’s all thanks to your support.
The team will be taking a break for the holidays, but we are working on our plans for 2026 and hope to share more with you later next year. In the meantime, we will be working through our backlog of work items and player-submitted issues.
We have recently updated and improved our support and bug reporting process - notably by bringing on additional full-time Customer Support representatives. As we review and close older reports, please continue to share any new or unresolved issues with us at help.relic.com. We will use these reports to help shape our priorities for 2026. As such, we have not included a “High Priority Known Issues” list with these patch notes as we work to complete this new review.
General
Community Maps – added 5 new maps created by community members to the pool of maps available in Skirmish & Multiplayer. The team at Relic has made some minor updates to these maps for their official inclusion in the game.
Deadly Archeology (2)
As the Necrons wake across the Galaxy, more and more worlds have found ancient basalt structures spewing forth pitiless, death-dealing machines. Deadly Archeology is a 1vs1 map created by TranspersonalPsy
Fata Morga Remastered (2)
Site of the climactic battle between the Blood Ravens and the Chaos witch Morga. A remastered version of the classic 1vs1 Fata Morga map, created by TranspersonalPsy
Sandstorm (2)
Sandstorm is a 1vs1 map created by monorail and Eranthis. The Blood Ravens recruiting world of Calderis features endless tracks of desert and massive sandstorms
Refinery (4)
Promethium refineries dot the landscapes of countless human worlds, belching smoke and producing the power that drives the Imperium. Created by MC Warhammer and Eranthis
Forsaken Canals (7)
Forsaken Canals is a 7-player map created by Eranthis. Once a lush city cut by broad canals, Eran was abandoned when an axial shift rendered the planet an arid wasteland
Japanese – added official support for Japanese by completing missing translations, updating legacy translations, and updating fonts to support Japanese characters
Russian – reviewed & updated legacy translations to improve quality and consistency
Polish – reviewed & updated legacy translations to improve quality and consistency
Achievements – removed earning score-based achievements from Campaign missions, as this was not an intended behavior
BugSplat – upgraded the game’s BugSplat version to improve error logging and to catch crashes that were not previously logged
Save / Load – fixed Cloud Save functionality to correctly back-up & transfer profile information to fix errors
Save / Load – updated Original Campaign save functionality to correctly save difficulty setting when loading or restarting a game
Lighting - FX lights now light the terrain
Game Launch – improved handling of cases where two (or more) copies of the game are launched to prevent cases where DirectX error messages were displayed
Game Launch – added additional error logging to help diagnose rare cases where the video card is not correctly detected on game launch
Load Times – improved loading functionality to prevent cases where Windows would trigger Application Not Responding errors when loading large games
Gameplay
Flamer Changes – Today's update re-tunes several flamer weapons both to function correctly as area effect weapons and to match their effectiveness more closely to update 2.4.0 or their legacy Soulstorm equivalent. Note that in most cases, these new values don't match Soulstorm one-to-one because they were not working properly as area of effect weapons during that game’s lifetime
Imperial Guard Hellhound (inferno cannon): area of effect restored to 10 meters; visual FX increased to better match damage area. In this case, gameplay should match 2.4.0/Soulstorm very closely
Tau Crisis Suit Flamer: reduced flamer angle from 60 to 30 degrees and damage from 50-70 to 15-25. Effectiveness vs basic infantry groups should be close to 2.4.0/Soulstorm, although single-target damage is much lower. In 2.4.0/Soulstorm this weapon had no cone and was doing damage only in a line
Tau Commander Flamer: reduced flamer angle from 60 to 20 degrees. Effectiveness vs basic infantry groups should be close to 2.4.0/Soulstorm, where this weapon had a very short cone so was mostly doing single target damage
Sisters of Battle Penitent Engine Flamers: reduced damage from 42-50 to 10-15 on each flamer. Effectiveness vs basic infantry groups should be close to 2.4.0/Soulstorm, although single-target damage is much lower. In 2.4.0/Soulstorm these weapons had wide and short cones so did damage over a smaller area
Winter Assault - updated Eldar to correctly fire at the Assassin during the Order Mission 3 cutscene
Soulstorm – fixed a bug with the Space Marine factional campaign map power (Deep Strike) in which it was linked to an incorrect data table – causing units to immediately die instead of correctly spawning
Movement – fixed an error where charge modifiers would be applied multiple times, most reported with Chaos Cultists moving much faster than intended
Multiplayer – updated the Faith (Sisters of Battle) and Soul (Dark Eldar) resources to not share with factions that cannot use them in Multiplayer games with Resource Sharing enabled
Audio – updated Space Marine servitors to fix using English dialogue while playing in Russian
User Interface
Front End – updated lighting in the front end to render as intended and to load consistently when switching between campaigns / mods
Save/Load– updated Save / Load screen background to correctly support widescreen resolutions in Dark Crusade & Soulstorm
Archive – fixed the aspect ratio of images on the Archive screen in Dark Crusade & Soulstorm
Dark Crusade – fixed a typo in the Manreaper wargear description
Soulstorm – updated campaign victory flow to correctly trigger conquest victory cinematics
Soulstorm – fixed cases where the menus would display in 4:3 aspect ratio when the Attack tutorial pop-up was triggered
Soulstorm – updated incorrect mission speech portraits in Necron & Dark Eldar Stronghold missions
Soulstorm – updated Defeated screen backgrounds to be the correct resolution and to be images from Soulstorm campaign
Soulstorm – updated victory screen to align the tooltip box correctly on all resolutions
Soulstorm – fixed cases where Reinforcement unit images would be displayed at the incorrect size
Soulstorm – increased resolution on icons used on the Campaign map
Loading Screens – removed legal text when loading between mods / campaigns
HUD – removed camera edge panning functionality when the Objective or Diplomacy HUD overlays are open
HUD – added mipmaps to unit portraits & icons to better preserve detail on smaller images
Videos – improved playback performance to skip frames when Vertical Sync is enabled at a lower frame rate
Videos – fixed cases where audio would pause and desync from videos if the game lost focus or became inactive during a video
Art & Animation
Maps – updated the out of bounds areas across numerous maps to avoid having noticeable cut-off areas
Winter Assault – fixed impasse to prevent units from clipping into the terrain near the Titan in Order Mission 5
FX – fixed a rendering issue that was causing FX to flicker – for example the warp storm on the Soulstorm campaign map
Tau – fixed opacity on the faction leader when equipping the Stealth Field wargear
Space Marines – updated leg animations of the Dreadnought during sync kills
Eldar – updated the Vyper to display the correct weapons during the jump ability animation
Dark Eldar – updated Slave Chamber to correctly display badges
Dark Eldar – updated Raiders to correctly remove squad members when disembarking
Modding
Lighting – With recent improvements to the renderer, we are now able to support lighting the terrain with FX lights
The FXTool now supports 'NewAttenuation' on FX lights
This follows a more physically correct (1/(d*d)) falloff
Enabling 'NewAttenuation' disabled the effect of 'Attenuation' as it aims to have the light falloff to the 'Radius' of the light
We have also added an 'Intensity' control so you can make the lights brighter than white to compensate for the increased attenuation rate
With this come some limitations: the renderer can only handle 8 lights per object. This includes chunks of the terrain
This means that there is a limit to 8 lights per 32m x 32m terrain chunk
Mods Menu – added a button to directly open the Mods folder location
Mission Editor – updated editor to use available dedicated GPUs to improve performance
Mission Editor – decals can now scale up to 400%
Mission Editor – objects no longer snap to an unexpected position after dragging and releasing left mouse button
Mission Editor – moved manual snap shortcut to (Shift+S) to fix cases where the save shortcut (CTRL+S) could be interpreted as pressing S
Mission Editor – updated manual snap to support undo
Mission Editor – editor no longer interferes with mouse movement when the editor is not in focus – ex. ALT+TAB to another program
Mission Editor – Show Objects toggle is correctly restored on launch
Mission Editor – added toggle to Edit > Options > Sound to toggle sounds on and off
Mission Editor – the Heightmap Editor now updates terrain lighting after each edit using the Terrain Smoothing Tool
FX Tool – updated tool to correctly display Dark_Eldar visible FX
FX Tool – added support for lighting debugging
FX Tool – fixed skinned meshes not correctly rendering and models not correctly loading
Logging – removed deprecated values from FX files to fix malformed errors
Logging – fixed numerous data errors causing “motion_error” to be logged repeatedly
Logging – reduced amount of “Failed to open folder” errors that are logged
Logging – updated localizer ID errors to reduce log spam
Logging – fixed errors in the unitstats.ai causing invalid upgrade log spam
Logging – Improved AI warnings messages to aid with debugging: added more information to each cpuAssert(), updated cpuAssert() to prefix the function name, added cpuBreak() for all the cpuAssert( false, ...) situations, fixed some cpuAssert( true, ... ) situations to be cpuBreak()
Mod Support – improve support for unit lighting in Main Menu & Army Painter when playing with modded units (ex. Tyranid mod)
Mod Support – improved support for zero-time research to correctly register immediately
Mod Support – load models in the Main Menu on demand rather than all at once to improve loading time