HOWTO: Set Tuxborn Skyrim modpack to save to Steam Cloud in Deck command line

As I wrote in an earlier post, I’m working on setting up Tuxborn, a Skyrim modpack for Wabbajack, as the basis of my next Skyrim playthrough. But one of the things I needed to do to get it working properly was to make sure it saves its saves out to Steam Cloud, because by default, Tuxborn is not set up to do this.

If you don’t care about your saves remaining local, you won’t have to care. But if you do want to back up your saves to the Steam Cloud (and I do recommend this), then you’ll need to do a little housekeeping to handle this. What specific steps you’ll need to follow will depend on whether you’re playing on the Steam Deck, or playing on a PC.

I’m going to do a few posts to talk about different ways you can handle this. This one is going to talk about how to do this task on a Steam Deck, and it will assume you’re comfortable using the Steam Deck’s Konsole app.

I will do a couple more posts after this one, to talk about how to do this same procedure using the Dolphin file manager app on the Steam Deck, and another post after that to talk about how to handle this in Windows.

All of this also, of course, assumes you have a regular working Skyrim install on your Deck already.

Information you will need first

First of all, you will need to boot your Deck into Desktop mode.

Second, you will want two pieces of specific information:

1. The entire path to where your Deck normally saves Skyrim save files
2. The path to where Tuxborn saves its games to the profile you want to play with

On my Deck, the path to my regular Skyrim saves looks like this:

/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/Saves

And if you’re thinking that looks like an enormous path, you are correct. Unless you really customized your Skyrim install or the default username on your Deck, though, this is almost certainly the same path you will want to use. Verify it on your own device to be sure.

(Also, note that this path has several spaces in it. If you want to work in the command line, you may need to put double quotes around the entire thing, or else put backslashes in front of every single space. More on this in a moment.)

The other path you’re going to want is where Tuxborn puts its saves by default. This will vary for you depending on which of Tuxborn’s play profiles you want to use, and what directory you used for your Tuxborn install. So I’m giving my path for example purposes only, you should edit this example path appropriately for your system:

/home/deck/Games/Tuxborn/profiles/Tuxborn - Deck/saves

The two parts of this path that you may have to change depending on your system are the ones I’ve highlighted in blue. The first blue part is the specific path where I put my Tuxborn install. You should change that part to match where you put your own Tuxborn. The second blue part is the specific Tuxborn profile I chose to use. If you chose a different profile, you will want to edit that part to select the directory for your chosen profile instead.

So once you have these two locations identified, what do you do with the information? You use it in the Konsole, the command line app on the Deck, to tell your Tuxborn directory to save its games out to your Steam location instead of its own saves directory.

Steps to follow

1. Open your Konsole app.
2. Use the cd command to go to the second of the two locations identified above, the place where your Tuxborn will put its save files by default. But you want to be one directory level up from that, not in the saves directory itself. Note as well that your path does have spaces in it, and the easiest way to handle that is to put double quotes around the entire path. So your command will look something like this: cd "/home/deck/Games/Tuxborn/profiles/Tuxborn - Deck"
3. (OPTIONAL, in case you have anything in the saves directory that’s already there. Skip this step if you don’t have anything in there that you want to keep.) Next, you will want to make a backup of the saves directory that’s already there. You can do this by renaming that directory to something else, such as: mv saves saves-backup
4. And now here’s where you actually link off to the Steam saves. The command you want is the Linux command ln, and I also recommend using the -s argument with it, which does a soft link instead of a hard link. (If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it, you can look it up later.) Stay in this same directory, but now you’ll want to copy in the first location noted above, as part of the ln command. Your command will basically create a new “saves” directory, but it’s really a shortcut pointing out to the Steam location instead. The command should look like this (again, edited as necessary for your own specific device, and again, note that I put double quotes around the entire path because it has spaces in it): ln -s "/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/Saves" saves
5. (OPTIONAL, unless you actually did step 3 and want to preserve any save data you have in your now backed-up original saves directory.) Copy data out of the backup saves directory into the newly linked one: cp saves-backup/* saves

Testing your changes

Before you do anything else, now test your changes.

1. Open your non-Tuxborn, regular Skyrim install.
2. On your main menu, hit your Load command and see what saves you have available. If you see any previous saves made in Tuxborn, then you know now that your non-Tuxborn install can see them and that they made it out to the Steam Cloud! Congratulations!
3. But you’re not done yet, you should also test this on the Tuxborn side. So close your regular Skyrim, and now launch Tuxborn.
4. Once Tuxborn loads, you may or may not see an error thrown about a cloud error. I did see that on my device, but it didn’t seem to actually be a problem. But noting as an FYI.
5. Once you get to Tuxborn’s main menu (however long is normal for that on your device), again, select the Load command. You should see both any Tuxborn-specific saves you had already, and any saves from your regular Skyrim.

So that’s it! Obviously, you do not, repeat, not want to load your regular Skyrim saves in Tuxborn, or vice versa. All of this is strictly to make sure that your Tuxborn saves are just going out to the Steam Cloud to join any other Skyrim saves you have.

Next post I’ll do on this topic, I’ll cover how to do this in Dolphin.

Drop a comment if you have any questions!