Initial tips for install of Emissaries of Tux on Steam Deck

So I’ve written on this site about how I joined the support team for Tuxborn, right?

Turns out that Ouroboros, our lead Tuxborn dev, also maintains a modpack for Enderal. If you don’t know what Enderal is, this is a large, complex Skyrim mod that basically turns Skyrim into a completely different game. It still is using the Skyrim engine, but the world, plot, characters, etc., are completely different. It came recommended to me some time ago, and I had already added it to my Steam library, since Enderal is actually available for free on Steam.

Ouro’s modpack for Enderal is called Emissaries of Tux, and he’s just dropped a 2.0 release of it. Out of general interest, I’ve now tested the install process and have the following tips of interest to Steam Deck users who want to try out this modpack.

Step 1: Install and launch Enderal

You do need to have Enderal on your Steam Deck in order to use the modpack, so find it on Steam, and install it.

You will need to launch it at least once, to take care of a couple of things that need to be in place before installing the modpack. Both of these are important.

The first thing is that the necessary compatdata directory (which I’ll talk more about below) will get created. You don’t need to take any action for this, this’ll happen under the hood.

Step 2: Turn on gamepad support (optional)

You shouldn’t need to do this if you don’t plan to play vanilla Enderal, because Ouroboros says he’s taking care of this as part of the Emissaries of Tux setup. But if you want to play vanilla Enderal at any point, you’ll want to go ahead and do this.

Enderal does not have gamepad support on by default, but you can fix this in the Enderal launcher.

To get to those settings, you will temporarily need to use the Steam Deck’s ability to give you a mouse pointer by holding down your Steam button, and rolling your thumb over your right trackpad.

Do these steps:

Click on the Settings button with the Steam Deck’s pointer
Click on the Controls tab
On that tab, turn on the checkboxes for “Activate gamepad” and also “Gamepad vibration”, if you want that
Click the Save settings button to save your changes

Now you should be able to use the Steam Deck controls in Enderal, and you can quit out of the launcher.

Step 3: Do the Wabbajack install

At this point you have a couple of options, on how to run Wabbajack.

If you have Wabbajack on your Steam Deck already (for example, you’re a Tuxborn Steam Deck player and you already set up your Steam Deck to run Tuxborn), then you should be able to use the same Wabbajack to install the Emissaries modpack, and you can skip to 3b.

Step 3a: Install Wabbajack

If you do not have Wabbajack on your Steam Deck already, then you need to decide between these two options:

Install WJ directory on your Steam Deck, or,
Install WJ on a PC and do the install there

If you want to try to install Wabbajack directly on your Steam Deck, this will save you some steps, but it’ll also require you to do some tinkering.

Omni, Tuxborn’s dev in charge of installation guides, covers the necessary steps to install Wabbajack in the full Steam Deck guide for installing Tuxborn. Basically, steps 1 and 2 of that guide. Follow Omni’s instructions to set up Wabbajack on your Deck.

If you’d rather do Wabbajack on your PC, that’ll be an easier install process. But it will also ultimately require you to copy your resulting Emissaries installation to your Steam Deck.

Step 3b: Once Wabbajack is installed, get the Enderal Wabbajack file and install it

Either way, since Emissaries is not on Wabbajack’s gallery yet, recommended way to get the necessary Wabbajack install file is to go to Emissaries’ page on Nexus. Download the Wabbajack file from there. You may need to unzip the file you get, as it’s a 7z file. Unzipping that will get you a directory that should contain the actual Wabbajack file, and that’s the thing you’ll want to open up in Wabbajack via the “Install from disk” button.

‼️ Important warning: ‼️ You may see an issue with a couple of the files in the load order not downloading. Ouroboros calls this out in the Readme, and I can confirm this happened to me. A couple of them I was able to make download anyway after a couple of Retry attempts. However, this did not work for me for EnderalSEEdit, which I had to download manually.

Ouro’s Readme provides this link for downloading EnderalSEEdit. This did work for me with the following steps:

I saw WJ complaining it couldn’t download that file
Paused what I was doing in WJ
Opened a browser and went to the link provided by Ouro
Downloaded EnderalSEEdit that way
Copied that file directly into the Downloads directory for the in-progress Wabbajack install
Returned to Wabbajack, and hit the Retry button
Install was able to conclude

Step 4: If you installed Emissaries on a PC

If you installed Emissaries directly on your Steam Deck, skip this step and go to step 5.

Otherwise, if you installed Emissaries on a PC Wabbajack install, and you want to play it on your Deck, you’re going to need to copy that entire install directory down to your Deck. There are multiple programs you can use to do this. Here are some recommendations:

WinSCP
Warpinator (on the Deck) and its partner program Winpinator (on the PC)
Syncthing (my personal favorite)
Rsync or any rsync-compatible Windows client

Use whatever program you like, but just be aware that you’re moving a lot of files, so be patient as you move files from point A to point B.

Step 5: Post-install steps

Once you have the install complete (either via installing directly on the Deck, or copying an install down from PC), then there are several manual post-install steps Steam Deck users are going to need to do. Some of these are very similar to Omni’s Steam Deck install guide for Tuxborn, so I’m going to use that as a reference here.

In the Tuxborn guide, MOST of Step 3 is necessary for Emissaries, too. You still need to manually create a non-Steam-Game entry in your Steam for the MO2 in Emissaries. So use the Tuxborn guide’s step 3 as a reference. Anywhere Omni mentions Tuxborn in that guide, just adjust that appropriately for your Emissaries install.

You will want to do steps 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3, adjusting appropriately for Emissaries instead of Tuxborn.

To use my own install as an example, here’s how I set up:

Since I had Wabbajack already on my Deck for Tuxborn, I just installed straight to my Deck.
I used an SD card rather than my Deck’s internal storage.
I told Wabbajack to use the install path “Games/EmissariesOfTux” on my SD card.
I told Wabbajack to use the downloads path “Downloads/EmissariesOfTux” on my SD card.
I set my launch properties as follows, based on Omni’s instructions:
- Target: /run/media/Storage/Games/EmissariesOfTux/ModOrganizer.exe
- Start In: /run/media/Storage/Games/EmissariesOfTux
- Launch Options: STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS=/run/media/mmcblk0p1 STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/976620 %command%

Some notes about these settings:

If you installed to internal storage you won’t have to worry about this, but if you’re also using an SD card, be aware of what the path to your SD card is. Mine is /run/media/Storage. Storage happens to be what I named the SD Card.
Normally the default downloads path would be “Games/EmissariesOfTux/downloads” in this scenario, but I just like to have the Downloads directory separate. This is personal preference on my part, you don’t have to do that.
Omni’s instructions advise using mmcblk0p1 instead of the name of your SD card. You will note I’m using “Storage” on my Target and Start In settings. That’s the name of my SD card, and this is a thing I pulled over from my Tuxborn install, where I found that using “Storage” there worked correctly but using “mmcblk0p1” did not.
On the other hand, in the Launch Options field, I did need to follow Omni’s instruction to use “mmcblk0p1”, so that’s why the path is different there.
Launch Options is where you need that compatdata directory I mentioned up in Step 1. Unless you’re a Steam Deck power user and did something very unusual with your device, you’re probably going to need the exact same path I’m using here.
I have both a STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS option in Launch Options AND a STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH option. I need both of them specifically because my Emissaries is on an SD card. Any Steam Deck player installing straight to internal storage will only need the STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH option. But in either case, the last thing in Launch Options should be %command%, as shown above.

Do not, repeat, not, go to step 3.4 in Omni’s guide. There is no post-install script to run for Emissaries yet. So stop at step 3.3.

Now, after you do step 3.3 and do the one launch of MO2, you will want to proceed to run this command in your terminal window on your Deck:

protontricks --no-bwrap 976620 -q xact xact_x64 d3dcompiler_47 d3dx11_43 d3dcompiler_43 vcrun2022 dotnet6 dotnet7

The purpose of this command is to install a bunch of dependencies into the game data for vanilla Enderal, which Emissaries will need to work. You’ll probably see a huge spew of output in your terminal, and it will probably take several minutes to finish up. Let it sit and do its thing until you get back to a command prompt.

Once you see a prompt, then you’re ready to go to step 6.

Step 6: Launching Emissaries

Once I did the protontricks command I was finally able to launch MO2 and then proceed to launch the actual game, by clicking on the Run button.

Loading the game for the first time took a very long time for me, a total turnaround time of about 20 minutes. The launch process looked roughly like this:

Launched MO2 via the Play button on the Deck.
Once MO2 launched, clicked on the Run button in MO2 to launch Emissaries.
Got a prompt asking if I want MO2 to handle nxm links, to which I answered yes.
Preparing VFS dialog appeared and then disappeared.
Gray dialog with an Unlock button appeared, and as per experience with Tuxborn, I did nothing with that button as I waited for Emissaries to load.
It took a few minutes before I finally got a black screen, and at that point I was concerned that something had locked up.
However, I kept waiting, and finally at around 7 minutes in, I saw Community Shaders start to compile shaders.
Eventually, the background graphic showed up (the same one that’s the background graphic for vanilla Enderal), and shaders compilation continued.
When shaders compilation finally finished, I then saw a couple more notifications pop up, similar to ones I’ve seen in Tuxborn, talking about animations and other things loading.
Then, finally, I reached the main menu.

The entire launch process took about 20 minutes on my Deck, from launching MO2 to finally reaching the main Enderal menu. But remember that I was installing to an SD card. So anybody installing to a Deck’s internal storage, this shouldn’t take quite as long for you., Ouro told me he sees about an 8 minute turnaround time on his desktop computer. So a Steam Deck player launching from internal storage should see somewhere between 8 and 20 for total launch time required.

Final notes

One last word of advice: I managed to break my install after finishing it, when I went back to vanilla Enderal to launch it and doublecheck where the gamepad options were. When I did that, I saw Enderal re-install some dependencies, and that, in turn, appeared to confuse my Emissaries install.

I’m still discussing that issue with Omni, and we’re working on identifying whether there’s a dependency conflict between what vanilla Enderal wants on Steam Deck, and what Emissaries wants.

‼️ Therefore, for the time being, once you get a successful Emissaries install onto your Deck, you may want to avoid launching vanilla Enderal after. It may break Emissaries. More bulletins on this as events warrant. ‼️

Editing to add

9/4/2025: Removed warning about Emissaries not installing, as that issue has been resolved.