HOWTO: Make modding Skyrim easier on a Steam Deck

This post is a guide intended for Skyrim players who want to make modding the game easier on a Steam Deck. Maybe you’re wanting to build your own Skyrim load order. Maybe you’re working with a curated modpack from Wabbajack.org. Whatever your personal scenario, there are some steps you can take to make your modding experience on your device less onerous.

Suggestion 1: Bluetooth keyboard

Not gonna lie, trying to do serious modding work on the Deck is hampered a lot if all you have to work with is the onscreen keyboard. It takes up half the screen, so by definition, it’s going to be blocking a lot of the UI you’ll need to work with in MO2, Vortex, Wabbajack, etc.

There are alternate keyboard apps you can install that’ll give you a smaller onscreen keyboard. But for my money, the better option is to just invest in a physical Bluetooth keyboard you can use in conjunction with your Deck. Bonus points if it has a built-in trackpad, to give you mouse support.

This will help you not only when doing modding work, but also within Skyrim itself if you need to launch the console for any reason. Skyrim has a known issue with the console crashing on Decks, and until Bethesda and Valve get this fixed, the only real workaround for this is to use a physical keyboard to access the console.

I can personally recommend the iClever BK-08 keyboard, since that’s the one I’ve been using the last few years, and it’s lasted me through two different Decks so far. It’s not their most recent model, but maybe some of their current ones will appeal to you.

ProtoArc keyboards have also been recommended by one of the Tuxborn players on the Aetherius Modding Discord. (Shoutout to Silver Patronus!)

Suggestion 2: Set up VNC access to your Deck

If you can configure your Deck to allow you to VNC into it from your computer, you won’t even need to involve an external keyboard, because then you can manipulate your modding tools using whatever keyboard and mouse you have with your computer. That will be tons easier than trying to work directly on the Deck, especially if you’re nearsighted and have trouble with reading things on the Deck’s small screen.

I used this tutorial to set up VNC on my own Deck. You’ll want to keep two things in mind for this:

1. You will probably have to redo the setup steps every time Valve deploys an update to SteamOS. This is a consequence of how locked down Valve keeps the OS, in general. There are in theory ways to work past this, but I have not personally verified them, so I’m not going over those here.
2. One additional thing not covered in this tutorial is this: in the part where it tells you to populate pacman keys, do this extra command: pacman-key --populate holo. I’ve seen that I’ve had to do this last few times I’ve had to reinstall VNC, and this was the solution I found to error messages I kept getting. So include that as part of the tutorial steps. You can do this right before or after you do the same command with the archlinux argument.

Setting up your Deck for VNC access will of course require you to have a VNC client on your computer to talk to it. Some suggestions I have for that are:

• If your computer is a Mac, the Screen Sharing app provided by macOS will work for this
• If your computer runs Linux, Remmina will work
• My experience with VNC clients on Windows is a bit limited, but I’d suggest looking into TigerVNC, or any other reasonably well-documented open source client

Suggestion 3: Set up SSH access to your Deck

This will also periodically help with your Deck-based modding needs, If you want to edit an INI file on the Deck, for example, it’ll be a lot faster if you can just SSH into the device, and use your keyboard on your computer to edit the file from the command line.

I used this tutorial to set up SSH access to my Deck.

Both Mac and Linux computers should be able to connect to your Deck via SSH directly in the command terminal.

To get SSH to work on a Windows box, I recommend the client PuTTY. If you’d like a command-line-based SSH client, you can either install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or consider using Cygwin.

Suggestion 4: Recommended tools

Depending on how exactly you want to mod Skyrim, I can recommend a few different approaches.

If you want to work with a standalone MO2 install and build your own load orders, consider SteamTinkerLaunch. I played with this some when first learning how to mod on my Deck, and while I ultimately went with a different approach, I did see at the time that it seemed a good way to get MO2 onto the device if you wanted it. The reason I recommend this approach for standalone MO2 is, MO2 does not have a native Linux build. SteamTinkerLaunch will take care of installing a lot of under-the-hood things you’ll need to make the Windows-based MO2 work on the Deck.

If you want to work with Vortex, I can recommend the setup scripts created by pikdum. This is my current approach for working with Vortex on my Steam Deck.

If you want to work with a Wabbajack-based modlist, I suggest the Jackify tool written by Omni, one of the two Tuxborn devs. Jackify is a Wabbajack variant that can work natively on Linux. If you’d like to work with the original Wabbajack instead, Omni covers relevant steps in his guide to installing Tuxborn on a Steam Deck.

Any questions?

I employed suggestions 1, 2, and 3 when I got my current Steam Deck and set it up, as documented in Getting up and running on the new Steam Deck and Additional housekeeping on the new Steam Deck.

Everything in suggestion 4 comes out of my history of modding Skyrim on my Steam Deck.

I hope all or at least some of this will be helpful to my fellow Steam Deck players! Drop a comment if you have questions.