Modding
Main category for posts about modding, on Windows or Steam Deck
-
Issue with no controller buttons on screen SOLVED
A little while ago today I did a post lamenting a problem I was having with my Oblivion install on my Steam Deck showing me keyboard prompts on screen rather than controller button prompts. I am delighted to report, as of this post, that this issue is solved.
A helpful user on Mastodon (all hail @blake) told me that the issue was that the controller config I had on the Deck was sending keyboard inputs, not controller inputs. And that what I had to do was to change to a configuration that sent controller inputs instead.
-
No controller button prompts on screen in Oblivion
EDITING TO ADD 1/22/2023 8:25pm, for anybody that lands on this post: I’ve actually found a solution to this issue. Please have a look at this later post.
So once I got Oblivion running on my Steam Deck, I thought I’d try to do the same thing with it that I did with Shenner’s run in Skyrim: i.e., go ahead and mod it, but very lightly, sticking to just bug fix mods, or ones that provide critical enhancements to just improve the game’s quality of play on a modern device.
However, I’m running into an issue I need help with.
-
Some notes on additional mods I want to try
Both of my current playthroughs, Kendis and Harrowhark, are cluing me to additional aspects of Skyrim I feel like I’d definitely like to address with further modding. This post is to do a roundup of those things for my later reference.
-
Mods for Harrowhark’s Playthrough
My latest Skyrim playthrough, launched on my Win11 VM and which is also running on the Steam Deck as my whim dictates, stars Harrowhark the Imperial. She is named after Harrowhark Nonagesimus in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, and it is very likely she will also wind up being my vampire/necromancer playthrough. I expect she and Serana are going to get along very well indeed.
This, however, is not her first official playthrough post. This is the post in which I’ll document, for the curious, what mods I am running. Because this is also my first official modded Skyrim playthrough!
I have quite a few mods installed on the VM for this–nearly 80 in all. I’m not going to list them here in the actual load order, because the load order is a thing dictated by my mod manager of choice, Vortex. I took pretty much the load order Vortex set up for these mods as I installed them.
Instead, I’ll break them out into categories here. And this post is long, so the full list is behind the fold!
-
My current modding setup on Steam Deck (Updated)
This week I was contacted on Twitter by a user with the handle Shadark. (Hi, Shadark!) This person was going down the same path I’d done, trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn running on the Steam Deck. We got to talking on Discord, and I agreed to provide some screenshots of what my current setup is.
But during that conversation, I realized it might actually be better to do so here on the blog. Shadark found me googling for help about modding on the Steam Deck. But if anybody else needs this information, I figured it would be nice to have a cohesive walkthrough I can point at!
Previous posts of mine were more scattershot, and contained a lot of experimentation. So here’s a more up to date post, pulling relevant bits of data out of previous posts and presenting them in a more coherent fashion. Hopefully this will be useful not only to Shadark but to any other Steam Deck players who might be interested in modding Skyrim on their devices.
Since Shadark was specifically interested in Skyrim Together Reborn, I’ll be talking about that some in this post, but my setup is not just for that mod. If STR is not a thing you want to try playing, feel free to disregard the parts of this post explicitly related to that, which is section 9.
This is in-depth geekery so I’m putting it all behind the fold. (Dreamwidth folks, if you’re reading this via crossposting, as near as I can tell the post came through okay over to Dreamwidth. It looks okay from my DW account. If it does not look okay for you, let me know.)
-
Skyrim Together Reborn on the Steam Deck
Editing to add 11/6/2022: This post is getting a little traffic still, so if you’re looking for tips about how to run Skyrim Together Reborn on a Steam Deck, please have a look at my more recent post where I give a thorough walkthrough about my setup.
This is a followup post to others I’ve been doing lately about getting Skyrim Together Reborn, a mod that allows you to play Skyrim as a group with friends, working on my Steam Deck.
Which has been a challenge. The mod is only officially supported on Windows, as I was advised outright on the STR Discord. And right now I’m not running Windows on the Deck. I’m not likely to change this any time soon, just because as I understand it, you can’t dual boot between operating systems directly on the device. And I’m not in a hurry to wipe SteamOS off the thing.
But since I’d gotten other Skyrim mods functional on the Deck, and since the Deck is currently my most powerful gaming device*, I wanted to see if I could make it work at all.
Deets behind the fold.
-
Additional update re: modding Skyrim on the Steam Deck
As of yesterday I figured out a couple more things with my mod setup, so here’s a few more notes about that. This is a followup to these previous posts:
More behind the fold.
-
Screenshots of mod testing in Skyrim
The in-depth exploration of mods in Skyrim has begun!
I’ve been using my PC as a sandbox first, trying out mods in sequence to see whether or not I like them well enough to deploy them onto the Deck for use in official play. So right now I’m doing that with a separate character from the ones I’m actually seriously playing–which may or may not turn into an actual legit playthrough later, we’ll see. For now she’s just a test character to give me opportunity to play with mods.
-
Modding Skyrim on the Steam Deck update
This is a followup to last night’s post where I put out a call for help resolving problems I was having getting a modded Skyrim setup going on my Steam Deck.
I’m pleased to report that the situation has now been resolved! Many thanks to the user named Baguette on the Skyrim Together Discord server, who gave me some helpful tips.
So here’s a post about what those tips were, and what I had to do to get the Deck ready for modding.
-
Problems with steamtinkerlaunch on Steam Deck
Editing to add 11/5/2022: This post gets a bit of traffic so if you’re looking for help on setting up steamtinkerlaunch on your Steam Deck, you should go check my more recent post about this, where I do a walkthrough of my current setup.
I’ve begun my explorations with how to get Skyrim into a moddable state on the Steam Deck! But I’ve run into some challenges, and this post is a writeup of this, in the name of being able to share a single link of information in case I need to yell for help on Discord or Twitter, or wherever.