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.)