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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.)
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Gaming surprise of the week No. 2: new M1 MacBook Pro!
I’d already called out in my pages for the Anna Play Skyrim site that I’d been planning to upgrade my primary laptop and get an M1 version of the MacBook Pro. Dara’s also recently upgraded her laptop, but I wanted one with the fancier M1 Pro Max chip, because I knew for sure that I wanted to game on it. And I also wanted 32GB of RAM.
The surprising part that comes in here is this: Apple dropping a bunch of security updates and Catalina, the version of the operating system my prior machine has, not receiving any. Apple never actually announces these things to the public, but that round of security updates strongly suggested to Dara and me that Catalina had fallen off their official support matrix.
Which meant that that machine, Aroree, is probably now unpatchable. Which is not acceptable for any machine actively talking to the Internet.
So I’d been setting aside some funds already intending to save up for the new machine. The security update situation, though, accelerated my and Dara’s timetable for when we were willing to get me a machine, too. I went ahead and ordered one a couple of weeks ago.
And now Apple actually shipped it to me this week, a whole week earlier than expected. 😀
I’ve gotten it set up now, including with a Windows 11 VM. Which means that this new machine–dubbed Lydia–is now in play as a thing I can game on.
I’d hoped to try to run Elder Scrolls Online on this machine, but that’s proving problematic. (More on this in my next post.)
So for now my primary gaming intentions on this machine are going to be Skyrim-focused. Primarily, that’s going to be Skyrim Together Reborn. I have STR functional on the Deck now, but doing it on the laptop will actually be better, because I’ll have a bigger screen and a full keyboard at the same time. And can plug in headphones for voice chat purposes.
That said, it’s also pretty much guaranteed that I will experiment with mods on this machine as well! It may be even better for modded playthroughs than the Deck, I dunno yet. It’ll be fun to find out!
I’ll be updating relevant Anna Plays Skyrim site pages to include this new addition to my gaming-capable electronics! And I’ll have plenty to say about the machine in general over on the main annathepiper.org blog soon.
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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.
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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.
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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.