FIRST things to do with your Steam Deck

so if you just picked up a steam deck here are some things you're going to want to do the first thing is you're going to want to put on a screen protector I know that sounds really lame but it would be a huge bummer if you put a big old scratch right in the middle of your screen on the first day you got it so just put a screen protector on they're cheap they're easy to install and they don't impact your gaming performance whatsoever I'll leave a link to the one that I'm personally using but any of them are going to work great it doesn't really matter have you got the screen protector on the other thing I would say is you could put on a case or a skin if you wanted that extra level of protection I currently don't have one because I don't think it needs it I really like the texture of the plastic on the steam deck so I don't think it needs a case or a skin but if you are going to abuse it or just put in more damaging environments maybe you want to do something like that but I will say so I haven't used a skin or a case at all and I've gotten two pretty solid scratches on the back even though I would say I'm barely careful with it it's plastic and plastic scratches relatively easily so that's something you might want to consider number three now that your steam deck is physically safe you're going to want to download some games if you already have a steam account in Steam games then I'd recommend just downloading some games that you already have and trying those out but here's where we need to talk about the different verification settings the first one is verified which means valve has gone in and checked that the game runs great that's going to be your best experience on the steam deck verified games run Straight Out of the Box no tweaks needed the next step down is playable games and in my experience playable games actually work great the most common problem with games that are playable and not verified is that at some point in the game you're going to have some text boxes that are kind of small and kind of hard to read and that's basically it most of the playable games that I've played on mine have been a totally great experience I've had no problems with them the only thing like I said is some text can be hard to read sometimes but it's really not a big deal so what I would say is go through your steam library and then just download some of the games that are verified or playable and those you're probably going to have a good time with of course some playable games won't be that well optimized or won't run very well but generally speaking they work better than you'd expect the last setting is untested and that doesn't necessarily mean the game won't run it means it might run but it hasn't been tested and what I would say is for your first day just avoid games that are untested or unverified just because we want to have a good experience so we're only going to try the well-optimized games right out of the box and while we're on the subject of games I'd recommend getting at least one single player game that you can play offline and the reason is because part of the fun of having a steam deck is because this thing is portable so if you're in the car or in a waiting room or on the train or whatever you're doing you can play some games but depending on where you're at you might not have a Wi-Fi connection or an internet connection so that's why I recommend getting at least one game that you can play offline so you can easily play it when you're portable my go-to pick for playing offline is Elden ring that's my favorite one to play offline but I also would highly recommend Hades vampire Survivor or Fallout 4. those are games that I've personally played offline and they work just great you're going to have a good time the next step is to get an SD card even if you got the 512 gigabyte model of the steam deck there's a very good chance you're going to want more storage just because you can hold more games and why wouldn't you want that you can get SD cards for super cheap so I highly recommend you go out there and pick up an SD card at like a half a terabyte one costs around 50 bucks I'll leave a link to the one that I got Below in this same category if you got the base model steam deck like I did one thing that you can do is you can replace the internal drive and I recommend you do it if you're handy at all obviously there is some risk involved but I did it and it's actually not very difficult and I'm not a very handy person so I think just about anyone can do it valve has clearly designed the steam deck to be user replaceable at least for the internal SSD so it's really not that hard of a process that's another easy way to add some storage to your steam deck for pretty cheap I got a half a terabyte internal SSD for it was about 50 bucks off eBay so not too bad moving on the steam deck has pretty good battery life but if you're playing trip AAA games and the battery life gets quite a bit lower than if you're playing something like vampire survivors so if you're gonna play a lot of AAA games I highly recommend you get a super long USBC cable I got a 20-foot braided USBC cable that I'm going to leave linked below the nice thing about long cables is that way when you're playing on the couch or in bed or whatever you're doing you just don't have to be nearly as close to the outlet I mean it's kind of a no-brainer but it just makes it easier to play wherever you want to play and battery life really can be an issue if you want to play totally unplugged from the wall then I also would recommend getting yourself an external battery pack and then you can carry that around with you wherever you want and that'll dramatically increase your steam decks battery life if you get that extra long USBC cable you're going to need something to plug it into the wall you're going to need the charger itself and the steam that maxes out its charging speed at 45 Watts that means you can be using the seam deck at full power and be charging as fast as it can charge but you actually don't have to do that I had a 30 watt brick laying around so I just tried using that and after some test best thing that I've done on my own my steam deck never uses more than 25 watts when I'm running the most demanding game and that's everything involved including the screen power and everything else so with the 30 watt brick although it doesn't charge nearly as fast as the 45 watt brick it does still always charge so you won't drain any battery while you're plugged in but one nice thing is because you're charging so slowly it actually heats up the steam deck less than if you were charging with the 45 watt brick because the faster you charge the more heat you produce I'm not recommending you go out and buy a 30 watt charger because it'll trickle charge but what I am saying if you already have a 25 or 30 watt charger those are going to work totally fine with the steam deck they just won't charge as fast as the 45 watt charger would that being said I wouldn't recommend getting anything lower than a 25 watt charger as than the steam deck while you're using it could be draining its battery life and so I don't think that's going to be a good experience so I would say probably 30 watts and higher is what you want to go with but that way if you already have a phone charger this USB type c you can plug it into your steam deck and you're going to have a good time one thing that's made a huge difference for how I use the steam deck is actually getting an HDMI dongle with this dongle you can do a bunch of different stuff but the main way I use it is to plug into my TV and that way if we're playing a split screen game me and my buddies can plug it into the TV and then you can play with other people but also sometimes it's just nice to be able to plug into your TV and play off of your TV instead of using the steam decks relatively small screen and that actually brings me to the next thing this is totally optional but I'd recommend getting a controller I personally have an Xbox controller and a PlayStation 4 controller and those both work great with the steam deck but having the controller allows you to then plug the steam deck into the TV and then you can sit back and play on your couch while you're still playing on the TV or it allows you to do things like split screen games which I play a lot of Nazi zombies with some of my buddies so we play split screen and then we just have a couple different controllers you're going to be having fun but I would recommend getting at least one extra controller so that way you by yourself can leave this steam deck plugged into the TV and go sit back on the couch or if you have a friend over you give them the controller then you can still plug your steam back into the TV and you just kind of have to sit close to the TV depending on how long your HDMI cable is the last thing I'm going to recommend is that you try messing with plugins the one I use is called decki and then what that allows you to do is get a whole bunch of different plugins for example vibrant deck is really nice it can change the saturation and the color temperatures on your screen to make it look better but you can also use stuff that make it easier to use Bluetooth devices like your headphones or controllers or set custom boot animations or whatever you want there's a whole bunch of community made stuff and it's really easy to set up but that's getting into a little more advanced stuff so I'm going to leave that for a later video and there you have it those are the first things that I would do with my steam deck if I was you and those are the first things that I did with my steam deck but now that you got a steam deck let me know what your experience is I've been having a fantastic time playing on mine it's been by far my favorite gaming device that I've ever owned and I grew up as a piece C Gamer my whole life so this is relatively new to me to have a handheld that's gonna do it for the video see you guys next time peace

Channel: Sam.Alexander.Reviews

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Keywords: first things to do with your steam deck, steam deck, steam deck review, first things to do with your steam, steam deck tips, your steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, linux gaming, steam deck games, first things to do with your steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, first things steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, FIRST, Deck, Steam, things, things to do with your steam, steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, FIRST Steam Deck Sam.Alexander.Reviews, first steam deck sam.alexander.reviews

Id: cDEF4J5RarI

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023