Modding Games on the Steam Deck

one of the coolest things about pc gaming is installing mods that change the way you game mods can do anything from swapping out character models to adding completely new expansion-sized areas to explore so why not take advantage of this ability on the steam deck after all it is just a handheld gaming pc might as well take advantage of that pc part you know so let's take a look at the different ways you can mod games on the steam deck this isn't going to be a full-blown tutorial on how to install mods for every game since modding one game can be completely different than modding another we're also not gonna cover games that aren't available on steam itself here so no wide screen hacks for emulated games and no minecraft mods this will however cover some of the basics of modding to get you up and running before any of that let's just go over backing up your game files in case the worst happens you want to back up your game files in case modding a game goes wrong and corrupt some important data shortly after getting my steam deck i was playing around with files i probably shouldn't have been and something bad happens one of my games and i could no longer get it to launch even deleting and reinstalling the game didn't fix the problem the issue was finally resolved when i swapped out my internal drive for a higher capacity one and that's definitely not an ideal fix this is why backing up your files is super important so that if you encounter a similar issue you have a known working backup of your game to do this simply head into desktop mode on your steam deck there's a super simple way for us to do this now so just open up steam find the game you're looking for in your library and right click it which you can do with the left trackpad oddly enough select properties then select local files and finally backup game files you can then just select a location for the backup if you don't have enough space you can either manually backup only the important files that you know you're going to tamper with or just plug in some external drive and save it onto there for now and now that you've safely backed up your game files we can get to modding and if anything goes wrong with your game and uninstalling your mods doesn't seem to fix any problems you can simply override the game with your known working backup and everything should be fine the easiest way to start modding is to use the steam workshop it's important to note that not every game has steam workshop support but the mods you install will be synced to your account here you can see that i'm playing left at 2 with mods i installed these mods on my main pc and when i downloaded the game on steam deck all of my mods were installed as well if you plan to change between your main pc and the steam deck and then this makes modding much more consistent but also super easy to see if a game has workshop support you can select a game in game mode navigate to game info then scroll along this bar to see if you can find a tab labeled workshop if you don't see the workshop tab and the game probably doesn't have workshop support from here you can browse all the mods that this game has available through steam workshop you should be able to sort by popularity or subscriptions or stuff i haven't found a way to type in keywords to search for on gamemode so if you're looking for a specific mod you may have to do that in desktop mode where you should see a little search bar here to install a mod just select it with the a button then scroll down and hit subscribe it really is that easy i'm not even making some meta joke telling you to subscribe that's just the term they use to uninstall a mod you simply unsubscribe there's no major commitment so there's no reason to be afraid on the mod page itself you can see a description of the mod look at pictures or videos add it to favorites and even leave a comment adding mods to your favorites can help you keep track of them easily and reading comments can sometimes give you more insight to other people's experience with that mod for example there's a very popular mod pack for forager here but reading the comments and looking at the description shows me that some aspects of the mod don't work too well with the controller we can always just use the steamvex trackpad or plug in a mouse and keyboard but it's nice to have this information regardless some mods may have other requirements and you'll have to install those first so it's always important to read the mods description before complaining that your mod doesn't work next let's talk about in-game mod support there's only a handful of games i know that have this kind of feature so i'll name them out for you we got a skyrim special edition the farming simulator games at least the one i played on playstation did and that was probably like farming simulator 14 or 15. and fallout 4. i tried looking at more games but couldn't really find what i was looking for here by in-game mod support what i mean is that within the game itself there is a mod menu that you can browse and install mods from yeah from just within the game itself so take skyrim for example actually let's clarify skyrim for a second there's two main versions of skyrim available on steam you have the original version and then you have special edition the original version actually has workshop support but the special edition doesn't and the mods between the two kind of work differently because the games themselves are built a little different so that might be important to keep in mind instead of workshop support special edition has the creation club and its own mod menu and here you can browse and install mods with the simple press of a button you can even search for mods here though your selection is going to be somewhat limited an important thing to keep track of here is your load order and mods will usually say something in the description like place this at the very top of your load order or place mod x below mod y because mod y is dependent on mod x or something like that if there's no mention of where a mod should be placed within the load order then just leave it in the middle-ish and you should be fine this is a super simple and easy way to install mods without having to do anything too complex since this feature is built within the game itself now like i said there aren't too many games i know of that even have this feature so if you happen to know of some more then please leave a comment about it if your game doesn't have steam workshop or in-game modding support there are a few other places that we can grab mods from by far the most popular seems to be nexus mods i've been using nexus mods for years and i really love it there's tons of mods for many great games so take a look over there and see if they have a game you're looking for they also have the kind of mods that aren't exactly allowed to be on steam workshop or anything since they may be a little too much let's say but even the nexus has its limits so if you're looking for that real dirty stuff and you'll need to head elsewhere you dog you to download anything on nexus mods you'll need to make an account first it's free and easy to do so just take care of that after you've done so simply feel free to browse all the mods to your heart's content once you find one you like we can look into installing it before we get into that i want to mention that there are many mod installers that can streamline the process of modding and keep all your mods organized nexus mods has its own thing called vortex then you have things like mod organizer 2 and stuff like that for this video i'm unfortunately not going to go into that stuff some of these mod organizers weren't exactly designed to work on linux so getting those ones to work is a bit of a pain you can use something like lutress to help with this part but that's something i'm still looking into myself i haven't used lucha's before and i'm trying to look into it during my free time here and there but yeah you know using mod organizers and stuff like that on the steam deck i guess that's a future topic if you have experience using stuff like vortex on the steam deck then please leave a comment about it with your experience as i and many others would love to hear it for now i'm just going to show you how to install some mods manually each mod has its own installation and uninstallation instructions listed on its description tab on the nexus so take note of those witcher 3 is a pretty easy game to install mods for so let's take a look at that you need to locate your game files and i already kind of showed you how to do that when we back them up i right click on a game then select properties then local files and this time just hit browse this will open up the dolphin file browser to the exact location of where your game is installed if you then look near the top and click on the thing that says common it'll take you to where all your other games are installed and i don't see all of my games here since these are only the ones that i have installed on my internal drive so if i repeat that process for a game that's installed on my micro sd card i can find all the games that i have over there we'll probably also need a different file archiving tool you have arc to start with but that won't work for certain file types so just go to the discover store and search for pzip install that and then just forget about it for now let's take a look at the fast travel from anywhere mod and looking at the installation instructions it says to extract the mod to our mods folder which we have to create if we don't already have one my witcher 3 is in a different location since i have it installed through heroic but use the process we went over earlier to locate your game folder and then right click to select create new folder which we will name mods and to download the mod from the nexus you need an account like i said so log in and then click on the tab that says files and then we're just going to select manual download after that you're going to select slow download since you probably don't have a premium account and it should ask what you want to open the file with so make sure that pzip is selected since arc may not work i've actually tested this exact mod with arc and it wouldn't open it wouldn't support the file so you're gonna have to use pzip for this one and after that just right click on the mod and we can select extract extract all and then just change the output to something simple like our downloads folder you can then find the file in the downloads folder and from there you can simply place it into the mods folder that we created you can drag it copy it paste it whatever you want really and once we're in game we just have to test things out as you can see we can do exactly as the mod sets just fast travel from anywhere the mod description advises against doing this during quests is it has the potential to break the game but otherwise it worked perfectly always pay attention to the mod description in case there's some other restrictions or [Music] requirements so that was pretty simple right why don't we take a look at another game then we'll do stardew valley this time and let's try npc map locations you'll notice that this time there's actually a requirement and if we click on it we can see what it is now things below are mods that require this mod and we don't care about that so what we care about is the thing at the top which is sm api actually i noticed this mod was right above the mod we're looking at now but we'll just use the link provided by our mod page instead and it takes us to a website to download sm api which states that it works on linux so that's good for us download and extract it to somewhere simple like our downloads folder for easy access now after you've extracted it you might notice this uh file inside called install on linux.sh which should take care of everything for us but i couldn't get it to work if you do then again please comment on how you did it thankfully the readme file has instructions on how to perform a manual installation and it should be surprisingly simple first we click on internal then linux and we should see install.dat if you click on that it should open in arc and now you just want to click extract and place it somewhere easy to access i'm just going to use the downloads folder again because consistency a file labeled install should be there now and we just need to bring up our stardew valley game files the same way we've done before you should now copy all the files from the install file we just got into the stardew valley game folder overwriting any files that already exist now for the next step it wants us to find a file named stardew valley dot depths dot json make a copy of it and then rename the copy file to stardu modding api.dap make sure you have the correct file selected i almost did the wrong one we can click on the magnifying glass to search for the file we need then make a copy of the file back out of the search so you can paste it and then rename the copy just make sure everything is spelled exactly don't leave any spaces that shouldn't be there or anything like that just spell it out exactly case sensitive and everything now the next step is to locate and rename the stardu valley file to stardew valley dash original then locate stardu modding api and rename it to stardew valley [Music] all of that was just to install a prerequisite mod but now that we have sm api installed we can now install the mod i originally wanted npc map locations the install instructions are pretty simple and step one is already completed if we click on files there will be two files that show up this time just read them and they should tell you which one you want to grab so in this case it's going to be the top one manual download then it's going to remind us we need asm api which we already did so hit download again and then slow download because we don't have premium then open it with pzip extract it to somewhere of course i'm just going to use downloads folder again because why not and for the final step it tells us just to place the files into the mods folder so within the stardu valley game files we should already be a folder named mods since we installed sm api and we just need to place our new mod in there that's all there is to it we can launch 30 value like we normally would in game mode and once we're in game we can check our map and yeah all the npc locations are clearly shown to us which is really handy i hate wasting half of my farming day looking for chain or something trying to turn in a quest so i love this mod it's pretty much a must-have that's pretty much all there is to it i'm no expert here i just read instructions on what to do and followed them i can't cover how to mod each and every single game out there but i hope i've given you some basic knowledge to help with modding your games some mods will require much more work other mods simply won't function on the steam deck but there are plenty that should work fine again i haven't gotten any of the mod managers to work but i haven't looked too deep into them yet if you have any experience with them on the deck please leave a comment about it as i and many others would really love to know make sure you back up the game files for any game you intend to mod in case something goes wrong and there is a somewhat high probability of something going wrong with each mod you install finally if you enjoy the video then thanks again as always i appreciate you and everything you do ciao [Music] you

Channel: The New Challenger

Views: 111,495

Keywords: SteamDeck, Modding, SteamWorkshop, NexusMods

Id: GfWnVaoiep0

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022