So I’ve had my deck for about a year, basically using steam cloud to swap between my laptop and deck. For my vortex question, I play some modded games using vortex, specifically cyberpunk. But how do I install vortex and for simpler mods is it plug and play when it comes to installing simple mods? Like once vortex is installed can I just download the mods with vortex. Most of my modding (like in noita for example) has been through steam workshop which syncs mods and load order across the two machine, but there are exceptions like the previously mentioned cyberpunk as well as skyrim (i think my modlist is too demanding for the deck)
As for Decky I saw this post and i know decky is for plugins and thats really it. Where can I download it and what else does it do?
As i was typing this out i was bouncing around thoughts, so hopefully theres a coherent questions somewhere in here
Edit: for decky I also have emudeck, decky says it can add acheivments and other things, what do those add?
For modding cyberpunk specifically, Nexus mods has a linux and Steam Deck compatible mod manager. It doesn’t support that many games, but Cyberpunk is supported.
I don’t have enough experience using Vortex to give much advice for other games, I usually just install mods manually instead of using a mod manager. That said, I know SteamTinkerLaunch is a tool that can be used to run both Vortex Mod Manger, ModOrganizer 2, and some other mod managers for games. Once installed you can select to run games with it from the game’s properties menu in Steam. Launching the game will then open a menu where you can select to run a mod manager for the game, launch it without mods, or several other options. There should be tutorial videos on youtube and other places for it.
Decky has a ton of plugins available, you can change how the Deck’s UI looks, change game art, change bootup animations, and do a lot more. You can browse plugins here. Occasionally decky or plugins will break when SteamOS updates, and the more plugins you have installed the more likely you are to encounter an issue like this. Some of the plugins are fantastic though so I consider it well worth the occasional trouble.
Oh nice thanks for bundle of info, I’ll check out the links when I have more time
And yeah I’m definitely familiar with the “updates break mods” and I was sure decky would be the same, I’m probably gonna do some light weight and small scale stuff, but then again I said the exact same thing 5 years and 300 mods ago with Skyrim
But yeah thanks the detailed info
And just to make sure I’m downloading the right decky this is it?
Yeah, that’s it. I normally recommended going through the main readme https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader?tab=readme-ov-file#-installation
Alternative option:
Learn and use LIMO.
https://github.com/limo-app/limo
I’ve been running a heavily modded CP77 for about a year now, on a Steam Deck, via LIMO.
Its basically Linux native MO2, available as a flatpak.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo
It also works with literally any game, if you set it up to.
But, it doesn’t do load order imports / nexus bulk mod collection downloads.
But but, it does support FOMODs, LOOT, and has quite useful collision checkers and managers, and can interface with the Nexus API.
