For the Linux users who might be running into problems with STEP (or Skyrim modding in general)

[James_Richards]

I thought I would share my adventure in getting STEP setup and working on Linux. Specifically, Arch Linux.

Due to the proliferation of various open source drivers, window managers, desktop managers and now going from Xorg/X11 to Wayland; Linux can be quite difficult to do some more advanced gaming. In the last few years, Linux has become a more viable gaming platform, with Valve and CodeWeavers spearheading WINE development and improvements.

Many Linux users for the last couple decades have become quite familiar with WINE and applicaitons serving to help simplify the experience (PlayOnLinux, Wine Bottles, and now Lutris). My guide's goal is for the people who are just now getting into Linux or have been using Linux and want to stop dualbooting just to play their games.

My guide is built on a system running systemd as much as possible (from boot to desktop environment, no GRUB here), KWin for a windowing manager and (KDE) Plasma for a desktop environment. It shouldn't matter your setup, as long as you are able to download and install a game made for SteamOS, no matter what distribution you are using (Ubuntu, Arch, Manjaro, PopOS! or anything else out there). If you can't; stop and fix that first. I am not a Guru at Linux yet, and I will try and help, but you will be better served ensuring you can 1) play a Linux game without issue 2) can install steam and install one of the many SteamOS games out there and 3) check the support forums for your particular distribution. Asking for help is no longer a moment of fear; the community is not gate-kept buy crotchety old men and women who feel superior to others. The community is much more open these days. Just make sure you spend some time Googling for your answers or searching the forums before asking.

Let us look at what I did to make things easier.

I have Steam installed and have been able to download and play many games that are built with SteamOS in mind. These are usually "Linux games", meaning the executable or binary (as I am apt to call them) are *.sh files. NOT *.exe or *.bat files. I would give examples, but I am not sure what the 15 to 20 somethings are playing these days.

As with every Skyrim modding step, download and run Skyrim for the first time. Start the launcher, let it select your graphics settings (these will be changed later anyway), start a new game and let it play past the titles to when you get that classic "Hey, you!". Just quite the game. Don't bother changing your key bindings or preferences, those changes will end up being overwritten later.

When you are back in Steam, right click the game in your list of playables and go to Properties. I have always had issues with the Steam Overlay, and I have never used it. So I turn it off, as well as Theater mode (I am too poor to do anything with VR anyway). For me, I also stop syncing game saves. Why? For one thing, I have my own backup system in place and I was running into a weird issue where things would stop working when trying to run SKSE when it was on, for some reason. I might explore that later. I also set Skyrim to update only when I ran it, zipped up the main exe and launcher and saved that. I don't see Skyrim being updated that often anymore. I think Bethesda are going to be focusing on their other properties for a while. BUT, better safe than sorry, and running Skyrim through SKSE should keep things from updating anyway.

On the left, chose 'Compatibility' and put a check to force the use of a specific Steam Play Compatibility tool. For my success, and until I am able to properly put my setup through its paces, I am using Proton 7 (7.0-6). Proton 8 I believe has some feature regressions that cause problems.

Close the window, minimize Steam.

If you have Skyrim Special Edition / Anniversary Edition, both Edition monikers use the same compatdata folder. This folder is where your "C Drive" is going to be. Depending on your install, how you have Steam setup and where you have your Steam Library, you will want to open your file manager of choice and go to ~/path/to/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c

Looks a little familiar? Windows folders. AppData folder. You are most likely in the right place. You can double check by going to "users", then "steamuser" (most installs have this as Proton doesn't always carry over your SteamID info the same way it would on Windows), "Documents" or "My Documents" (the later is linked to the same folder), the "My Games" and you should see the Skyrim folder that houses your save games and current INI's.

DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING YET
I mentioned those settings will change and if you have already read the STEP guide from top to bottom before starting (you did that, right?), BethINI WILL change or remove everything you change or add.

Anyway, go back to the "drive_c" folder.

I made a folder, Modding. I did not bother creating a "Tools" folder there as I kept in mind where all the applications and tools were being installed/uncompressed to and slightly changed the tool setups according to STEP. Really, this is probably the ONLY thing I changed early on. In this folder is where the ACMOS Roadgen, BethINI, DynDOLOD, MO2, Mopy, SSEdit and xLODGen folders are made.

When working with WINE, a user should specify the environment and where things like the binary and compatibility files should be installed. You can do this outside of Steam.
First, since we are using Proton, we need to ensure we keep the "Proton Ecosystem" intact. In terminal, enter

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=/usr/bin/steam STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/ /home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton\ 7.0/proton run /home/james/Downloads/Mod.Organizer-2.4.4.exe

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH is where the Steam binary is, the executable that starts Steam.
STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH is the variable where the compatibility folder will be, your "Windows DLL" and such will reside. It is a neat way to keep your WINE installs separate. I have managed to get Windows 98 games installed using some of these methods, and you should really read up on the WINE HQ site on how to do this.
The next variable, is the "wine variable" the executable that makes, in this case, Proton run. (/home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton\ 7.0/proton) The back slash "\" represent an escape character for a space. If you do not keep that in place, you will have problems, unless you surround the variable in quotes "/home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton 7.0/proton"
Next is "run" this tells Proton you want to run something.
Which is followed by the MO2 installer. Again, if you have spaces in your variable, put a "\" before the space and you should be fine, but until you get really used to how terminal works, I would just use quotes.

So again, with quotes, I would run MO2 installer like this:
 

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH="/usr/bin/steam" STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH="/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/" "/home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton 7.0/proton"" run "/home/james/Downloads/Mod.Organizer-2.4.4.exe"

Usually, you can also remove the "/home/james/" and use "~/", but I am the type that is a little too anal about some things and I would rather know exactly which "home" folder I am working with.

Following the STEP guide, get your tools installed and ready and then run Mod Organizer 2 for the first time.
I won't go into too much detail, because it is almost exactly the same as installing MO2. The binary has changed, is all.

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=/usr/bin/steam STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/ /home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton\ 7.0/proton run /home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/Modding/MO2/ModOrganizer.exe

It should fire right up. Follow STEPS recommended setup, or do what I did. I just setup a portable version.

When setting up tools to run in Mod Organizer 2, and this is for people who have been around for a while, I was using STEP a loooooong time ago; use the x64 versions of the binaries of these tools. Unless you are truly unfortunate and still run a 32-bit system, almost everyone by now should be on 64-bit enabled systems. There was old prevailing wisdom that even if you are on a 64-bit system, especially with LOD generation, using 64-bit binaries were sluggish, slow and unstable. I made the assumption that this was still the case and it was causing me nothing but headaches. Linux Proton users; use the 64-bit versions! (usually have a name like LODGenx64.exe)

When instructed to run BethINI, close MO2 as normal, look at the terminal window and you should see one last line; mod organizer done.
You should have control of your terminal again and can run BethINI. Just like running MO2, this is what I enter:

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=/usr/bin/steam STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/ /home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton\ 7.0/proton run /home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/Modding/BethINI/BethINI.exe

or

STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH="/usr/bin/steam" STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH="/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/" "/home/james/Games/steamapps/common/Proton 7.0/proton" run ""/home/james/Games/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/Modding/BethINI/BethINI.exe"

Then, follow the rest of the STEP guide, do not stray! It might be tempting. Once you have a good owrking setup, you can then start changing things. I have 8 different profiles setup in MO2 right now, each one with some slight changes I would make, allowing me to go back easily and undo those changes.

Now, time for first launch. Or at least the benchmarking steps. I am not talking about the smoke tests. If you have problems here, double check which version of SkyrimSE.exe you have. Make sure you have the right version of SKSE64 installed AND the extenders. Not all Special Editions right now are created equal.

During your benchmarking, you might run into some problems. If you installed everything like I did; participating in the ENB setup for certain mods, and choosing that you will indeed be using the mods suggested for Weather and Lighting, there really should be no problems. If you do, this is where you are probably having some varying system issue that might be sought after for answers elsewhere. STEP, though some knowledgeable people, are more than likely Windows users and their skills are invaluable for the Windows side of things. You can still ask, just don't expect them to move mountains like the Linux nerds littered all over the internet can.

The real problems I see, are coming during the Post-Processing portion of the guide. Benchmarking would be fine, until I enable/installed ENB. Once you are invited to test again after the post-processing section is where I had my first problems. Performance TANKED hard when ENB went online. Following the STEP guidelines on this MIGHT be detrimental to your system. If you have sever performance penalties after turning on ENB, you might want to consider the steps I took.

In the zip file downloaded from the ENBSeries site, at the time of writing is v0.493, there is a WrapperVersion and LinuxVersion folder. I used the d3d11.dll file from this folder. There is an accompanying README that explains the differences and the system used to make and test the DLL when Vorontsov Boris shipped this package. This DLL works a lot better! For me, My performance did not fall so hard as before. Due to the age of my system, however, I had to make a slight adjustment to the Display Tweaks ini; I kept the vsync off and screen tearing on. I also put the fps cap to 60 and I played for a couple hours. Cleared out Bleakfalls Barrow and the mine near Riverwood, ran to Whiterun and into Dragonsreach. Cheated some gold in because I wanted to see what the Tundra Homestead was all about. I noticed some screen tearing, but it really was not that bad. For me, as long as there was no lag for input (I'll be exploring that soon as well, would be nice to turn off tearing and have smooth frames with good response).

As for the LOD tools, they can be run safely through MO2 without issue. Just make sure you choose the x64 versions and things should really be just fine.

Most likely, my continued tinkering will have to wait until I can afford to buy new components. This rig is approaching 8 years old and I was an idiot for not keeping up with an update cycle. Right now, I am just switching out mods, replacing mods with different versions, etc... STEP has always been a good base to start at and then move into more. I for one, got rid of all the pets, mudcrab, zombies and I might start going after the goblins if I find I don't like them. Get familiar with xEdit so if you do the same, you can clean out the masters from the STEP patches. Get used to using Wrye Bash so you can manage any new items leveled lists and such and tings will be great! Wish I had a job thought... I really want a better computer.

One last thing. I noticed as I would install and manipulate mods, MO2 would begin to slow down. It wasn't suing a lot resources, and my CPU never went above 10% utilization, but it would really slow down. I just got int he habit of working with 3 or 4 mods and when I notice things slowing down, I would quit MO2 and reopen it. No biggy.

My next post, if it is wanted, I am thinking of writing up how to setup NXM handling and creating desktop shortcuts for those would like to use less of the terminal.

I hope that maybe my insight might help someone, and I am available for direct messaging, or responses here. If I notice a FAQ coming on, I'll build one of those.

This might go through rewrites or changes to reflect anything I found or felt needed to change or be brought up. I will do my best to keep this maintained. If I slack off, just message me and give me a good bollocking

Edited May 17, 2023 by James_Richards

[James_Richards]

I may also be tempted to create an AE from GoG guide. I plan on tinkering with that as well.