Playability on steamdeck??

[Purple Fox]

Hello all. Was thinking about purchasing this game, but does it play well on steam deck? Steam page only says “playable”, so I thought I’d try for some real feedback.
Thanks!

[Hatsune Neko Gaming]

some people do get it to play on it, but the game is not officially supported on steamdeck

[tR02020]

Originally posted by Purple Fox:

Hello all. Was thinking about purchasing this game, but does it play well on steam deck? Steam page only says “playable”, so I thought I’d try for some real feedback.
Thanks!

I am playing it, I would recommend especially if you haven't played it before, controls can be a bit funky because the amount of keys available to press in game but you get used to them and you can change your controls to your pleasure. Runs perfectly as far as I can tell.

[Purple Fox]

Great.. thanks for the reply!

[PlayerEmers]

I played on the deck for quite a while, but eventually the game starts triggering random graphical bugs

geometry/objects start to glitch out with big flickering dark patterns that extend beyond the horizon
sometimes its thin lines, but most of the time giant retangular paterns take over the screen when the camera is near the geometry that is glitching out

i gave up on playing on the deck because of this, but if this glitch was not a thing, i would say the game is VERY playable on the deck with peformance mods and a custom steam input layout

edit:i tried everything to find the source of the glitch, mitigate or fix those glitches: from peformance mods and file edits from nexus (most of them made by scar) to trying different custom proton versions using proton up-qt) but the bug will always show up, sometimes as soon as I load a save or later when a save is 30 to 60 ingame days in

[Purple Fox]

Ugh.. well.. I don’t have desire to do a ton of mods or play on PC, so I guess I’ll have to pass. Thanks for the response.

[PlayerEmers]

Originally posted by Purple Fox:

Ugh.. well.. I don’t have desire to do a ton of mods or play on PC, so I guess I’ll have to pass. Thanks for the response.

be advised tho:
i have not found many people with same issues I reported here and I have no idea how's the experience with other people playing on the deck

its hard to tell if this is a "my deck" problem, but I can tell you that this problem only happens on Kenshi for me, never had issues like this for other games and I "treat" my deck really nice and always try to go out of my way to fix rare issues like this (but had no sucess on kenshi)

[PlayerEmers]

you can try the game on the deck yourself and post results here
im looking for feedback of other deck players to try and find a solution for this problem

i've posted a video of the problem a while ago on the discord server for kenshi, you can watch here:
https://discord.com/channels/752466528066338856/752523523733323927/1318228535491563612
and another video
https://discord.com/channels/752466528066338856/752523523733323927/1291888693669531692

first video only had a single mod that added a custom OP/Cheat start scenario, second video had a bunch of mods
but same problem

edit: if anyone else reading this is also a deck kenshi player that played multiple saves for more than 40+ hours or so, i would appreciate you posting your thoughts and personal experience here

[PlayerEmers]

im thinking about doing a big megathread on lelddit and here on the steam forums for deck issues/deck related stuff

but its going to take some time to do it

[Purple Fox]

@playeremers that would be cool

[Judaspriester]

Idk about the steam deck, but the issues seem(!) at least not to come from proton itself. I play on a linux pc and the game works fine for me.

[PlayerEmers]

i did few hours of testing after nuking files/cache/shaders and downloading (and verifying files for good measure) the game. Did those same steps many times before without sucess on fixing the geometry glitches

the difference now was that I also updated the deck OS/steam (3.6.20 stable)

it seems like the problem is not triggering, at least fot the time being
I need to do a entire playthrough (or test playthrough) to really be sure the problem is fixed for now

unsure how an OS update would fixed this issue but if its legit, i glad it did
gonna post again when im done with the playthrough (at least 100 ingame days or so)

edit: will probably make a guide instead of megathread for deck related stuff when im done with this

[Purple Fox]

Nice! I’ll be watching for it!

[Judaspriester]

Originally posted by PlayerEmers:

it seems like the problem is not triggering, at least fot the time being
I need to do a entire playthrough (or test playthrough) to really be sure the problem is fixed for now
/quote]

My quick guess would be that kenshi has some odd behaviour that's now better handled either in the os itself or a newer version of proton, so that it doesn't appear anymore.

As I think about this, I've rarely seen those artifacts on linux myself, that I just shrugged and thought "well, kenshi at it's best". I'm at day 120 now and the issue is barely noticeable.

[Purple Fox]

Thanks!

[PlayerEmers]

Ok, I played for about 15 hours (30~ ingame days) and the glitch did not show up. I think its safe to say that its fixed after the new SteamOS update and you dont need to worry about buying it to play on your SD.

I know you said that you dont intend to use many mods, but I HIGHLY encourage you to use a few peformance mods. Kenshi is not exactly very optimized and most peformance problems you will encounter are related to loading zones/assets (even if you install it on your m.2 ssd) and inconsistent frames.

You should install ONLY ONE mod of each category (to prevent random issues):

=Fooliage mods=
-Foliage and Stone Total Rework
-Less Foliage Mod that doesn't block your doors (reduces fooliage/trees, makes the world feel a bit more empty)
-Even less clutter (alsos reduces fooliage, but by 90%. world will feel more empty)
-No Clutter (removes trees, fooliage from the game. the world is just empty)

If you dont care about world fidelity, you should install one of the mods from the bottom of the list for bigger peformance gains. Fooliage hits peformance really hard.

=Texture compression mods=
-Compressed Textures Project (reduces texture sizes by half)
-Texture Options 512 (most texture sizes are reduced to 512x512: expect blurried textures)
-Texture Options - 256 px version (same as above, but textures are reduced to 256x256. textures are ♥♥♥♥♥♥/blurry)

If you dont care about graphical fidelity/blurry textures, pick one from the bottom of the list for better peformance gains.

=Particle mods=
-Reduced Particle Effects
-KPM: Performance Particles

=Water mods=
-Water Optimizer

Recommend playing with the refreshs rate locked at 40

Still plan on making a guide that has a tutorial to install even better mods for peformance, but those mods require extra tinkering on desktop mode. Will probably make the guide next week because I still need to test those extra peformance mods to check if they trigger the glitch i talked about before.


edit: not related to peformance, but if you like cel-shading, you can use Native Stylise. It will somewhat "counter" the mods that reduce graphics/make the game feel "less ugly"

also dont forget to check the community controller layouts
the ones at the top are good, i also made one myself, you can search for my nick there or search for the name "kenshi on deck"