Transfer Workshop Character Categories and Order to Steam Deck (or anywhere else)

I spent several hours organising my roster on my Windows PC, only to find it doesn't sync with my Steam Deck. Copying the files over directly will not work either. This guide describes how to make it work, as I couldn't find a guide on this anywhere else.

Intro

This guide is written for my exact use case, transferring the Workshop organisation from a Windows PC to a Steam Deck, or vice versa. You should be able to copy the instructions and use them to transfer between any two devices, though. Anything that has access to the Steam Workshop, at least.

If you follow the guide and have a unique directory that wasn't listed here, please include it in the comments to help others.

Finding the files

In this step, we need to find the two files on your current device you want to copy across, and also the directory of workshop characters on the second device, which we will need to edit the files before we copy them over.

Step 1: Find the two files that you want to copy to the new device.

Windows: The directory will most likely be:

C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Local\RivalsofAether\workshop\

Steam Deck: The directory will most likely be:

/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/383980/pfx/drive_c/user/steamuser/appdata/local/rivalsofaether/workshop

Inside here will be two files, categories.roa and order.roa. Categories.roa can be copied across easily, but order.roa won't work yet.

Step 2: find the directory on your second device that workshop characters are stored in.

The easiest way to do this is to generate an order.roa file on that device, so open the game, go to the Extras menu, Steam Workshop, and move a character somewhere. This will generate the file. Then, find the order.roa file (its probably in a similar location to whats described above), open it, and make a note of whatever directory is being used inside. In my case, the file is full of directories like:

E:\steamapps\workshop\content\383980\MODNUMBER

Editing order.roa

Order.roa contains the directories for each modded character, but these will probably be different on another device. We are going to make a copy of order.roa, edit it, and use that edited version on the second device.

Please make sure you copy/paste this file somewhere else, and do not edit the original one. You could easily break your existing order, and end up spending hours putting it all together again. I've copied both files into a sub-folder here.


Open order.roa in a text editor that has a replace function, I am using Notepad++ for this.

Take note of the directory structure that this file is using. This is specific to your current PC.

Using the replace function, replace the start of the directory with the new devices directory, and hit "replace all".

In my case, my file uses my Steam directory:

T:\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\383980\MODNUMBER

And the Steam Deck uses:

E:\steamapps\workshop\content\383980\MODNUMBER

Everything after \steamapps is identical, so I replace the first part with the new first part, shown below.


After this step, check to make sure that the directories in the file match up with the directories on the second device. Double check that the backslashes are in the correct place. This file should now work on the second device.

Transferring the files

Copy the files to the second device, and put them in the correct location. This can be done however you like, I personally did it by uploading them to Google Drive and downloading them on the Deck.

When you open the game on the second device, if everything has worked, you should now have both the categories and the order from the first device.

[Nereus Kruz]

THANK YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH
I've tried for so long, having more than 1000 characers downloaded and having to order them by hand is a nightmare. For some reason, maybe i didn't do it correctly at first, basic notepad didn't work for e. With Notepad ++ it actually did!
Again, thank you a lot. You saved me