Excited to have bought the steam deck during the sale! I was planning on grabbing a dock and micro sd card and I noticed there were a bunch of accessories and customizations people could do with this thing. Was wondering if there were anything the community loved in particular?
I don’t have any extra hardware, but I’d like to recommend Emudeck. This tool helps to set up all the emulators
!! thanks for that, I have been meaning to get through some classic jrpgs
I haven’t done it yet, but my understanding is the hall-effect joystick swap-out is one of the most game changing mods. The dead zone on the stock joysticks is very noticeable, although gyro aim fixes makes it pretty much a non-issue for me personally.
oo TIL swapping for hall effect sensors will also resolve stick drift concerns 👀 that does sound like a game changer
FYI it does involve a small amount of soldering if you want the cap touch areas of the sticks to work. Still a very accessible mod but slightly more challenging than it may first appear.
They released new hall effect joysticks that drive require soldering and work with both stick types.
Another software customisation - If you’d like to play Minecraft I’d recommend Prism Launcher plus a mod called Controllable. Whilst you can use Steam Input to set the controls manually, Controllable adds native gamepad controls to the game which work better and include some QoL features. I’d also recommend following this guide, specifically the bit about setting an instance to launch automatically, which skips the launcher screen. Not only is that more convenient, it actually fixed an issue I was having where the mod saw two ‘steam inputs’ and you had to change it to the second one each time - It was getting confused by the two windows which steam had given their own gamepad layouts. With only one window popping up now, it works on launch each time.
A usb c multiport, or usb c to usb adapter for external drives or keyboard/mouse, and a right angle usb c adapter. I’d also get a screen cover for it. Software wise, I’d recommend cryutilities, decky, protonup-qt, flatseal, Heroic Launcher, ProtonTricks, Lutris, Warpinator, Bottles, and Corekeyboard
I wondered the same thing too, but have ended up with:
- a 512GB SD card
- using a spare USB-C dock that I already had
- two PS5 controllers for couch multiplayer.
