Just finished up running this mod in Tuxborn, so here’s my latest review, of the mod The Tools of Kagrenac.
Spoiler-free picoreview: this mod had several aspects to it that frustrated me immensely. Yet I did ultimately enjoy playing it. Details behind the fold (or, if you’re reading this on Dreamwidth, at the link immediately below).
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This is a followup guide to this one that I wrote a while back: HOWTO: Set up a radial menu on a Steam Deck game. Tuxborn players expressed some interest in the details of my decisions on how to set my radials, so I’m going to write those out for this post here.
The primary audience for this post is Tuxborn players on Steam Decks. But a lot of this can apply to any Skyrim players on Steam Decks, especially if you’re running a load order similar to Tuxborn’s, and if that load order happens to include the BFCO-related mods we have.
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Here’s the final thoughts wrapup post on Elessir’s run, which will let me move him into the archive of old playthroughs!
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I had six remaining posts pertaining to Elessir in my Drafts folder, and a few more directories’ worth of screenshots for which I never took notes. So I’m going to do an overall survey of them here, so I can knock all of that out of the queue.
This post will contain spoilers for the tail end of follower Lucien’s personal quest, and also some spoilers for Beyond Skyrim: Bruma.
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Second post in my new playthrough of Enderal, using the Emissaries of Tux modpack. Main action in this post: a side quest in Riverville, in which I venture into Clearwater Cave to hunt for Tarhutie’s lost elixir.
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Welcome to my very first post ever for playing Enderal, the total conversion mod for Skyrim that transforms it into an entirely different game!
If you’ve never played Enderal before, suffice to say, this post will be full of spoilers, like any other playthrough post on my site.
And meet my character Siobhan, half-Nehrimese, half-Kiléan, who finds out right quick that maybe sneaking on board a boat to get to Enderal is maybe not the smartest thing she ever did….
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Updating to add 1/26/2026: while this procedure still works to install Emissaries of Tux, it was written before Omni released his Jackify tool for Steam Deck and Linux users. Jackify, which basically does the same thing as Wabbajack but while running natively on Linux, is the Tuxborn/Emissaries team’s recommended means to install either Tuxborn or Emissaries if you’re running a Steam Deck, or playing on a PC with Linux. You can get Jackify from its page on Nexus. Please try using Jackify if you’d like to do an Emissaries install. If that doesn’t work for you, then feel free to come back to try these steps. Reach out to me on the Aetherius Modding Discord if you need further assistance. Thanks!
So I’ve written on this site about how I joined the support team for Tuxborn, right?
Turns out that Ouroboros, our lead Tuxborn dev, also maintains a modpack for Enderal. If you don’t know what Enderal is, this is a large, complex Skyrim mod that basically turns Skyrim into a completely different game. It still is using the Skyrim engine, but the world, plot, characters, etc., are completely different. It came recommended to me some time ago, and I had already added it to my Steam library, since Enderal is actually available for free on Steam.
Ouro’s modpack for Enderal is called Emissaries of Tux, and he’s just dropped a 2.0 release of it. Out of general interest, I’ve now tested the install process and have the following tips of interest to Steam Deck users who want to try out this modpack.
You do need to have Enderal on your Steam Deck in order to use the modpack, so find it on Steam, and install it.
You will need to launch it at least once, to take care of a couple of things that need to be in place before installing the modpack. Both of these are important.
The first thing is that the necessary compatdata directory (which I’ll talk more about below) will get created. You don’t need to take any action for this, this’ll happen under the hood.
You shouldn’t need to do this if you don’t plan to play vanilla Enderal, because Ouroboros says he’s taking care of this as part of the Emissaries of Tux setup. But if you want to play vanilla Enderal at any point, you’ll want to go ahead and do this.
Enderal does not have gamepad support on by default, but you can fix this in the Enderal launcher.
To get to those settings, you will temporarily need to use the Steam Deck’s ability to give you a mouse pointer by holding down your Steam button, and rolling your thumb over your right trackpad.
Do these steps:
Now you should be able to use the Steam Deck controls in Enderal, and you can quit out of the launcher.
At this point you have a couple of options, on how to run Wabbajack.
If you have Wabbajack on your Steam Deck already (for example, you’re a Tuxborn Steam Deck player and you already set up your Steam Deck to run Tuxborn), then you should be able to use the same Wabbajack to install the Emissaries modpack, and you can skip to 3b.
If you do not have Wabbajack on your Steam Deck already, then you need to decide between these two options:
If you want to try to install Wabbajack directly on your Steam Deck, this will save you some steps, but it’ll also require you to do some tinkering.
Omni, Tuxborn’s dev in charge of installation guides, covers the necessary steps to install Wabbajack in the full Steam Deck guide for installing Tuxborn. Basically, steps 1 and 2 of that guide. Follow Omni’s instructions to set up Wabbajack on your Deck.
If you’d rather do Wabbajack on your PC, that’ll be an easier install process. But it will also ultimately require you to copy your resulting Emissaries installation to your Steam Deck.
Either way, since Emissaries is not on Wabbajack’s gallery yet, recommended way to get the necessary Wabbajack install file is to go to Emissaries’ page on Nexus. Download the Wabbajack file from there. You may need to unzip the file you get, as it’s a 7z file. Unzipping that will get you a directory that should contain the actual Wabbajack file, and that’s the thing you’ll want to open up in Wabbajack via the “Install from disk” button.
‼️ Important warning: ‼️ You may see an issue with a couple of the files in the load order not downloading. Ouroboros calls this out in the Readme, and I can confirm this happened to me. A couple of them I was able to make download anyway after a couple of Retry attempts. However, this did not work for me for EnderalSEEdit, which I had to download manually.
Ouro’s Readme provides this link for downloading EnderalSEEdit. This did work for me with the following steps:
If you installed Emissaries directly on your Steam Deck, skip this step and go to step 5.
Otherwise, if you installed Emissaries on a PC Wabbajack install, and you want to play it on your Deck, you’re going to need to copy that entire install directory down to your Deck. There are multiple programs you can use to do this. Here are some recommendations:
Use whatever program you like, but just be aware that you’re moving a lot of files, so be patient as you move files from point A to point B.
Once you have the install complete (either via installing directly on the Deck, or copying an install down from PC), then there are several manual post-install steps Steam Deck users are going to need to do. Some of these are very similar to Omni’s Steam Deck install guide for Tuxborn, so I’m going to use that as a reference here.
In the Tuxborn guide, MOST of Step 3 is necessary for Emissaries, too. You still need to manually create a non-Steam-Game entry in your Steam for the MO2 in Emissaries. So use the Tuxborn guide’s step 3 as a reference. Anywhere Omni mentions Tuxborn in that guide, just adjust that appropriately for your Emissaries install.
You will want to do steps 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3, adjusting appropriately for Emissaries instead of Tuxborn.
To use my own install as an example, here’s how I set up:
Some notes about these settings:
Do not, repeat, not, go to step 3.4 in Omni’s guide. There is no post-install script to run for Emissaries yet. So stop at step 3.3.
Now, after you do step 3.3 and do the one launch of MO2, you will want to proceed to run this command in your terminal window on your Deck:
protontricks --no-bwrap 976620 -q xact xact_x64 d3dcompiler_47 d3dx11_43 d3dcompiler_43 vcrun2022 dotnet6 dotnet7The purpose of this command is to install a bunch of dependencies into the game data for vanilla Enderal, which Emissaries will need to work. You’ll probably see a huge spew of output in your terminal, and it will probably take several minutes to finish up. Let it sit and do its thing until you get back to a command prompt.
Once you see a prompt, then you’re ready to go to step 6.
Once I did the protontricks command I was finally able to launch MO2 and then proceed to launch the actual game, by clicking on the Run button.
Loading the game for the first time took a very long time for me, a total turnaround time of about 20 minutes. The launch process looked roughly like this:
The entire launch process took about 20 minutes on my Deck, from launching MO2 to finally reaching the main Enderal menu. But remember that I was installing to an SD card. So anybody installing to a Deck’s internal storage, this shouldn’t take quite as long for you., Ouro told me he sees about an 8 minute turnaround time on his desktop computer. So a Steam Deck player launching from internal storage should see somewhere between 8 and 20 for total launch time required.
One last word of advice: I managed to break my install after finishing it, when I went back to vanilla Enderal to launch it and doublecheck where the gamepad options were. When I did that, I saw Enderal re-install some dependencies, and that, in turn, appeared to confuse my Emissaries install.
I’m still discussing that issue with Omni, and we’re working on identifying whether there’s a dependency conflict between what vanilla Enderal wants on Steam Deck, and what Emissaries wants.
‼️ Therefore, for the time being, once you get a successful Emissaries install onto your Deck, you may want to avoid launching vanilla Enderal after. It may break Emissaries. More bulletins on this as events warrant. ‼️
Read more on Anna Plays Skyrim.
My next playthrough post is going to be another one from Nona’s playthrough, and I am super behind on her in particular. I left off in the middle of running Carved Brink with her.
Y’all may recall that I put up a review post about that mod, as well. But here’s the thing: since I ran Carved Brink originally with Nona, I have since run it a few more times as Tuxborn has continued to develop its builds, and since I’ve been doing playtesting for Tuxborn, that by definition included re-running Carved Brink. This led me to discover some additional things about it that I’d missed the first time, and which honestly made me enjoy playing it more.
So at this point, I’m rather more kindly disposed to it than I was on the first playthrough. And I felt it was appropriate to put up an addendum to the original review.
Most of the commentary I gave in the original review still applies, and I’m not going to recap points where my opinion hasn’t changed. But I do have some additional stuff I like about Carved Brink, and which I want to note here.
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I got Ashoshah started as a character on ESO nearly a whole year ago at this point, and have I posted about her more than once since then? No, no I have not. So here’s a post to try to get caught up on what I’ve done with that character.
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This is the first of my playthrough posts for Alecto the Dunmer, and featuring version 1.0.1 of the Tuxborn modpack. Main action here: trying out the Alternate Start option that strands your character in a shipwreck; getting back to the mainland; having my ass kicked repeatedly until I finally made it to the relative safety of Dawnstar; stopping in Whiterun, and being stymied from proceeding to Riften by bandits also kicking my ass; and finally going to Solitude to talk to Auryen at the LOTD museum, and pick up Katana as a follower.
Since this playthrough is my first time running Katana, I’ve got some review commentary about her in this post, too. (A full review of her and her associated NPCs, Megara and Shale, will come later.)
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Another Skyrim catchup post, knocking down a couple more sessions from Elessir’s now-finished run. These two sessions date from mid-September. Primary action here is taking out Miraak to finish off the Dragonborn main plot, but with a generous side helping of Solstheim side quests as well.
I have eleven more sessions of Elessir’s to write about, and then I can finally call his run finished.
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More Skyrim catchup, but this time with one of the active playthroughs. This is for my Nona playthrough in version 0.5.2 of Tuxborn, which is still in progress even though Tuxborn has now updated to its 1.0 official build.
Main action here is a mix of standard Skyrim stuff, and playing the Carved Brink mod. Accordingly, there will be spoilers for Carved Brink.
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Catchup post for my Elessir Skyrim run from last year. This post dates from mid-September.
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And now, swinging back to get caught up on Elessir’s Skyrim run! This is a pretty short post, covering Solstheim action played at the end of this past August. Mostly involving running the Thirsk Mead Hall plot, and the one to get the netch leather armor from the AE.
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I feel like blogging today, so let’s get a bit further along on Nona’s playthrough in Tuxborn 0.5.2, shall we?
Main action covered here is familiar territory: running the end of A Daedra’s Best Friend. But there’s a big side helping of meeting a couple of the characters from the Interesting NPCs mod, who did, in fact, live up to the label on the tin.
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If you’re an Elder Scrolls fan, but also the owner of an M series Mac, you may be wondering if you can run the new Oblivion Remastered release on your computer. This post is here for you!
The main upshot of this is, if you want to try this at all, then you need to do it with a Wine install. Parallels is the usual solution I hear bandied about for gaming on a Mac–but Parallels only supports up to DirectX 11, and Oblivion Remastered’s system requirements explicitly say version 12.
So Parallels is not an option. (And a lot of you may be going GOOD, anyway, because if you’re a Mac user to begin with, you don’t really want to bring Windows into the picture if you can avoid it. At least, I certainly don’t.)
This means your only other course of action (at least, if you want to run directly in macOS as opposed to trying a Linux VM, or installing Linux as an alternate OS on the machine) is to try to do it on a Wine install. You have two different general ways to approach that:
More behind the fold.
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I bought Oblivion Remastered yesterday as soon as I saw the news that it was being released. And last night, I fired up a playthrough to redo Ganniwer, the character I’d started via my attempt to get an Oblivion playthrough going.
Here’s a post to cover my initial impressions of this version of the game, so far. Details behind the fold.
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All of my fellow Bethesda gamer nerds are over the moons today for the news of the release of the official remaster of Oblivion, and that includes me, because boy howdy does the remaster look amazing.
High points of what was revealed on Bethesda’s livestream:
AND, most relevant to my interests, it is Steam Deck verified. I am downloading it onto my Deck as I write this post. 😀
I will also be attempting install and launch on my Windows VM. I can run Skyrim in that VM, as I’ve written about here before, but I could not run the original Oblivion. So I’m absolutely going to check if the remaster will work on the VM, just to confirm if it works on ARM builds of Windows, for the benefit of any Mac users out there.
Two versions of the remaster are now available right now on the Steam store. The regular version has the base game and core DLCs (Knights of the Nine, and Shivering Isles). The deluxe version has additional goodies and content.
So now, I will be waking up Ganniwer’s Oblivion playthrough. I didn’t get very far with her, only up to level 5 or so. So I will be redoing the start of her playthrough on this shiny new Oblivion version.
Follow along as Ganniwer closes shut the jaws of Oblivion.
This is going to be fun.
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I’m so severely behind on getting ESO posts done that I’m giving myself another round of amnesty, and am going to get some posts up that are just high-level summaries of stuff that interested me across spans of play.
So here’s a post to summarize stuff with Gyllerah from April through June of 2024.
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I am very pleased to announce here that I’ve joined the team for Tuxborn, the Skyrim modpack, as a contributor! This is the result of my presence on the Tuxborn Discord channels and the assistance I’ve been giving other players there.
My contributions to the Tuxborn team will be focused on tracking useful information for other players to help them in their playthroughs, such as what followers are available in the modpack, what player homes, what armor and weapons, and such. And also, how to launch various important quests such as Legacy of the Dragonborn, Wyrmstooth, and others.
I will be contributing material on Tuxborn’s wiki, now live on its Github here:
https://github.com/Omni-guides/Tuxborn/wiki
I’m also assisting the Tuxborn devs with playtesting, since I own an OLED Steam Deck. Tuxborn is specifically intended to be performance-friendly to Steam Decks in particular, although it is definitely not limited to that device, and can be enjoyed on PCs and other handhelds as well, such as the ROG Ally.
Because of this, I’ll be giving Tuxborn a bit more visibility on this site moving forward! Look for a new page focused on Tuxborn to go live here very soon.
And, sneak preview: Tuxborn’s official final release version is very, very close to going live. So I’ll be announcing here as well when it does!
Read more on Anna Plays Skyrim.
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