Skyrim special edition linux
A subreddit about the massively popular videogame The Elder Scrolls V, Skyrim by Bethesda studios.
Since Skyrim Special Editio came out Linux players were left in the cold. But recent changes have finally made it viable to play the game on Linux, with modding capabilities.
UPDATE 1: If you have no voices in game you can fix it by installing xact with winetricks:
- Added wine-mono steps
- Added work-around steps for ModOrganizer 2.1.3
- Added link to guide for setting up Module Manager downloads.
There are some caveats, which I’ll highlight as we get to them, some have work-arounds which I’ll share. Some do not currently have solutions but this should change over time. Herewith then, a complete guide, to a playable, moddable SSE experience on Linux.
Step one: getting a workable wine.
SSE support in wine is quite cutting edge, your distro’s packages almost certainly won’t be able to run it. Instead you will need to build your own version. This is reasonably manageable if you do it in a step by step fashion.
SET UP ENVIRONMENT
At this stage you have a functional wine build available. Now we can start setting up the environment.
* Go to your Winebottle container directory: cd $HOME/WineBottles/SkyrimSE
Create a script there called «skyrim.sh» with content as follows:
#!/bin/bash HERE=`realpath $0` HERE=`dirname $HERE` export WINEPREFIX=»$HERE/prefix» export PATH=»$HERE/wine/bin:$PATH» #Use the local wine when run via this script. export DXVK_HUD=fps #Show a handy FPS counter in-game if test $1 == «steam» ; then cd «$HERE/prefix/drive_c/Steam» wine64 Steam.exe elif test $1 == «mo» ; then cd $HERE ./movfs4l.py UNVFS cd «$HERE/prefix/drive_c/MO» wine64 ModOrganizer.exe ./movfs4l.py elif test $1 == «skse» ; then cd «$WHERE/prefix/drive_c/Steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition» wine64 skse_loader.exe else $* fi
Set the file as executable. This script creates a convenient wrapper for ensuring the correct wine and environment is used at all times, as well as some handy shortcuts for launching some of the tools we’ll be using a lot. However it generically lets you run anything withthe proper WINE setup — so for example you can use programs like winetricks easily:
./skyrim.sh winetricks somelib
Note we don’t need winetricks for anything in this guide — but if you need it later, it’s useful.
Now we can initialize our wine prefix:
In the wine configuration tool, go to the Desktop Integration tab. At the botoom of the tab are folder links, disable all of them.
Next download movfs4l.py. This is a python script I wrote to provide a work-around for the ModOrganizer2 VFS functionality which is not currently working in wine. In time wine may gain support for Vortex or perhaps MO2 will work better, but for now, this is the solution we have. The script uses the same methodology as Vortex does: symlinking but it parses the MO2 setups to ensure that the resulting skyrim filesystem is exactly as MO2 would have produced it. I have attempted FUSE based overlay filesystems as an alternative but they are highly unstable for this use-case and have no means of dealing with the fact that Linux is case sensitive and Windows is not.
You can get the script here: https://github.com/ajventer/ksp_stuff/blob/master/movfs4l.py Download it, place it $HOME/WineBottles/SkyrimSE and set it as executable.
The above skyrim.sh script will automatically use it correctly whenever you invoke ./skyrim.sh mo so you don’t need to worry much further. As long as you use the paths in this guide it will work out of the box but if you change any paths you will have to edit the PATHS= map at the top of the script.
Update: Now we need to install wine-mono. You can download it from here: http://dl.winehq.org/wine/wine-mono/ then install it with
./skyrim.sh wine64 msiexec /i /path/to/wine-mono*.msi
INSTALL DXVK
DXVK isn’t absolutely required to play skyrimSE except on a number of Nvidia cards where wine native produces ugly artifacts in shadow rendering, but it is nonetheless reccomended as the Vulkan based DX layer gives much higher frame-rates and much more stable game. Grab the latest release from: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases Extract it and install it: tar xvf dxvk-*.tar.gz cd dxvk[tab] cd x64 ../../skyrim.sh ./setup_dxvk.sh
INSTALL STEAM
Download the latest windows steam installer from http://steampowered.com and install it:
./skyrim.sh wine /path/to/steam_installer.exe
Change the installation path to: c:\Steam #Important
INSTALL SKYRIMSE
Once logged in, go and install SkyrimSE.
INSTALL MODORGANIZER2 Updated
Download the STANDALONE versions of ModOrganizer 2.1.1 as well as the latest version (at time of writing 2.1.3) from Nexus at: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1334/ Install the latest version of ModOrganizer2, set the install path to
Now open the 2.1.2 zip file and copy the following files into $HOME/WineBottles/SkyrimSE/prefix/drive_c/MO (overwrite the ones already there)
usvfs_proxy.exe usvfs_x64.dll usvfs_x86.dll
Wine cannot currently load the versions of these files in 2.1.3 — but since VFS isn’t working anyway that’s not a concern, we will just use the older versions to allow the program to start.
- ModOrganizerWith wine-mono installed the Fomod installer functionality will work. However the program will still show a warning about wanting dotnet4.6 — unfortunately there seems to be no way to install dotnet4.6 on wine64 prefixes.
- The «sort mods» button uses lootCLI.exe in the background which requires the real dotnet46 to work — since there isn’t a way to install this, currently this button will not work — I have yet to find a good solution for effective automated mod ordering on wine.
Install SKSE64
Exactly the same process as in windows
Start SkyrimSE
Start the game from the library, set up your initial skyrim configs, enter the game to make sure it works and then exit. While there you can open the console and type GetSKSEVersion to confirm that SKSE64 is working.
Run ModOrganizer UPDATED
Install a mod or 2 to test the setup with — I suggest alternate start (always nice for testing) and SkyUI for starters. With MO2.1.3 and newer nexus logins can be set up. If you’d like the «Modmanager Download» links on Nexus to work you can follow the steps in the HOWTO/NOTES section here to set it up: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=32310 unfortunately that guide is hard to get to work. The XDG «standard» is one of the worst documented standards I’ve ever come across, it has all sorts of weird quirks that you may run into, a tendency towards silent failures (so no useful error messages) and a tendency to have completely different paths depending on your distribution. Basically — it’s a trial and error process using that baseline, if you’re lucky and it works first time — great, if not, I can’t help you sorry.
Our skyrim.sh script will automatically set up the link-based VFS once MO exits but this will use the Default profile. If you want to set up a different profile use:
./skyrim.sh ./movfs4l.py PROFILENAME
If you want to forceably undo the links in MO2 for some reason call
Run SkyrimSE
(In a new shell) ./skyrim.sh skse
If all went well, you will be able to start a new game with alternate start and SkyUI active.
Further steps and notes
At this stage your game is working and moddable. Unfortunately we are using work-arounds and some much wanted functionality (like direct modmanager downloads) are not available. One major caveat remains: at the time of writing I have no idea how to replicate ModOrganizer’s BSA handling abilities — mods with BSA’s are simply not working so I suggest loose-file versions where-ever available until such time as I can get this functionality working in movfs4l or it MO2 gets full wine support. The current version of movfs4l.py has fixed this and BSA based mods now seem to work — at the very least those that have an acompanying ESP to load the BSA.
This guide was based on my own trial and error process over many months to get a playable, moddable SSE on Linux. I am however a python coder, not a wine expert. So I would like to given an open invitation here to help improve this guide. If other people running SSE on Linux have suggestions for better ideas that worked for them, if you can improve on how I solved something, by all means please add a comment with your feedback. That way if somebody finds this guide via googling they’ll get your ideas on top.
Finally -this guide is good at the time of writing, but if you are reading this in future please do check the winehq apps database and other sources as some of the work-arounds and caveats listed here may no longer apply. For example if Vortex is working well under Linux you’ll probably want to swap that out for MO2. Vortex also uses symlinking so structurually the behaviour will be the same, but being Windows Native it doesn’t have python’s case sensitivity (inherited from Linux) and doesn’t need my script’s work-arounds to deal with different sources capitalizing a file differently, it also has a large and active development team — while my little work-around had me hacking something together in one day to solve a problem I had in front of me.
I hope this is useful, and I especially hope it inspires others to share their tips, tricks and improvements so that skyrim community on Linux can finally enjoy proper 64-bit gaming.