Fallout 4 - Mods, Steam, steamtinkerlaunch and Mod Manager

Recently I started playing Fallout 4 by Bethesda via Steam on my Ubuntu desktop with Awesome WM.

Quite quickly in the game (once you gather different bits of ‘junk’ and other pieces), you will get annoyed by the fact you can not do a simple search in a cabinet/container for an item. You have you manually scroll through the entire list and I was fed up with that. Luckily there appears to be a perfect mod to fix this issue: Fall UI - Inventory. And yes, ’losing’ achievements in Steam (because mods are being used), does not bother me at all.

To install this mod, it is recommended to use a mod manager. And of course, these pieces of software are targeted for Windows. So I was looking online on how to solve this issue and I have and want to share the solution. I’ve purposefully included more commands, so that newbies might also find this post useful. And yes, I have a personal preference for flatpak

install flatpak

Install flatpak and enable flathub:

sudo apt install flatpak
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

If you use GNOME, you probably also want to install the software plugin:

sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

update and install flatpaks

So first install steam and steam tinker launch:

sudo flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam
sudo flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.steamtinkerlaunch

Then link the flatpak installs (which is not done automatically), otherwise steam will not be able to see/use steamtinkerlaunch (found this solution here):

sudo flatpak run --command="/app/utils/steamtinkerlaunch/bin/steamtinkerlaunch" --file-forwarding com.valvesoftware.Steam compat add

create a short starter

Optionally create a short starter, so you don’t have to use the ’long’ version:

mkdir ~/bin/
cat >~/bin/steam <<EOF
#!/bin/bash

flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam
EOF
chmod +x ~/bin/steam

fallout 4 bits

To install mods, I went for the Vortex mod manager, by Nexus Mods.

But to start, I selected steamtinkerlaunch from the compatability list and was greeted by this error:

f4seloader.exe couldn't load arguments

After checking the log file ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/377160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Fallout4/F4SE/f4se_loader.log it was easy to fix. I had previously used steam commandline flags to run the game windowed. Those flags are unsupported with steamtinkelaunch, so I removed them.

Then I installed vortex via the GUI. Had to modify an .ini file, which I was able to find here: ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/377160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Fallout4/Fallout4Prefs.ini

And once I had Vortex up and running, I could get the mods available to install (present in the “Download” directory within Vortex), by moving the downloaded mod files to the correct directory:

user@host:~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.config/steamtinkerlaunch/vortex/downloads/fallout4$ mv -i ~/Downloads/FallUI\ -\ Inventory-48758-2-2-1-1666954336.rar .

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