It used to, but all the popular replacements are now solder free.

As far as I know, I think all the designs have been updated to not need soldering.

The inspiration for this discussion is that the capacitive pad on my left thumbstick has started to peel upwards at the bottom, so I plan to replace it soon. Haven’t had any issues with drift or anything else.

A couple things to try:

1. A lot of thumbstick drift is caused from getting debris or sticky residue in around the thumbstick. This is especially common if you let your kids touch your Steam Deck/controllers. Taking some plastic-safe electronic cleaner spray (like CRC QD electric cleaner) and spraying it around the thumbstick while the deck is turned off can fix this pretty easily, and the same cleaner can be used to fix other controllers (especially nintendo switch joycons) as well as sticking controller buttons.

2. The steam deck has adjustable dead zones. If your drift is very minor, you can increase the size of the dead zones to compensate.

3. It’s possible to recalibrate the thumbsticks, see this guide

4. Replacement thumbsticks are available on Amazon, many people like to upgrade to hall effect sticks made by Gullikit or other companies. Ifixit has guides for both the right and left thumbsticks. Important to note with this, there are 2 models of LCD thumbsticks and 1 model of OLED joystick, you need to buy the same type of thumbstick as what your Deck already has (edit: looks like the gullikit LCD stick now works for both LCD types, it has a micro switch on the joysticks to select which type you have). The Ifixit guides explain how to check which LCD type you have. Actually replacing the thumbsticks involves popping the back off the deck (with the microsd removed), disconnecting the battery, unplugging a ribbon cable from the thumbsticks, and then removing a couple screws before pulling the whole thumbstick out. After the new thumbsticks are installed, you will have to follow the callibration guide listed above under #3.

For anyone looking for the details here, the live recording of the talk isn’t yet available. The presentation slides used during the talk can be viewed here, but they’re of limited use without the included talk that explains them.

You can supposedly fix this by setting environmental variables in Heroic. Go to the game in heroic>advanced>environmental variables (wiki page)

Then do the following variable:

Key: LANG, Value: en_US.UTF-8

Key: LC_ALL, Value: en_US.UTF-8

Key: LANGUAGE, Value: en_US:en

It’s a turn based RPG, but with a more mature focus. Kinda like the old Final Fantasy games (X, pre-remake 7, etc).

It also has a full Souls-like inspired dodge or parry mechanic, where a skilled player can avoid 100% of enemies attacks. Dodging is easier with a larger input window, parrying is harder but can trigger more skill effects and fully parrying an enemy’s combo lets you do a counter attack.

Finally the game has equitable items that give you passive skills, and using them enough lets the character learn the skill permanently. The end result is incredible build customization of the different characters. The builds get increasingly wild as things go on, with various end game builds that can 1 shot anything, become immortal, etc. Overall it’s a very fun and rewarding system to play with.

That review wouldn’t include the performance improvements from this brand new patch.

I played the game months ago, and found it very enjoyable. I did install an alternative ue-engine.ini file that reduced some of the particles and massively improved performance though. Without the engine tweaks it was perfectly playable but ugly.

Since that article was posted, the game got a major update with a bunch of steam deck improvements:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1903340/view/491585297311596633

There are tools like Answer Overflow that try to make information on discord more easily discoverable from web searches.

Looks pretty similar to this case, which was previously discussed in this community here.

Edit: here’s this case: https://github.com/unkyulee/steamdeck-enclosure

The source device (the steam machine in this case) will check with the display and see what the highest HDMI standard they both support is. It may also check if your splitter supports it, but I suspect the splitter is just a passthrough device.

While the steam machine might not be able to run super demanding titles at 4k 120hz+, there’s no reason it couldn’t do that for lower demand titles like indie games or older games. The physical hardware is HDMI 2.1 capable and can use those higher resolutions/fps if the device is running windows, so this is entirely the HDMI Forum limiting the capabilities of the device because it’s an open source device.

The HDMI version is what determines how much bandwidth you have available.

HDMI 2.0 has a max of 18GB/s bandwidth, which is why the Steam Machine has to do chroma subsampling to go above 4k@60Hz. HDMI 2.1 ups that bandwidth to 48GB/s, allowing higher resolution/refresh rate.

The physical hardware is HDMI 2.1 capable and can do that if the device is running windows, so this is entirely the HDMI Forum limiting the capabilities of the device because it’s an open source device.

An alternative some people do is to use a smart plug to turn power off/on to the deck’s dock (I’m assuming it’s docked if you’re using a controller).

There’s a bios setting to wake up the deck whenever it’s plugged in, so cycling power like that will wake up the deck.

Alright, so I probably can’t help you with this without having some personal hands on experience with it.

What’s probably happening is it’s trying to install a system level systemd service, but you can’t due to the steam deck being locked down. Your options would be to unlock the filesystem, find a way to install the Mullvad systemd service as a user instead, or figure out how to use systemd-sysext to install I as a system extension separate from the immutable filesystem.

Of those, I’m guessing the best solution would be the middle option, assuming you can get the right systemd mullvad-daemon.service file. Once you have it, it could be placed in ~/.config/systemd/user/ and enabled with systemctl --user enable mullvad-daemon.service. But as stated, the catch is you need the mullvad-daemon.service file, and I’m not sure the best way to do that. Maybe you could unlock the filesystem , let it install it as a system level service, and then convert it to a user level service? Either way it’s complicated and I’d have to mess around with it myself to figure out what would work.

If you didn’t see any major errors when running the previous command, then you maybe just need to restart your deck (or alternatively log out and log back in).

Especially when installing things through non-normal means, the path may not have updated for something newly installed.

Try to follow this guide to install nix: https://sadatdaniel.dev/2023/11/install-nix-package-manager-on-your-steam-deck/

A few options:

• Installing in SteamOS directly - this should work, but will have to be redone every time steamOS updates. Some things like rwfus are meant to let you install things without them getting wiped, but that may or may not work. You can also create an installation script so you would just need to run a single file after a SteamOS update to restore everything.

• Try installing through nix. The deck has nix support, and nix has both mullvad client and the mullvad cli client.

• Just use the mullvad provided wireguard/openvpn files. In desktop they should be usable through the network manager, in game mode there’s a Decky plugin called TunnelDeck.

Maybe it only worked when clicking the power button to sleep, not when holding the button and then selecting sleep.