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Troubleshooting
This section is intended to document some common problems that users face when using TinkerGame and shed some light on their cause, and any potential solutions.
When troubleshooting, it is usually also a good idea to inspect the TinkerGame logs. In particular, /dev/shm/tinkergame/tinkergame.log may contain useful information for troubleshooting.
Ensure that you have met all of TinkerGame's hard dependencies before installing. If you installed with a package manager, the packager should have taken care of installing all the relevant hard dependencies for you.
The most common missing or outdated dependency is Yad, particularly on Ubuntu-based distributions. Take care to ensure you have met all of TinkerGame's relevant hard dependencies. If issues still persist, please open an issue.
The primary cause of this is a misconfigured locale. When TinkerGame tries to show a game's name, if it has unicode characters in its name (such as "NieR:Automata™") it may be unable to on systems with a misconfigured locale. One of the most common instances of this locale issue is on Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. You can see if this is your problem by running tinkergame from the command line and seeing if it gives you any warnings about your "locale being unsupported by the C library".
To fix your locale, run env | grep LC_ and examine the output. If any of these come back with an unusual or unfamiliar locale such as en_150 in their name, you'll want to overwrite this. If this does not return anything, you can run locale and take note of any locales that do not look set correctly. Commonly, this is LC_MEASUREMENT, but it may be different on your system and even LC_ALL may not be correctly configured.
You can follow the steps to configure your locale on your distribution, but you may still want/need to overwrite your locales. You can overwrite your misconfigured locale variables by taking note of the offending variable name(s), opening your shell profile and exporting them to your $LANG variable. For example, if your LC_MEASUREMENT variable is not set correctly, you can set it in your shell profile with export LC_MEASUREMENT="$LANG". You could also set this to a specific locale, with export LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8", assuming you have this locale set up on your system!
This issue could also be caused because you've pressed the "Cancel" button several times to skip the wait requester. From the command line and with your game open, you can run tinkergame wr e to re-enable the Wait Requester for your game.
Same issue as above.
When the Steam configuration changes, such as when new Proton versions are added, the cached TinkerGame information at /dev/shm/tinkergame needs to be cleared. Deleting this folder and re-running TinkerGame will get it to fetch all this information again.
Fetching this can take a long time, which is why TinkerGame caches it.
Steam Shortcut information and Game Grids are stored per-user in a Steam userdata folder, using the user's Short UserID (i.e. 123456). TinkerGame will first try to determine this path using the last logged in user. This is the user marked MostRecent in Steam's internal loginusers.vdf file. It then stores a cached list of users in /dev/shm/tinkergame/LoginUsersCSV.txt.
When TinkerGame cannot find this user, either because this file for some reason does not exist, or because TinkerGame otherwise cannot parse it, the fallback is to pick the first folder with only a numeric name and only numbers 1-9 in its name.
If you have changed users recently and TinkerGame is still using the old user, you can try removing /dev/shm/tinkergame to remove all of TinkerGame's cached information and force an update of the cached list of users, so TinkerGame will re-fetch which user is the Most Recent.
If you have multiple Steam accounts and TinkerGame cannot parse the loginusers.vdf file, it is unable to determine the MostRecent user and will fall back to picking the first Userdata directory which may be incorrect.
Failing everything else, you can force a Steam UserID in the global.conf file by specifying STEAMUSERID="your_steam_user_id". For example if your Steam UserID is 12345, you would set STEAMUSERID="12345" in the global.conf file. This option will take priority over all other methods of determining the UserID, so make sure it is correct, and remove it if you want TinkerGame to prefer the auto-detection.
Many distributions either do not have Yad installed or have a very outdated version. It is available via package manager for several distributions, but if you are still having difficulties it is possible to install Yad via an AppImage with tinkergame yad ai. You can either provide the path to your own AppImage for Yad, or by default TinkerGame will fetch one.
For more information, see the TinkerGame Yad wiki page as well as the TinkerGame FAQ section on Yad.
This is commonly caused by an unresolved Proton version mismatch. Go to the Main Menu and re-select your Proton version. For example, there may be an unresolved GE-Proton or Proton Experimental version mismatch.
This can also be caused by trying to run Proton games using TinkerGame as a Launch Option, which is incorrect. To resolve this, you should use TinkerGame as a Compatibility Tool for Proton games.
Many users, particularly those on Steam Deck, will incorrectly attempt to install the SteamTinkerLaunch Flatpak (i.e. installing through Discover). That Flatpak installs upstream SteamTinkerLaunch and, as noted on the Steam Deck wiki page, is only for use with Flatpak Steam. There is currently no TinkerGame Flatpak. If you want TinkerGame, install it following one of the steps on the Installation wiki page.
If you are using Flatpak Steam, and Flatpak TinkerGame is still not working for you, please open an issue.
Make sure you have the program installed and that it is available on your PATH. You can check if a tool is on your path from terminal by running which <progam_name>. If you installed a tool as an AppImage or Flatpak, TinkerGame may be unable to find it. TinkerGame does not download tools for you, it only integrates with existing tools on your system.
If issues still persist, please open an issue.
There is a chance that the modding issues you're facing have already been documented on the Modding wiki page. Take a look at that page and see if you can resolve the issue.
TinkerGame offers the ability to install and use ModOrganizer 2 and Vortex Mod Manager. However, it does not guarantee mod compatibility on Linux. It doesn't do any extra magic to get mods working, so if they don't work on Linux normally without TinkerGame, it is very unlikely that they will work with TinkerGame.
If you have a mod that does work on Linux with your mod tool and only does not work when you use TinkerGame, feel free to open an issue. If you have resolved it, please document how and we can add it to the Modding wiki page.
The SteamOS Game Mode runs inside of the GameScope compositor. This does not have very good support for multiple windows at the same time. Issues related to windowing inside of GameScope are not TinkerGame bugs. TinkerGame is only responsible for launching the applications; if they look bad on a compositor, that isn't something TinkerGame can do anything about.
When an update for a Valve Proton version comes through on Steam, or when you remove/update a Proton version (including downloading a GE-Proton variation), TinkerGame will only update its Proton list to reflect this when /dev/shm/tinkergame is cleared. You can do this yourself from your file manager or commandline, or restart your PC. On Steam Deck, you can do a reboot to accomplish this.
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