Steam/Games troubleshooting

This article Article description::provides troubleshooting details for specific games running via Steam.

Steam runtime
If the Steam runtime is enabled and some games are not starting (for example Dying Light or Life Is Strange), setting  may fix the issue.

Texture compression
Many games, especially those that use the Source engine, require S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) support. Without S3TC support, these games will usually have black or missing textures, or fail to start.

Confirm if S3TC support is enabled with, which is provided by the package:

If S3TC support is not enabled, ensure that the VIDEO_CARDS variable in is set to the correct value, and update the video driver to most recent version.

If S3TC support is enabled, but games fail to start with the following error:

This system does not support the OpenGL extension GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc

Force enable S3TC support with:

If nouveau drivers are being used, installing may be required to fix the above error.

Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

 * Gearbox's SHiFT service assumes the underlying distribution is Ubuntu, which stores its SSL certificates in, whereas Gentoo (by default) stores them in . This difference prevents the redemption of SHiFT codes on Gentoo. To workaround this issue, add  to the launch options in.


 * If the game is launched but closes almost immediately try adding  to the launch options in  . This fixes the  . Another solution is to recompile   with ,  with   and without   and  without.


 * Additionally the game may still crash at points during game play, when creating a new character or when traveling to one of the DLC's. To workaround this issue edit the file. Find the section   and change the value of bForceNoMovies from   to  . The files can be found at  and.

Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 and other Source-engine 1 based games (e.g. Portal) may segfault because the stack is no longer 16-byte aligned when the process does calls to glibc. A symptom that may be exhibited is a segfaulting SIMD instruction (or rather it raises a general protection error), for example  in  / /.

To fix this, build with   added to. See package.env for information about setting per-package build options. Functions then have an automatic-alignment-fixing entry which restores the 16-byte-alignment-assumption often used for SSE2/AVX.

Black Mesa

 * If the game is launched but shows nothing, add  to the launch options in.

Cities: Skylines

 * In case you have set some libraries in the environmental variable  of your linux session, make sure you run the game with this variable emptied or filled only with libraries directly related to the game. Empting can be done by setting   in the launch options in  . Unrelated libraries in this variable can cause the game will not start or become unstable.

Dead Cells
Dead cells requires the Wayland libraries to function correctly, and will complain if the libraries are missing when starting.

Death Road to Canada

 * Death Road to Canada requires the following USE flags to function correctly and for in-game music:

Rebuild the and  packages:

Add  to the launch options in.

DiRT Showdown

 * If the launcher fails to start, enable texture compression support.


 * If an Intel GPU is being used and the launcher fails to start with the following error:

Unfortunately your machine doesn't meet the full OpenGL 4.1 requirements so the game may not perform correctly

Add  to the launch options in. Intel Broadwell and Skylake based GPUs also require  to be added to the launch options.


 * If an Intel GPU is being used, the launch options can be removed after upgrading to Mesa 12.0.1.

Dota 2

 * If black textures are visible and an older (<9.1.6) is installed, update  to a recent version.


 * If black textures are visible and a recent is installed, build  with the   USE flag.


 * If a red screen is visible during startup and textures are missing in-game, enable texture compression support.


 * If some textures are not clickable (e.g. the character can not move at the fountain when the right mouse button is clicked), verify the integrity of the game cache.

Firewatch

 * If the game fails to start with the following terminal error:

Unable to preload the following plugins: libCSteamworks.so

Try to add  to the launch options in.

Left 4 Dead 2

 * If black textures are visible, enable texture compression support.

Life Is Strange

 * If the launcher fails to start, add  to the launch options in.

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS
Planetary Annihilation: TITANS is expecting to find. Within the Planetary Annihilation: TITANS runtime directory create a symbolic link to :

Rust (legacy)

 * If the launcher fails to start, add  to the launch options in.

Sid Meier's Civilization V

 * If a black screen is visible and the introduction music is audible during startup, change the value of FSResID :

The correct value for FSResID appears to be system dependent, and may require setting different values before working.


 * If the game is launched but closes almost immediately and the syslog shows, try recompiling ,  and  with.


 * If the game crashes during game play on system that has 8 or more logical cores and shows following segfault:

Try adding  to the launch options in   so that the game only uses 4 physical CPU cores (and 8 threads, with hyper-threading). Note that the number of cores given as an argument to depends on the system CPU, and it should be set so that the number of threads available isn't above 8.

Starbound

 * If the launcher fails to start with the following error:

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb".

Available platform plugins are: xcb.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Add  to the launch options in.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe

 * If the package is not installed, Stealth Bastard Deluxe will segfault.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe specifically requests the fonts /, which can be checked for availability with. Otherwise, add the fonts to the font path, or create a font alias:

Stellaris
Stellaris requires texture compression support.

Team Fortress 2

 * If a black screen is visible for 1-2 seconds, add  to the launch options in.
 * If is built with 32-bit support, Team Fortress 2 will segfault on start. The current workaround is to disable 32-bit ABI for this library :

Incorrect sound card selected
Transistor uses the FMOD engine, which can sometimes detect the wrong default device. Determine the index of the card to be used with 's output, then put that index into. For example, to use the first card detected by ALSA (index 0):

Relaunch Transistor and the chosen card should be outputting its sound.

Unity-based games

 * Many games that utilize the Unity3D engine released in late 2015 or later either display a black screen for a few seconds and segfault, or run but without sound . To workaround this issue, disable the Steam runtime for the game by adding  to the game's launch options. It may also be possible to run the game without Steam, but some games will force the use of Steam and keep failing.


 * Other Unity-based games such as Hollow Knight or Mother Russia Bleeds will show the screen for two seconds, terminate, and then write to a log file located in . This error is caused by the OpenGL version not matching up to what the game is requesting. To work around this, add  to the game's launch options. This will override the OpenGL version for that particular game, allowing it to run.


 * Some games, notably Wasteland 2 Director's Cut, might require PulseAudio to be started manually prior to launching the game, especially on desktop environments which do not have PulseAudio integrated. Torment: Tides of Numenera did not require PulseAudio to be started manually when the  method above was used.

X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude

 * If red, green and blue stripes are visible, or the launcher fails to start, enable texture compression support.

Yooka-Laylee
Yooka-Laylee will fail to start if a controller is connected (the game is only really playable with a controller).

War Thunder
If the game fails to start with the crash report dialog saying:

We are sorry, but something went wrong.

And terminal error: double free or corruption (out)

Try to add  to the launch options in.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

 * If the game fails to start with the following terminal error after pressing "Launch game" in the launcher:

eON_Core::init - failed to initialise SDL2: SDL not built with haptic (force feedback) support ERROR - eON failed to initialise!

Try to add  to the launch options in.

Terraforming Mars (or Windows-only games in general)
If Windows-only games crash without even displaying a window, and the Steam log include a line that begins: wine: Unhandled exception 0x20474343 in thread.. the cause might be that the system Mesa library (on which Steam depends) is not compiled with Vulkan support. Follow the instructions on the Vulkan page to rectify this.