Frost and Fire
Published
Assigned buttons:
- A: Sense
- B: Escape/Immunity
- X: Backpack
- Y: Tool belt
- Left analogue stick: Move camera up/down/left/right
- Right analogue stick: Move camera left/right; zoom in/out
- Left bumper: Quests
- Right bumper: Professions
- Left bumper + right bumper: Bounties
- D-pad up: Map
- D-pad down: Spells
- D-pad left: Weapons
- D-pad right: Armour
In Steam Deck settings:
- Set frame rate to 45 FPS
- Set TDP to 8 W
This yields around 6 hours of gameplay with maximum graphic settings.
The text in in-game windows scales with the window size. If you set the window sizes too small, the text will be difficult of read.
Once, the game crashed the whole Steam Deck and caused it to reboot.
If you launch the game and it detects an available update, most of the Steam Deck buttons completely stop working. This makes it impossible to quit Brighter Shores. When this happens, hard-shutdowm the Steam Deck by holding the Power button. Once it restarts, wait for your Steam Deck to detect, download, and install the latest Brighter Shores update before running it again.
Brighter Shores is great fun on the Steam Deck. The game has just entered Early Access, so while there are some stability issues, they'll probably be patched before long.
This game has a lot of hotkeys, so I manually bound the ones I want to use.
- D-pad: F1, F2, F3, F4 (switch between the build menus).
- B: escape (cancel current selection)
- X+left joystick: middle mouse button down+ mouse input (rotate the screen).
- Left trackpad: rotate building
- Options: Pause
- L4: Toggle tower lines
- L5: Toggle top-down view
This game seems pretty battery-intensive. I made these changes:
- Set refresh rate to 60 Hz.
- Set TDP to 11.
But I'm also playing with maximum anti-aliasing turned on, so your mileage may vary.
With this configuration, the frame rate drops when there are a lot of units and projectiles on-screen, but I don't find it very noticeable.
The UI scaling can be changed in the settings, which helps a lot. However, if you set it too high, you won't be able to see the full menu screen when viewing community-created maps.
The game crashes when attempting to open the wiki.
The game also crashed once when attempting to load a saved game. However, that same saved game loaded successfully when I tried again.
Creeper World 4 is an amazing game, and it plays really well on the Steam Deck.
However, be sure to save your progress regularly, just in case you encounter a crash. Creeper World games can easily last 45+60+ minutes, so losing that progress sucks.
- Set refresh rate to 45 Hz
- Set TDP to 11
Your turning speed seems to be tied to the frame rate. See my notes on performance problems for an explanation and solution.
The performance on Steam Deck is pretty bad, and the frame rate is really unstable. This makes for an awful user experience when you first start the game, before making any performance tweaks.
Worst of all, your turning speed (right stick) seems to be tied to the frame rate in a way I've never experienced before (I'm not sure if this is standard or not). The higher the frame rate, the faster your turning speed, and vice-versa. This means if you set your turning speed for your maximum frame rate, it will slow to a crawl when the frame rate drops, and make the performance feel even worse than it already is.
To avoid this, set a low refresh rate like 45 Hz, and then set your turning speed accordingly. This helps stabilise the frame rate and avoids it swinging between extremes. It also makes the game feel much smoother.
I don't think this issue is specific to Steam Deck or Linux, but some UI elements are difficult or impossible to access with a gamepad.
For example:
- When sleeping and selecting the time of day to wake, the left and right buttons don't skip over the current time of day.
- On the world map screen, location names can only be viewed by hovering the mouse cursor over them.
To work around this, consider binding the right trackpad to mouse input, or use the Steam button shortcut.
I thoroughly enjoyed this game, despite significant performance problems. Luckily, they're easy to work around. The developer has stated they're working on performance improvements for Steam Deck, so hopefully this will get better with time.
In Performance Settings:
- Set Frame Limit to 30 FPS
- Set TDP Limit to 5 Watts
This seems to yield about 5-6 hours of gameplay.
A lot of the game text is very small, and there's no option to resize it in the game settings.
Webfishing's controls are janky. It's very much a keyboard-and-mouse game, with no official gamepad support whatsoever.
I tried some community gamepad layouts, but didn't like them - they seemed overly complicated and janky.
I ultimate my created my own layout, which I've shared as "Friendly Steam Deck". Its benefits are:
- Easy mouse look with the right joystick. Instead of having to click and drag, you can simply move the joystick as if playing an FPS. It's not perfect due to the game's lack of gamepad support, but works very well.
- Alternative bindings for reeling and mashing, to avoid finger pain.
- Reel using either R2 or Y.
- Mash by repeatedly pressing R2 or Y, or by holding B.
- Toggle sprinting with L3.
- Doesn't use layers or mode shifting, which I think makes it a lot simpler.
Cloud Saves aren't supported. Be sure to keep your saved games backed up!
The frame rate is highly variable, often swinging from 90 FPS down to about 45 FPS. When playing on servers with a lot of other players, it can dip down to around 30 FPS.
Changing the graphical settings doesn't seem to make any difference for performance. Maybe it's a bug - and if so, hopefully it will be fixed soon.
In any case, I don't think the performance problems are a big deal. This is a very laid back game, and enjoyable at any frame rate.
Webfishing plays very well on the Steam Deck despite the lack of official gamepad support and performance problems. Highly recommended.
Do note Webfishing is intended as a multiplayer experience, with text chat. If you don't like the Steam Deck keyboard, you might find multiplayer inconvenient. However, it's still perfectly enjoyable as a solo game.
