PlayableShow Details
Unknown
Works out of the box, and it's one of my fav games to date!
Fully playable single- and multiplayer. VR works fine. HOTAS works great.
If you don't have friends but want a multiplayer adventure, search for Pulsar server on Discord and post in #looking-for-game or #schedule-play in advance. You'll have someone to play with in 10–20 minutes.
Native version is a 1-click plug-and-play experience. I pulled in at least 8 other Linux users, and the only issue we found was a minor weirdness with mouse scrolling speed on 1 machine. We fixed it by editing settings.xml in the game's directory and bumping the <ScrollwheelSensitivity/> value to 10 (the in-game GUI lets you go up to 5).
We even got mods working. It's as simple as switching to Mono branch (right click on game in Steam > Properties… > Betas > Mono branch) and running the Pulsar Mod Loader downloaded off Discord (it supports Linux, it's open source, what's not to love).
Not a Linux thing (happens on Windows as well), but the in-game voice comm servers are finicky. On a bad day, your game just won't connect no matter what, even when other players hear each other. Discord is a fine alternative. If you really want to use the in-game VC, there's a mod called “Advanced VC settings” that usually mends the issue.
In Proton, it works as well as native, but beware switching from native to Proton (or vice versa) will remove your local saves.
The native version of the game had some random issues starting and would just show a black screen and eventually crash. After switching to using Proton it just worked and I was able to enjoy the game.
Works almost perfectly out of the box
Scrolling on the map is very slow.
Native works near perfectly OOTB
Minor hitching
Long range comms tutorial did not start
~4 hour session with a full crew at points. No issues.
Minor issues did not affect gameplay. Bug reporting also appeared to be broken. Did not verify these issues are Linux-specific, nor did I test if they were in the Proton version.
The game overall is enjoyable. It is geared more towards technical people. The game works running X11 and Wayland desktop environments.
The game wouldn't even start on hyprland, but worked no problem on awesomewm.
Because I couldn't run this on Hyprland (Wayland), I had screen tearing on X11. Vsync didn't help much.
Scrolling on the map works but barely responds.
I get more FPS running on windows. The performance drop is minor.
I had to run on X11-wm for the game to work. I tested the game running a DE on Wayland and X11 and it worked. There seems to be a problem with the current Nvidia driver and Wayland that prevents certain games from behaving properly on window managers. Other than that, no major problems. I did not check with other window managers.
works better on proton
Game crashes on native port when warping and randomly. Voice chat is not working on my end. But switching to proton fixes all issues and runs with better performance.
Works perfectly, apart from the scroll wheel acting extremely slow/unresponsive in the map view.
Using the scroll wheel (e.g. for map zooming) is extremely slow.
Runs well with very minor issues
When playing scientist the minimap on the top left is completely white, the scanner item (which displays the same as the minimap) works correctly
