Spyke

Setting up Promods on the Steam Deck

Just went through this process last night and thought it'd be helpful to upload my guide for anyone else trying to get Promods running on their Steam Deck. I've done this with ETS2, and it very likely works with ATS, but I haven't personally done that yet.

OPTIONAL STEP - CONTROLLING STEAM DECK FROM YOUR PC

This step isn't necessary, I just personally find it a lot easier to fiddle around in desktop mode when I can use a mouse and keyboard. Especially later in this guide where you’ll need to type in a long file path.
Press the Steam Deck's Steam button, scroll to Power, and select Switch to Desktop
Choose an app that is pretty innocuous and low resource, such as System Settings, or Console. Right click the app (clicking the left trackpad) and select Add to Steam.
On your PC, refresh your Steam Library and search for the app you added in the last step.
You should now have the option to Stream it instead of Play it.
Do that and steam will launch the stream to your Deck. Pressing alt+enter will take it from fullscreen to windowed (so you can keep reading this guide). And then you can just minimize that window. If you close it, it will end the stream.

INSTALL ETS2

On your Deck, Return to Steam and install ETS2 as normal.
Triple check you have all the required DLCs installed. The amount of threads I read where someone finally realized this was their problem was astounding. Generally, you need ALL mainline DLCs.
On the Library launch screen, click the cog icon, go to Properties, and find the compatibility settings. Check "force the use of a specific..." Set it to launch with Proton 7.0-4. I haven't actually tried it another way, but I was told this was a more stable version and it so far has run really well on the Deck. No issues and impressive battery life.
Launch the game at least once, so Steam creates the folders we're going to find in the next steps.
Shut down ETS2 and return to the Deck's desktop.

DOWNLOAD PROMODS

You can probably do this on the Deck itself, but I did it on my PC because I also needed the latest Promods for my PC install anyway.
This works just like normal. Head to promods.net and follow all the relevant instructions. If you’re doing this on the Deck, just open a browser and continue on.
I strongly encourage you to choose the paid option because the download is a single, faster file and it also supports the Promods team.
If you have a rar library from Promods, unpack it. By the end of the process, you should have 7 Promods files in total (if you only have 6, you probably forgot to generate the def file at the beginning of the process).

GETTING THE FILES ONTO YOUR DECK

If you already did the last section on your Deck, you can skip to the end of this where I tell you where to put the files.
If the files are on your PC, you can transfer them to your SD card and pop it back into your Deck. That’s probably the simplest way.
Optionally, you can install “Warpinator” from the Discovery store on your Deck, and Winpinator on your PC and then use that to remotely transfer files across your network. This can be fairly slow. I think transferring all 7 files took me about 30-40 mins this way (depends on your network, obvs). I won’t go into details on this here, because this is probably the more complicated way to do this.

WHERE TO PUT THE FILES ONCE THEY’RE ON YOUR DECK

I’ve seen conflicting reports on where to put this, but this is what worked for me.
Open the file browser on your Deck (from desktop mode) and navigate to the following path. I find it easier to just type this in, because in Linux a . before a folder means it’s hidden.
/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/227300/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/Euro Truck Simulator 2/mod
You’ll probably notice that there may not be a “mod” folder here - if not, you need to create it.
Put all 7 Promods files in that “mod” folder

FINAL LAUNCH

Relaunch the Steam Launcher, relaunch ETS2, go to the in-game Mod Manager (from the main screen) and make sure all old versions of Promods (which may be cloud synced) are removed, and the new ones are added as top load priority.
Close out of the mod manager and you should be good to go!

Original post by u/DraperyFalls