It’s been well worth the three-month wait for today’s SteamTinkerLaunch update. We’ve got so many new features, improvements, and bug fixes with the “Still Alive” update that is v12.0. Those of you who use this Swiss army knife utility on Steam Deck, and those of you who use mods with Sonic Frontiers, should be particularly excited about this update, as there’s some goodies tossed in your way.

To start, frostworx, the original author of STL, has stepped down as maintainer. Fortunately, sonic2kk has picked up the torture stake and is continuing the work where frostworx left off. And boy, let me tell you, they’ve been busy. This is probably the largest changelog I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a few highlights from the many new features with this release:

Steam Deck

  • GameScope, GameMode, and MangoApp options have all been enabled in Desktop Mode
  • tray icon and notifier in Desktop Mode have also been enabled
  • SteamOS 3.4 support
  • better visual feedback while installing with notifiers, echo statements, and more logging
  • offline installation improvements, such as adding a warning before installing and overwriting older install files if the local files are newer
  • quality-of-life improvements; improved language file loading process, and a Quiet mode to disable notifications during install

STL tray icon

UI

  • “various user interface elements” have been added in bold
  • “prettier” game name in main menu, quotes removed from some text elements
  • last played time displayed in hours, minutes, and seconds; only show this if the game was played with STL before
  • scrollbar “slightly thinner” on Deck, Deck compatibility rating added to main menu and wait requester
  • program version added to wait requester
  • “Open Issue” option added to tray icon menu – this will open up the Issue tracker on the STL GitHub, where you can add a support ticket

CLI

  • steamtinkerlaunch steamdeckcompat <appid> gets a game’s Deck compatibility rating
  • openissue, -v (or --version), and -h functions added (-h shows help screen, -v shows STL version)
  • “prettier” output for various commands

STL various CLI commands

One-Time Run

  • buttons have been added for Winecfg and Winetricks for a one-time run
  • the custom executable directory can be set as the working directory; the custom working directory can also be used to run an executable

ReShade

  • per-game ReShade override versions, and the global version of ReShade can automatically be bumped

ModOrganizer2

  • “major overhaul” of MO2 implementation
  • Valheim added to games list
  • “prettier” output of mo2 list-installed and mo2 list-supported

Vortex Mod Manager

  • quite a number of titles – from Dragon Quest XI S, to Horizon Zero Dawn, to Elden Ring, among many others – have been added “in an attempt to improve autodetection when selecting these games for managing”
  • “prettier” (yes, I know I’m using that word a lot) output for various commands

Hedge Mod Manager

  • initial support – HMM is an open-source mod manager for games that use the Hedgehog Engine, such as Sonic Generations and Sonic Frontiers
  • automatically installs all the Winetricks tools needed for HMM to run – this would include dotnet48, d3dx9, vcrun2019, and d3dcompiler_47
  • both the latest stable and nightly releases are supported
  • automatic link handling for GameBanana’s 1-Click mod install button should work, but that may not be the case if you’re on Deck – instructions are provided in the patch notes
  • .desktop file is created so you can quickly launch HMM on desktop
  • “various command-line options” have been added

HMM on Deck

Fixes

  • “various Steam Deck fixes”; don’t update STL on Steam run, less notifier spam, some UI elements should no longer be hidden by the scrollbar, Yad path fixed
  • fix missing headers when a game is run offline
  • better Proton Experimental mismatch handling
  • path fixes for local installs on Linux desktop
  • half-a-dozen fixes for Vortex Mod Manager
  • and plenty of other fixes

Other

  • STL can be kept open once a game is closed
  • general Wiki improvements
  • updated translations
  • CheatEngine and GameConquerer support have been removed, since apparently the use of these can result in player bans
  • better installation of STL via ProtonUp-Qt – Flatpak installation bugs fixed, fix incorrect game count in STL remove dialog, and some other features

Man, quite a list huh? And those are only the highlights…

Note that if you’re on Deck, make sure you’re using SteamOS 3.4 or later in order to use ModOrganizer2. This update has shipped to the stable branch a few days ago, so everyone should have it by now.

See the full patch notes on GitHub. I will likely have an updated video guide on how to get mods to work with Sonic Frontiers on Deck sometime next week with this new release, so stay tuned for that!