Popular Mod Site Admits Steam Deck Support Isn’t Good Enough, Fix is on the Way

Modding your favourite games for use on the go is about to become a lot easier, as the most popular modding website and platform just revealed that they’ll be adding extra support for the Steam Deck in the near future.

I don’t own a Steam Deck. I wish I did, and I’m extremely jealous of those who do own one, but I spent far too much money on my stupidly overpriced gaming PC to justify spending another 500-ish pounds on a portable Steam machine right now.

However, if I did own a Steam Deck, you better believe I’d be modding the hell out of the likes of Stardew Valley and Fallout: New Vegas.

Turns out, modding games on your Steam Deck isn’t quite as easy as I assumed. At least, that’s according to a recent article by Steam Deck HQ’s Noah Kupetsky.

Supposedly, it can be a little tricky due to the lack of a Steam Deck-specific mod manager. Thankfully, as Kupetsky notes in their article, that shouldn’t be the case for too much longer.

That’s because Nexus Mods, the number one video game modding website, just announced in their “Our Focus For 2026” blog post that they’re planning to update the Vortex mod manager to include Steam Deck support in the near future.

Official Steam Deck promo image, Valve

“We’re also committing to supporting Vortex on SteamOS. We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine,” states Nexus Mod’s blog post.

“We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.”

The blog post did also note that Steam Deck owners shouldn’t expect this support to roll out “within the next couple of weeks, or the next few months,” however, so there’s no exact timeframe for the incoming Vortex update.

Either way, it’s nice to know they’re working on it. There are some games I genuinely don’t think I could ever replay without certain mods installed, so the idea of buying a Steam Deck just so I can experience an inferior version of a game would, admittedly, put me off buying one.

I mean, would you replay Cyberpunk 2077 without installing “Weeee”, the best mod ever conceived? Every time I slide down that dumb little tube, I shed a tear for the poor console owners who don’t get to experience that same joy for themselves…