Installing the game on Linux

If you do not wish to perform a manual install, there is an AUR package and a Flatpak package available for convenience.

Vintage Story uses the .NET Framework. On a Windows machine, .NET is integrated with the OS or at least easily installed. Although the .NET Framework was originally designed to target Windows platforms, it can also be run on other Operating Systems, specifically Linux, with some additional steps.

Installing mono

In order to play Vintage Story on Linux, you will need to use a utility called mono. This will allow you to run other .NET Framework applications too, and also create your own mods. Mono version 5 or later is needed.

• When installing mono on Ubuntu/Debian/Raspbian/CentOS/Fedora, please refer to the instructions here.
• When installing mono on Arch Linux or any Arch-based distro (Manjaro, Antergos, etc), refer to the instructions here.

Installing openal

OpenAL is a cross-platform audio library, needed for the game sounds in Vintage Story. You may have it installed already, as standard or for another game or application. If you don't have it already, install it using this command: apt-get install libopenal-dev Any issues with this, search up how to install OpenAL.

Launching the game

After installing mono (and perhaps also openal), you're ready to start the game.

• Open a new terminal.
• Navigate to the game folder.
• Type mono Vintagestory.exe and hit enter.

The game files also contain a script, install.sh that is intended to install the game in ~/ApplicationData/vintagestory/ and create a shortcut on your desktop. Apparently this install script doesn't work for everyone, so you may need to take these steps manually, or create the target install folder before running the script (may be a permissions issue?) For more details please refer to the Forum thread linked below.

Game updates

Linux users normally update the game by extracting game binary files from the tar.gz downloaded from vintagestory.at. That should work fine, except that it is a good idea to extract those files into an empty folder where possible. If that is not possible for some reason, then we strongly recommend that you at least delete the /assets/ folder from your previous Vintage Story installation. If you simply extract the archive into an existing game installation folder without deleting /assets/, some previous asset files will remain, leading to minor issues - e.g. unintended blocks or items in the game, duplicated guides in the Handbook Guides tab.

(To make things more complicated, some of the downloads with sizes around 50MB contain all the game files except for music. In that case, you shouldn't delete the whole of the /assets/ folder because you would lose the music you already have: instead delete everything in /assets/ except for the subfolders /assets/game/music and /assets/survival/music - keep those subfolders.)

If you use a package manager, that may take care of some of this for you.

Troubleshooting

If you have any issues, the Forum thread on working linux setups might help you considerably. Please do share your own experiences there. You might also want to use the mesa_glthread optimization, which works well for some players.

Some players have reported needing to run sudo mono Vintagestory.exe to launch the game the first time: this may depend on how it was installed.

If you cannot log in, try running sudo cert-sync /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt or sudo cert-sync /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt.

Some people report minor graphical issues which are platform and driver dependent. Vintage Story makes use of a large variety of GLSL shaders for its rendering effects including commonplace elements such as grass and leaf colors in different climates. Bugs in the GPU driver's implementation of GLSL may cause artifacts with some of these. There's a chance a driver update might improve the situation. The in-game Graphics settings give high level control over many of the effects, you can try different settings.

A known issue is that screenshots saved using the in-game command (F12) are upside-down, on Linux. The VS dev team have tried multiple times to fix this... possibly it is finally fixed in 1.15.