TheSteam Deckhas a bunch of great features, but there are quite a few things that feel lacking, namely things like custom themes, storage bloat, or more control over your system’s performance. This is where a modification called Decky comes in, which allows plugins.
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It’s really easy to downloadDecky, since all you need to do is download the installeron your Steam Deck and run it. Now, once you go into gaming mode, you can find it on your quick bar and download as many plugins as you want, but this list saves that work for you and shows the best of the best.
Choices have been made based on personal experience with each plugin!
10DeckRoulette
Spin The Wheel Of Fate
If you’ve ever found yourself staring at your library of games, wishing you had someone to decide what to play for you, DeckRoulette comes in handy. Whenever you use it,it’ll take you to a random game that you own, deciding what you’re gonna play that night.
It can occasionally give you some weird picks (like no, I do not feel like playing Spore: Galactic Adventures), but it’ll usually pick from games you already have downloaded and were thinking about playing anyway. It’s great if you’re very indecisive and pretty fun.
9Pause Games
Great If You Need A Break
While you might not think it’s very useful, the Pause Games plugincan freeze your game in its current state, with everything stopping right where you left it. This is great for games like CrossCode that leave the music going on the pause screen, or games that you can’t pause in at all.
Namely,if you’re an Elden Ring player with a lifeoutside of playing video games, you can actually pause the game now. This is only useful if you play games where you’re unsatisfied with the pause functionality, but if you do, you should absolutely get this one.
8VibrantDeck
More Colorful, More Cool
If you’re playing a game that you’ve played on different screens or consoles before, then you might feel a bit dissatisfied with the colors, feeling they’re either way too bright, or a bit too washed out. This is where VibrantDeck comes in,letting you adjust the saturation however you want.
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This also works if you just wish a game was slightly more colorful. For example,I think Sonic Mania shifts towardslighter colors a bit too much, and the increased saturation brings home that Sega Saturn aesthetic and makes the game look incredibly good. Give this one a try.
7AutoFlatpaks
Getting The Annoyances Out Of The Way
One of the more annoying processes on the Steam Deck is keeping up on your updates for applications. You usually have to go into desktop mode, open discover, click update all, hope it actually works first try, then after several minutes you go back to gaming mode.
AutoFlatpaks is a plugin that makes this much simpler, just beinga tab you can go to in gaming mode, press download all updates, then continue gamingwhile they download. It’s much easier than the often annoying process of updating normally, and great if you use a lot of non-Steam applications.
6CSS Loader
Stylish UI
If you’re bored by your Steam Deck’s default dark blue and gray theming, you can quite easily change it up by downloading CSS Loader, a plugin thatlets you download themes off of its theme browser or create your own. These can be as simple as small color changes, or as complex as completely changing the UI.
I’m personally partial to the Outrun theme for my daily usage, as I’m a big fan of bright pink and blue. There are also great small tweaks, like clean gameview, no dark gradients, and complete overhauls that are fun to try once in a while, like the themes that make everything look like the Wii or Persona 5.
5Audio Loader
A Custom Soundscape
To go along with visual theming, you can also overhaul the sounds your Deck makes in gaming mode. Audio Loaderlets you set custom sounds for each interaction you can do in the Deck UI, as well as custom menu music if you don’t like the deafening silence.
While I usually don’t add music, since I prefer my handheld home menus on the quiet side, I can’t deny the appeal of having 3DS Internet Settings as the song that greets me whenever I turn on my Deck. It’s also just funny to change all the sounds to Switch SFX to confuse people.
4Decky Recorder
One big thing the Steam Deck is currently lacking over every other modern console is an easy way to clip and share videos of your game with other people. While Steam iscurrently working on a solution to this, it’s currently in beta, and isn’t fully polished yet, so Decky Recorder comes in handy.
This handy little plugincan be set to make a clip of your desired length when you press a button combo. This is especially nice for more intense, competitive titles ormultiplayer games, where you might want to clip things, but don’t want to waste performance on having OBS open the whole time.
3PowerTools
Fully Adjustable Performance
If you’re finding some games aren’t running as well as you wish, or you simply wish to mess with your Steam Deck’s performance on a deeper level than the power settings menu allows for, PowerTools is right up your alley. It provides some incredibly useful tools, if you know how to use them.
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You can change your CPU thread count, whether SMT is enabled, and a multitude of other options and sliders to adjust on a per-game profile to make sure each game runs as best as it possibly can. If you find your Deck struggles to run some game, give this one a shot.
2SteamGridDB
No More Ugly Art
If you’ve got a bunch of games on Steam and looked through the library in gaming mode, you’ve probably noticed a few of the games have pretty bad or bland art attached to their capsule that you wish you could change. Luckily, the plugin SteamGridDBhelps you customize all the art for a game.
You just download the plugin as usual, then when you click on the settings for a game, you may customize its art right there. This is especially useful for non-Steam shortcuts that come with no album art by default, where SteamGridDB searches up the application name and provides you with tons of options.
1Storage Cleaner
Free Up Space
Finally, we get to a plugin I’d consider genuinely essential. When you play a game, it piles up a bunch of compatibility files and shader caches to make the game run better the longer you play it, but these files never get deleted by Steam itself, sticking around even if you uninstall the game.
This is especially a problem if you’ve got a 64 GB model and very little base storage space, so that’s where Storage Cleaner comes in handy. This plugincan quickly clear up all your shader caches and the compatibility data you don’t need, saving you upwards of 10 GB of space at a time.
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