Can you play Honkai Star Rail on Steam Deck?

❘ Published: 2023-04-26T11:39:32

Wondering if Honkai Star Rail will run on Steam Deck? We’ve done the testing and while it’s indeed possible, it’ll require jumping through several hoops.

Looking to play Honkai Star Rail on Steam Deck? We’ve finally found an answer after digging deep and doing the research ourselves. Honkai Star Rail is the blockbuster follow-up to HoYoverse’s hit, Honkai Impact 3. The studio also developed Genshin Impact. With the influx of people looking to play the game on the go, we’ve explored if the game runs on Valve’s handheld PC, the Steam Deck.

HoYoverse is quite strict with its games, however. The PC versions of Honkai Impact 3, Star Rail, and Genshin Impact all feature a robust anti-cheat system, which spells trouble for those looking to run it natively on Steam Deck.

Does Honkai Star Rail run on Steam Deck?

Honkai Star Rail will not run natively on the Steam Deck. In order to make it playable, you will require an installation of Windows 11. We’ve got a full guide on how to do that, along with replacing your SSD.

There’s also an extra step you’ll need to take if you’ve managed to install Windows onto the Steam Deck. To get the gamepad built into the Steam Deck to work, you’ll need to follow the process on this GitHub project and install it.

Honkai Star Rail won’t work natively on the Steam Deck due to its incredibly strict anti-cheat. Even when trying it on various versions of Proton, the translation layer Valve has developed to get Windows apps working on Linux, we couldn’t get the game to load properly.

The game will install to the Steam Deck just fine, which we managed to do by adding it to our library. However, once booting the game up properly, we found it wasn’t compatible.

It’s assumed because the anti-cheat in place for Genshin Impact and Star Rail shows up as a device driver on Windows, Linux doesn’t meet the requirements for it to hook on.

This is similar to how Call of Duty and Destiny 2 work, and unless miHoYo does the extra legwork to support the Steam Deck, Star Rail might never come to the device without the workarounds. But, if you are looking to run the game on PC, be sure to check out if you should upgrade your GPU.