🎮 Fixed Steam Deck crash at 20% loading (both new games and saved runs)
Huge thanks to the community member who helped us track this one down! After a lot of back-and-forth troubleshooting, a player noticed the screen would briefly flicker or black out right at the 20% loading mark — right before the crash. That observation turned out to be the key to finding the real cause.
What was actually going wrong:
The game has an options menu (for resolution, display mode, vsync, etc.) that gets quietly loaded in the background both on the main menu AND in the in-game pause menu. Every time this options menu was created — even while hidden — it would re-apply your display settings, which tells your monitor/compositor to reshuffle the window mode.
On most hardware, this caused a brief, mostly-harmless screen flicker you might not even notice. But on Steam Deck, doing this in the middle of a scene transition (while the game was simultaneously tearing down the menu and building the game world) was too much for SteamOS to handle, and it crashed the game every time.
This also explained why display settings never seemed to stick between sessions — they were only being applied when the options menu happened to get created, which was inconsistent.
What we fixed:
Display settings (resolution, fullscreen mode, vsync) now load and apply once when the game starts up, through a dedicated system. They no longer get re-applied every time you change scenes.
The options menu no longer triggers display mode changes just from being loaded. It only changes your display settings when you actually hit "Apply" or "Defaults" in the menu.
Your resolution, fullscreen, and vsync settings now properly persist between sessions — whatever you had set last time will be active the moment the game launches.
Skipped an unnecessary UI rescaling pass during scene transitions when no scaling is needed, for slightly smoother loading.
Who benefits:
Steam Deck players: The 20% loading crash is fixed for both starting new runs AND resuming saved runs (Earth and Moon).
All players: No more brief screen flicker when transitioning between the main menu and the game world. Display settings now properly save and load between sessions.
Applies to all entry points: new game, resume saved run, and the tutorial.