So with this latest guide we’ll walk you through how to get the most out of your Steam Deck by utilizing these nifty features. Keep in mind that you don’t need to use these tips and tricks with the Steam Deck to ensure a good experience. A great experience in fact can be had even without knowing them. With that said, I personally found these things to be very useful. And I did feel that knowing about these features made the Steam Deck experience more enjoyable. Now with that out of the way, here’s how you can get the most out of your Steam Deck.
Tip & Tricks To Help You Get The Most Out Of Your Steam Deck
There’s quite a few tips and tricks with the Steam Deck that can help your user experience. Some of them obvious and some of them perhaps a little more unknown. We’ll start with some things that might be a little more unknown to the average user.
Familiarize yourself with the Steam Deck shortcuts
Just like any other PC, the Steam Deck has shortcuts. These shortcuts can help you access a number of different features. And although there aren’t necessarily hundreds of them, it can be easy to miss these shortcuts if you aren’t sure where to find them. Thankfully, this is pretty easy to do. You can bring up the shortcuts list with a simple two-button command. And once you do so, we highly recommend that you read the list a few times. This can help you get to know all the shortcuts, especially the ones you feel you’ll use more often. To access the Steam Deck shortcuts list, simply long press the Steam button. This will bring up the shortcuts list at any point. Even if you’re in a game at the time. The list contains shortcuts for things like using the joystick as a mouse, turning the screen brightness up and down, and more.
Force games to shutdown if you need to
Hopefully this isn’t something you’ll come across very often, but every once in a while you might be playing a game and that game may crash and freeze up. If it freezes, you can use the force shutdown key to force that game to close. To force a shutdown, all you need to do is press the Steam button and the B button simultaneously. Game freezes aren’t super common. I’ve only ever experienced this once or twice in my time with the Steam Deck so far. But this is likely to be one of the most useful of all the Steam Deck tips and tricks because when you do encounter this situation, you probably want to get right back into the game as quickly as you can. Keep in mind that the Steam Deck will get better with time and more software updates. At which point you may almost never have to use this feature.
Set up the Steam Deck’s rear buttons
This is a big one if you like to customize your gameplay experience. Most games don’t natively support these buttons though. So you’ll want to configure them to your personal preferences. If you don’t configure them, they may still work depending on the game. But they will likely be set to the ABXY buttons by default. However, you can set them up to control a whole bunch of different actions. If you want to learn how to set up the rear buttons, you can find out more about that in our guide here.
Adjust your screen brightness during gameplay, which can help battery life
Battery life is one of the bigger issues with the Steam Deck. While this is a great little machine for playing games on the go, it isn’t without its faults. Battery life is unfortunately one of those faults and it’s ever more present when you play demanding games like DOOM Eternal or Elden Ring. You can help to offset this a little bit though. One of the things you can do to help the battery life is adjust the screen brightness. Plus you can do this in-game. To adjust screen brightness while you’re playing, press and hold the Steam button while you push the left joystick up or down. This will turn the brightness up or down accordingly. Of course, you can also adjust the brightness by launching quick settings. But if you don’t want to open quick settings panel, the shortcuts makes the process that much faster.
Install a microSD card for more storage
Even if you picked up the 512GB model of the Steam Deck, that storage will quickly fill up with how large some of today’s games are. Plus, you won’t have access to all 512GB as some of that will be used for the system files. So a microSD card is highly recommended. You don’t just want to pick up any old microSD card though. You want it to have fast read and write speeds and if you’re going to pick up a card, we’d suggest a 1TB. Though if you have the 512GB model and only want a little more space, even a 128GB or a 256GB would do just fine. You can find some good options for Steam Deck microSD cards in our guide here.
Sort the games in your library
Just like with the Steam client on PC, you can sort your game library on the Steam Deck. And we found this to be really useful for deciding which games to play. Sorting your games is easy to do as well. And it certainly helps when you’re trying to narrow down your list. Maybe you just don’t want to scroll a ton, or you want to more easily see what you’re friends are playing. You can also sort games alphabetically, by your most recently played titles and more.
Connect a mouse and keyboard to your Steam Deck
Whether you’d be playing games or you just want something to more easily navigate desktop mode, a mouse and keyboard can be connected to the Steam Deck. Not all games will support mouse and keyboard and some of the ones that do may just play better with a controller. Many games do though. You can connect a mouse and keyboard to the Steam Deck using Bluetooth,
