Hi, first time posting on lemmy.(Yay!).

So I often put my steam deck into offline mode since I travel between places a lot . And when I was expecting another gaming session today(without internet), it was dead stuck in “loading user data” screen.

Some symptoms:

  1. The wifi icon have a purple X on it , indicating it’s still in offline mode.
  2. Enabling internet does nothing.
  3. Everything in desktop mode works(including internet), except steam.

I’ve faced this problem once before and had to resolve to a factory reset. Back then I tried

  1. Get away from any Wifi signal and boot up
  2. Go into desktop mode and wait for it"
  3. Hard reboot and switch to a different Wifi network"

None of them worked.

I’ve heard that you can attempt to recover from this by copying steam user data files from a pc, but I can’t confirm this right now.

I want to ask, had anyone encountered this before? Is there a way fixing it other than factory resetting? Thx for any help in advance!

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzMEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    Welcome to Lemmy! I haven’t actually heard of this issue before, I generally recommend not using offline mode though. My personal experience is that most games run fine in online mode without internet.

    For fixes, I’d try going to power > change account, and see if it will let you log in again. You might want to try an ethernet connection as well if you have a dock handy.

    You might also try swapping to the previous steam OS partition, you can do this by holding the QAM button (“. . .” button) while you turn on the device, and selecting the second option.

    If you end up needing a reset, you can try just reinstalling steam OS first without wiping your user data. That’s an option when using a recovery drive.

    • Water_Melon_boyOPEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Huge thanks for the fixes!

      First I tried changing accounts(With ethernet). No luck there, steam deck ended up showing “Issue connecting with Valve servers”

      Then I tried reverting to previous Steam OS partition .

      And I goofed 😂, I failed to mention that my Deck is a fairly new one (Yes I encountered this problem twice within 3 weeks). So the last version was literally the factory setup/out of the box one. Ended up wiping my steam data(Tried going back to previous A and B, both resulted in factory setup screen).

      The good news is that desktop side of things seems to be right where they were (even emulator saves!), and getting gaming mode back on track will be speedy.

      A shame I can’t experiment with more potential solutions（Getting resetted does the job）, but my takeaway is that.

      【Unless you absolutely need the insurance offline mode provides, or else just turning off wifi (even using airplane mode when needed) will be a much safer bet. Whatever offline mode did to Valve related connections, isn’t totally bugfree and have chances of failing.】

      • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzMEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Sorry you ran into some trouble, but it’s good to hear you didn’t lose your desktop stuff.