Installing Fallout London on Linux with Heroic Launcher
2025-03-12
tl;dr Use the same Wine prefix for Fallout 4 and Fallout London.
As it's Fallout 4, definitely install a high-fps mod.
- Install Fallout 4 GOTY with Heroic
- Install Fallout London with Heroic - make sure to set the Wine prefix in the
install dialog to the same prefix that Fallout 4 GOTY used (found
this which pointed me in the right direction)
- Run Fallout 4 GOTY (to install deps etc). This step may or may not be needed,
but I did do this.
- Run Fallout London
- Play!
For reference, I'm using Pop OS 22.04 with Heroic installed from a Flatpak
(version 2.16.0).
There are some extra bits worth doing (see here for details).
Note I don't use a mod manager, so anything below is a manual install.
-
Install the recommended High FPS fix. High-FPS fixes are
always worth it for Fallout because loading screens are unbelievably slow. I
believe this is because the loading time is exactly tied to frame rate, and
frame rate is locked to a maximum of 60fps. If you unlock the frame rate, at
least on the loading screens, it loads faster. Fallout London already
includes F4SE and the address library (file
F4SE/plugins/version-$numbers.bin`), so don't worry about dependencies of the
mod.
- Find your current game version, either by launching the game and going to
settings, or moving to your game's install location (for me,
~/Games/Heroic/Fallout 4 GOTY) and then running
ag kCurVersion (as long
as you've run the game at least once). My GOG install was the second one,
1.10.163.0.
- Head to the mod page on Nexus and download (manual) the appropriate
version for the current version of your game.
- Unzip the the downloaded mod and logically copy the F4SE folder into
the folder containing the F4SE folder of your install. It might work, but
actually don't do that. Linux filesystems are case-sensitive, and most
mods (and Fallout itself) is made for Windows which will generally have a
case-insensitive filesystem. Therefore the best thing to do is look at
the files the mod contains and copy those into the relevant locations in
the install folder. Copying wholesale would end up with a "F4SE/Plugins"
folder from the mod, and a "F4SE/plugins" folder from the base game. As
it stands, you can just copy the content of the plugins folder into the
plugins folder of the game's install directory.
- If it all worked, and you have an FPS counter showing in-game (e.g. via
Heroic settings for Fallout London -> Other -> Show FPS), you'll probably
now see loading screens at a locked ~350 FPS.
There's only one mod for the time being (that's definitely worthwhile), but I'll
update this post as and when I install more.