From adding a little bit of stylistic flair to match your personality, or celebrating one of the best Steam Deck games to one maniac having their Steam Deck boot animation be the entirety of the movie Shrek, users have been tinkering hard and creating some incredible start-up videos. My personal favorite is Handheld History, created by KnightMD, delivering a nice retrospective of previous portable consoles before transitioning seamlessly into the home screen menu. Valve has noticed this trend. In a recent update, the company claims to have made it easier to add a custom boot animation, which this step-by-step guide will show you how to do.. However, no matter how many times I followed the steps for the easy option, it simply didn’t work. With that in mind, I’m going to show you two methods — the simple one that Valve has enabled with the update and the more technical route that I can 100% guarantee will work. But first, allow me to point you in the direction of where to find these Steam Deck boot animations.
Where to find the best custom boot animations
Where to find the best custom boot animations
Beforehand, it was just a case of scrolling through the hundreds of posts on the Steam Deck subreddit — fun to do (especially with the amount of meme posts about the way the fan smells), but rather time consuming. However, Reddit user waylaidwanderer has done you a solid and created a website where people can upload their boot animations and you can take your pick. You can even filter the list by most liked or most downloaded if you want, to see what top notch options are gaining steam (pardon the pun).
The easy way
The easy way
SteamOS 3.3.2 brings a shorter and far simpler way to add custom boot animations to your Steam Deck, but whether it actually works at the moment is a little up in the air. Here are the steps to follow for this. As I say with any tinkering like this, always connect a keyboard and mouse to make things easier than using the small touchpad and on-screen keyboard. I use the MX Master 3S and MX Mechanical with mine.
If the easy way doesn’t work
If the easy way doesn’t work
If you did the above and the startup animation has not changed. It’s time to get a little more technical and use a little bit of a coding workaround. Don’t worry, this won’t be as daunting as you fear!
