Installing NIKKE under Linux

nikke-linux.md

NIKKE on Linux - Complete Installation Guide

First of all, happy new year (maybe?)

Important Warning

Just letting you know ahead of time, your account can be banned! I’ve been playing since the initial post without any issues, but do this at your own risk!

My Configuration

• OS: Arch Linux (Wayland)
• Compositor: Hyprland
• CPU: i7 9700KF
• GPU: RX 7800 XT
• RAM: 32GB

IG Performance: Similar to Windows.

Note: You might have to do some tweaking if you’re using a different distro.

Requirements

• Steam
• DWPROTON or Proton GE (I’m using 10-27, but 10-25 and CachyOS Proton also work)
• Windows OR use a manual fix; (I'll explain later)
  • Note: If you choose Windows, it will only be the initial install; once you have them in your pendrive, you won’t need to use Windows to reinstall the game at all.

Installation Steps

1. Download the windows version on their official website
2. Run the installer with w/e program you’re familiar with. For example, Lutris, Heroic, Faugus, and so on. In my case, I used Heroic to install the game.
3. Just run the initial installer; it won’t download anything, because it’s missing some dependencies from Windows, but it will create a NIKKE folder under your prefix (if you already know where the folder is supposed to be placed in your prefix, you can skip this part)

Initial setup (Only for the first time)

Manual fix (recommended)

1. You can skip the Windows step entirely by following the steps available here: wine-miniloader or dorin's version

Update: I'll update the whole Gist later, but use the miniloader version. I have a step by step here. It doesn't change the whole setup, you just need to run the game using that wine version. So, if you're comfortable setting up wine with another launcher, you can give it a try.

Windows (alternative)

1. Open Windows, and install the launcher. For reference, I installed the whole game (~22 GB), but you can try with just the initial client files…
2. Copy the whole NIKKE directory to a USB or upload it somewhere, idk.

• The folder is inside the c_drive.

Set Up Steam and Create the Wineprefix

1. Back to your Linux, add a game to Steam using one of the launcher executable files, specifically “NIKKE/Launcher/nikke_launcher.exe”
2. Go to properties on the game (in Steam) and set compatibility layer to Proton GE.
3. Launch it once to create the wineprefix.

*Note: you might need to start/cancel a few times, you can see the comments to understand why.*

Copy Game Files to the Wineprefix

1. Find your prefix:

   • If you’re using Steam directly, navigate to the wineprefix that Steam created:

     • It can be found in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/
     • Non-steam games have a random 10-digit folder name. I recommend sorting by the latest modified to try and find the right folder.

   • If you aren’t using Steam, you will have to find it manually to update the files.

2. Inside of that folder, you will find the wineprefix. Drop the NIKKE folder (from Windows install) into the drive_c folder directly.

3. One last step for future updates, you can refer to this message: link

Configure Steam Launch Settings

1. Go back to the properties of the game you added in Steam and adjust where it will look for the executable:

• Set the path to the wineprefix steam created, where we just put the NIKKE folder in
• You can also update the “start in” folder, but this might not be necessary.
• Disable Steam overlay just in case

Launch the Game

1. Launch the game through Steam. It will open the launcher, log in like normal, and launch the game.

*Note: you might need to start/cancel a few times, you can see the comments to understand why.*

Congratz, you have NIKKE running under wine!

Known Issues & Troubleshooting

It’s not really plug-and-play, but it’s working for now.

Startup Issues

It’s quite annoying to start the launcher through Steam sometimes:

• Having to start/cancel 3-10 times before the game opens (timeout issue)
• Anti-Cheat complains on first launch, but restarting fixes it.

Minor Bugs

• The launcher will never remember your password. You have to re-enter it every time you launch the game.
• The game also sometimes forgets your server location. You have to select your region at launch when it forgets.
• Sometimes, an anti-cheat error pops up, and it can be mitigated by relaunching the game.
• When quitting the game, you will have to click on “STOP” on Steam.

Possible fixes

• DWPROTON seems to perform better and I don't have to restart as often as I had to with Proton GE.
• fix restart issue

Long-term Usage Update

For any1 wondering, I have been playing every single day, and it’s still working! No bans so far, and the anti-cheat isn’t complaining at all.

OS: Linux Mint 22.2 Cinnamon
CPU: Intel i7-6700K
GPU: GTX 1080
Launcher: Steam (downloaded via System Package)
Proton: Proton-GE Latest

---

I can confirm NIKKE works on my system as well. Performance is identical to Windows. When I launched the game, it thankfully never asked me to reinstall.

Minor bugs

• The launcher will never remember my password. I have to re-enter it every time I launch the game.
• The game also sometimes forgets my server location. I have to select NA at launch when it forgets.
• Sometimes, an anti-cheat error pops up. Anti-cheat system works error. Please close related applications that may affect anti-cheat modules, or check system abnormal events with anti-virus softwares. Reboot system and try to start the game process in administrator. Can be mitigated by relaunching the game a few times.
• When quitting the game, I have to click on "STOP" on Steam in addition to just quitting the game. Otherwise, I'll get a transparent box on my screen that stays there forever. Can be mitigated by just hard stopping the game on Steam.

@Blinjko: Out of curiosity, what does WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winemenubuilder.exe=d" %command% do? I was able to launch the game without this command.

This has me thinking. Why is there an integrated Steam login for the NIKKE launcher? Are they planning a Steam release?

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: 6.18.3-arch1-1
WM: Hyprland

You're the goat for finding this!

Got the game up and running with a new account (didn't want to risk my main quite yet.) As stated, Anti-Cheat popup did arise twice while trying to load but Blinkjo's suggsted launch option seems to have either eliminated that or it was simply from relaunching the game several times due to the anti-cheat popup. As has been stated, relaunching several times until the window opens has been necessary.

@HawaiianPizza, honestly I got that launch option from AI because I was just desperate to get things working when i saw that anti-cheat box lol. Looking more into that now it seems that winemenubuilder.exe is a program that will create desktop shortcuts and other files that a program might request to be created, (I'm not really sure here but I imagine there is maybe some way to do this in windows and this is a program to support that feature or something like that). Regardless it doesn't seem like it really has an effect on the anti-cheat. Also I do appreciate the observation that re-launching the game over and over can eventually result in a run where the anti-cheat doesn't throw an error. It is rather annoying though. It took me around 4 times.

Before I knew that would work what I had been doing was creating a new wineprefix (via steam) every time I got the anti-cheat error. Interestingly enough when I would launch the game after doing this I usually wouldn't get the error. I suppose I could have just gotten lucky, or maybe there is some file or something that might me tipping off the Anti-cheat? It is evident that there is some sort of cache files because it saves our server location and email (but not password?), maybe there is something here that is causing issues?

If I get time I might look into what files are being created when the game launches / is running, to maybe get a better idea of what might be causing problems.

Either way the way I see it is the anti-cheat is seeing something that it doesn't like, but the odd part is that it doesn't seem to trigger consistently (at least based on what I've seen). It does seem to trigger more times than not. It also makes me wonder if the launcher not launching sometimes is also the anti-cheat triggering? (I don't think so because when it triggers in the game it only closes the game and not the launcher).

Thanks for the helpful guide!

I managed to get rid of the pesky ACE error dialog box. I've launched the game around ten times across multiple fresh boots and it is still working fine! The game runs like a charm on every first attempt. Curious to hear if this works for others as well!

For context, I am using the latest Proton-GE to run NIKKE via Steam. I installed NIKKE via Lutris and simply added the NIKKE launcher.exe as a Steam shortcut. No unique launch options are present and I have steam overlay disabled.

What I think might be going wrong

Since the ACE service sometimes works after multiple attempts of launching NIKKE, I assume there is some kind of race condition going on. This might happen because ACE is trying to initialize its "kernel-space" driver (which doesn't work on Linux) before the "user-space" bridge is ready (from Steam/Proton). If the service gets stuck in a "Start-Pending" state, the game fails. After deliberating with Gemini, it seems we can fix this by stopping ACE from trying to auto-start so the game can handle the timing itself.

The steps I took to fix it

1. Open a terminal.

2. Open the Registry Editor for the NIKKE prefix using protontricks: protontricks 2192128374 regedit (In this case, 2192128374 is the identifier for my NIKKE prefix. Replace this with your prefix identifier. If you don't have protontricks yet and you are on Arch Linux, run sudo pacman -S protontricks).

3. Navigate to the Services key by going to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\

4. Modify the ACE Services: Look for the keys ACE-Base, AntiCheatExpert, and/or SFA. Inside each one:

• Find the Start DWORD.

• Right-click and Modify.

• Change the value data to 4 (This disables the service by default until it gets started externally).

5. Close the registry editor and run this in your terminal to force the prefix to refresh: wineserver -k

6. Launch the game.

Side note: After changing the Start DWORD values to 4 and launching NIKKE I noticed that the Start DWORD gets set back to (in my case) 3. This doesn't seem to be a problem though, as the game boots up fine after I changed it to 4 initially. I think by setting the Start DWORD to 4 some kind of internal re-registration happens in the registry when starting the game, which fixes some things. However, this requires further investigation.. I'm just glad I can play without having to boot the game multiple times :)

Sadly, the comment above doesn't really help in my case. ACE always seems to kick me if Steam has been running for too long. Restarting Steam or my PC does work, though, so that's usually what I end up doing.

Just run the initial installer; it won’t download anything, because it’s missing some dependencies from Windows, but it will create a NIKKE folder under your prefix (if you already know where the folder is supposed to be placed in your prefix, you can skip this part)

I was able to get the installer to run under wine, there was a bug that caused it to stall:
https://github.com/Dorin130/li-launcher-wine-fix
Check it out if you'd rather do that over cloning files from Windows. Unsure why it doesn't work under proton, further debugging leads me to believe its proton bug, but I am very unsure... Fixed
Hopefully it will also work when the client needs updates🤞.

This has me thinking. Why is there an integrated Steam login for the NIKKE launcher? Are they planning a Steam release?

Most likely not. What you're seeing is probably a carryover from the publisher (Tencent/Level Infinite) reusing the same launcher across multiple games, some of which were released on Steam.

I managed to get it working with this proton Version:
https://dawn.wine/dawn-winery/dwproton/releases
No starting problems and no anti cheat problems.

I managed to get it working with this proton Version: https://dawn.wine/dawn-winery/dwproton/releases No starting problems and no anti cheat problems.

Thanks bro, this proton is the only one who got my ace to shut up, for now at least.

Has anyone tried updating the game with the most recent patch? The launcher started, but it seems to be stuck:

Has anyone tried updating the game with the most recent patch? The launcher started, but it seems to be stuck:

I redownloaded the Nikke installer, did the basic installation and then replaced the new files in my Steam installation, it worked. I used https://github.com/Dorin130/li-launcher-wine-fix .

yep, I was facing this issue and used the same fix. I wasn't using the dll before, so I'm hoping it's a one-time thing... especially because the other updates didn't require us to update the launcher like this one

Exactly the same issue I fixed in the installer happens with the updater. I suspected this would happen but couldn't test it until now since I didn't have an outdated launcher version. Updated my repo to fix the issue, if you're already using my fix, you'll also need to copy the new version.dll to $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/NIKKE/Launcher/ to unbrick the updates.

EDIT: Last step might break and set you in a loop. If that happens overwrite files from Nikke/Launcher/update_files/ to Nikke/Launcher/.

Another alternative:
https://dawn.wine/NelloKudo/wine-miniloader
If all else fails there are patches in https://discord.gg/ck37X6UWBp (#nikke-general), tbh I discourage this one since they are very much against ToS.

When quitting the game, you will have to click on “STOP” on Steam.

The launcher runs a tray icon, you have to right click the tray icon and click exit. Or double click it to reopen the minimised launcher and select exit from the menu top right.
(assuming tray icons via wine/proton works on your system)

I’m probably just an idiot, but tried all day to get Dorin’s methods to get me back up and running and no luck. May have to start from scratch and fetch the windows launcher again RIP

Here are the steps I took:

• Downloaded a new launcher, because I deleted the last one
• Ran it using steam to create a prefix
• Located the prefix and placed his version.dll inside the AppData/Local/nikkeminiloader sth sth
• Opened the launcher again, and pressed the download button. I waited a bit and it started downloading
• Replaced the steam path with the launcher path

Does anyone have instructions on how to use wine-miniloader with Steam?

@HawaiianPizza you can try to use steamtinkerlaunch, but I'm not sure if that will work. In my opinion, there's a simpler way:

• Download bottles
• Download the miniloader release, don't bother trying to compile it manually if you don't want to waste your time debugging the bash file. I managed to make it work, but it was a pain in the ass.
• Extract the miniloader & move it to ~/.local/share/bottles/runners/ — (I'm using the AUR version.)
• Run bottles using your terminal to follow the logs
  • I had to download the dependency all fonts, mfc42, vstudio 2012, and vstudio 2022 . (you can find this under dependencies.)
• Follow the usual steps to download the app & change the path to the launcher executable

I replaced Dorin's link with the miniloader, but I will need to update the Gist with those new steps. Let me know if you have any issues, and I'll try to help

@d-kja That worked flawlessly. I'm using the Flatpak version of Bottles, so I move the miniloader files to /home/YOUR_NAME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/runners/. Thanks for the help!