Running Cosmoteer Classic on Linux

Cosmoteer is a strategy spaceship-builder game recently released as early access on Steam. Its classic version can be downloaded from itch.io. Wine 7.0 stable cannot open this verison, so how can we play Cosmoteer Classic on Linux?

The key to this is by using a special version of Wine by GloriousEggroll, called wine-ge-custom. This ports over Steam’s Proton patches to Wine, so we can play the same games that Proton can without using yucky Steam software.

What we will also be using:

• Flatpak
• Lutris

Step 0: Install Lutris

I think having a game launcher is cool, so we’ll be using it with Lutris.

I love Flatpaks, too, so if you don’t like Flatpaks, I suggest you go somewhere else.

flatpak install flathub net.lutris.Lutris

Step 1: Install wine-ge-custom

Download the latest release from GitHub.

Extract that tar.xz file into ~/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/data/lutris/runners/wine.

Step 2: Open Lutris and install Cosmoteer Classic

You can get the Cosmoteer Classic installer from the developer’s itch.io page.

Next, open up your newly-installed Lutris, click the plus symbol in the top left of the window, and select “Install a Windows game from media.” Name the game whatever you want, install the Wine Setup file that Lutris asks, select the place you want to install it, and select the Cosmoteer installer that you just downloaded as the setup file.

Wait a bit for Wine to set up, carefully read and agree to the Cosmoteer terms-of-service, and click through with all the defaults - doesn’t matter. Contrary to what it claims, you do not actually need to restart your computer for the game to work.

Step 3: Reconfigure your Lutris Cosmoteer Classic installation

By default, Lutris will give the game (at the time of writing this) Wine 7.2, which Cosmoteer doesn’t like to work with. So before launching the game, we need to reconfigure it to use wine-ge-custom.

Visit your Games library in Lutris, right click your Cosmoteer installation, select “Configure”, and, in “Runner options”, select the runner starting wtih lutris-GE-Proton for “Wine version.”

With this change, you can now successfully play Cosmoteer Classic on Linux. However, it tends to crash frequently on my system while I was blowing up giant ships with my friend in multiplayer, so your mileage may vary.

If you want to import or export your saved ships and left the installtion directories all the default, it should be in ~/Games/cosmoteer/drive_c/users/${USER}/Documents/"My Games"/Cosmoteer/"Saved Ships".

Anyway, happy gaming fellow Linux Cosmoteerers! (cosmonauts?)