SOLVED: Since I upgraded to Mint18.1 Steam no longer detects games inside the steamapps directory

[randomNick3229]

Hello everyone,

my problem is pretty much pointed in the topic.
I kept my home partition while I performed the upgrade to Mint18.1 KDE as a fresh reinstall and since then Steam no longer accepts the steamapps directory in ~/.steam/ as what it is.
Meaning the games can't be started and require to be reinstalled.

Moving the directories, creating new ones with the same name and checking permissions didn't help, so I'm lost

Anyone knows a solution to this? As you can imagine, to re-download ~500G isn't really fun even with fast connections.

[odtech]

Hello everyone,

my problem is pretty much pointed in the topic.
I kept my home partition while I performed the upgrade to Mint18.1 KDE as a fresh reinstall and since then Steam no longer accepts the steamapps directory in ~/.steam/ as what it is.
Meaning the games can't be started and require to be reinstalled.

Moving the directories, creating new ones with the same name and checking permissions didn't help, so I'm lost

Anyone knows a solution to this? As you can imagine, to re-download ~500G isn't really fun even with fast connections.

Steam detects the existing files when you "reinstall" the game so it won't actualy redownload anything.

[randomNick3229]

Hello odtech,

Steam detects the existing files when you "reinstall" the game so it won't actualy redownload anything.

I tried so but it kept downloading files anyway.
What I noticed afterwards however was that it downloads files outside my actual steamapps directory that was moved somewhere else.

Managed to fix that issue, everything works again.

Thanks for the reply, I guess your post gave me unexpected ideas, haha

[odtech]

Hello odtech,

Steam detects the existing files when you "reinstall" the game so it won't actualy redownload anything.

I tried so but it kept downloading files anyway.
What I noticed afterwards however was that it downloads files outside my actual steamapps directory that was moved somewhere else.

Managed to fix that issue, everything works again.

Thanks for the reply, I guess your post gave me unexpected ideas, haha

Strange that steam expected the library structure to be different than what it was. But yeah the starting a install trick is a good way to see where steam expects the files to be.
I got my library on a second hard drive so whenever i mess around with the OS disk i just point steam back to the steamlibrary folder on the data drive and everything is instantly installed again. Works every time.