Death Stranding 2 Becomes Playable On Steam Deck With The Eclipse Mod

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Last week was an extremely busy one, with two gigantic games releasing on the same day on PC. And unfortunately, neither of those games is great to play on the Steam Deck. Crimson Desert and Death Stranding 2 are both great games in their own right, and a little sad that trying to play them on the go is not enjoyable. However, it seems that there might be a way to make Death Stranding 2 more playable on the Deck, to the point where it might actually be considered enjoyable.

This seems to be thanks to something called the Eclipse Mod. I’ve known about this for a while, but I have been a little hesitant to actually use it. These are mods made by a user, Eclipse, and posted on Telegram. It’s all in Russian, and since I haven’t been able to verify how safe it is, I’ve been avoiding trying it out. However, I saw there was a mod for Death Stranding 2, and I couldn’t help myself. And honestly, I’m glad I did. I still can’t completely verify how safe it is, but none of the files I downloaded raised any flags on my computers after scanning them. Keep in mind that if you try this yourself, there may be some risk.

Installation is relatively easy, and if you wanna try for yourself, I created a guide that you can follow to get it up and running.

Now, let’s talk about the performance increases. On average, almost every location where I was getting under 20 FPS was now hitting 30 and above. It went from ridiculously unplayable to surprisingly enjoyable in most locations that I tested. On top of that, the visual differences were so minor that I could not tell in side-by-sides until I zoomed in very close. The game is being tested on the portable preset with PICO upscaling at balanced. It looks like there are very minor detail changes, which mainly affect further away objects, but the general detail of the image is relatively the same.

It actually felt very surreal as I was playing. It was clear that something was happening behind the scenes, and we can see little instances of changes when looking at them side-by-side. However, visually, it was nearly the same. Even the shadow pop-in was almost identical. I would say that detail pop-in may be a little bit closer using the mod, but the difference is generally unnoticeable during actual gameplay.

However, the mod isn’t perfect, and there are still some instances where the frame rate drops below 30. When looking at locations where there are a lot of models, especially further away, there will still be drops. Granted, it is significantly better than it would be without the mod, but it is still worth mentioning.

Eclipse themselves do recommend some setting changes as well, and it does help visuals a bit, but it does hurt the performance as well. They ask for Textures on high, Texture Filtering at 4x, Screen Space Reflections on, and Ambient Occlusion on, while keeping everything else on the lowest possible. It will still perform decently at these settings and is still much better than without the mod, but there may be more drops because of it. So, if you want to play in the most stable way possible, keep the quality settings to their lowest.

The Eclipse Mod holds up and feels better in general, but it’s not going to be something that makes the entire game playable on the Steam Deck from front to back. It will make the game significantly more enjoyable throughout, there’s no doubt about that, and the visual trade-offs seem extremely small. I wouldn’t go in trying this expecting to find a “Verified” experience, but if you have no other way to play, this is a pretty big upgrade that’s hard to deny how fantastic it is.

Death Stranding 2 can be purchased for $69.99 on Steam, but you can save some money by buying it on Fanatical for $62.99.

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