Skip to main content

9 Steam Deck tricks and tips you need to know about

The Steam Deck is absolutely stuffed with features, settings, and configuration options, and you might not know about all of them. I’ve pulled together nine Steam Deck tricks and tips that you can use to get around the machine faster, save battery life, and make the most of of Valve’s handheld gaming PC.

Pull up Steam Deck shortcuts

A hand pulling up the Steam Deck shortcuts.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The Steam button will quickly become your best friend with the Steam Deck, but it does more than open your menu. Hold it down for a couple of seconds longer to pull up a list of Steam Deck shortcuts that show you how to take a screenshot, force quit a game, and more.

Recommended Videos

You’ll find the full list of shortcuts by holding down the Steam button, but here they are for quick reference:

  • Steam + B (long press): Force game shutdown
  • Steam + X: Show keyboard
  • Steam + L1: Toggle magnifier
  • Steam + R1: Take screenshot
  • Steam + L2: Right mouse click (this is correct, believe it or not)
  • Steam + R2: Left mouse click
  • Steam + Right joystick: Joystick mouse
  • Steam + Right trackpad: Trackpad mouse
  • Steam + Right trackpad (click): Left mouse click
  • Steam + Left joystick up: Increase screen brightness
  • Steam + Left joystick down: Decrease screen brightness
  • Steam + D-pad right: Enter key
  • Steam + D-pad down: Tab key
  • Steam + D-pad left: Escape key

Customize your controls

You have access to four back buttons on the Steam Deck, but they don’t do anything by default. You can customize your controls in any game by launching it and pressing the Steam button. Scroll to the right and select Controller settings to rebind any of the buttons on the Deck, browse community layouts, and create your own layouts. Valve even includes several controller templates to get you started, regardless of if a game supports controllers or not. You can’t do that on a Nintendo Switch.

Ignore the ‘Great on Deck’ category

Library filters on the Steam Deck.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The Steam Deck automatically sorts your library and provides a “Great on Deck” category that’s a little misleading. These are all of the Deck Verified games in your library, which means they’ve been tested by Valve and provide a seamless experience when playing on Deck. That doesn’t mean the rest of your Steam library is out, though.

Swap over to your full library and press the button to select Filter by Verified and playable. Countless titles work perfectly well on Steam Deck but don’t have full verification due to a pregame launcher or a minor configuration issue. Although you should explore your full library, I recommend starting with the best Deck Verified games first.

Change your keyboard theme

The default Steam Deck keyboard theme is boring. Head to the Settings menu and select Keyboard to change it. You’ll have a few themes by default, plus an extra if you have a 512GB model, and Valve sells more themes in the Steam points shop. There aren’t a ton of options now, but I expect we’ll see a lot more keyboard themes in the future.

Turn on half-rate shading in pixel art games

Half-rate shading option on the Steam Deck.
Jacob Roach

The Steam Deck now supports half-rate shading, which can massively improve your battery life. Half-rate shading basically cuts the resolution of pixel shaders in half. Although half-rate shading is available in every game, I recommend using in pixel art games in particular.

If you’re a big fan of platformer games and indie titles like me, half-rate shading will save you a ton of battery life (hours, in many cases). The lower resolution doesn’t matter in pixel art games, but be careful with half-rate shading in more graphically complex games — it can really hurt image quality.

Use FSR when you can

You can use AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) with any game on Steam Deck, but enabling it is a little confusing. FSR improves performance and saves battery by upscaling a game from a lower resolution. To turn it on, lower your resolution in any game and open the Quick settings menu. Scroll down to Performance and select FSR under the Scaling Filter section.

There are a ton of other options here, too — make sure to read our guide on how to check your frame rate on Steam Deck to see what some of them do.

Use desktop mode for Xbox Game Pass

Desktop mode on the Steam Deck.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

You can use Xbox Game Pass on the Steam Deck, at least a little bit. You can only stream Game Pass titles through Microsoft Edge, which you need to access the Steam Deck desktop for. To get there, press the Steam button, select Power, and choose Switch to Desktop. 

Once you’ve gotten Edge working and you’re signed into your Game Pass account, make sure to check out our roundup of the best games on Xbox Game Pass to know what to play first.

Limit power while traveling

Battery life is a big issue, so if you can’t pick up a power bank for Steam Deck, you’ll have to find other ways to save power. Open the Quick settings menu and scroll down to Performance to limit your graphics power (listed as Thermal power TDP). Turning the power down can save you massive battery life while traveling (though, the TSA might still make fun on your Steam Deck at the airport).

Make use of the Magnifier

The Magnifier on the Steam Deck.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Open up a game like Civilization VI, and you’ll quickly see the problem with the size of the Steam Deck’s screen. Thankfully, you can use the Magnifier to zoom in on areas that may be hard to read. To use it, hold down Steam and L1 and use the right joystick to select the area of the screen you want to zoom in on. Let go and it’ll stay there. You can turn off the Magnifier by using the same Steam L1 shortcut.

Jacob Roach
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Steam’s secret page tells you how much you’ve blown on games
A Steam library filled with custom artwork.

Have you ever wondered how much money you’ve truly spent on Steam over the years? Whether it’s during massive sales, impulsive DLC buys, or slowly building your game library one title at a time, those purchases add up — and Valve quietly keeps track of it all.

First spotted by Reddit user trotski94, there’s a little-known Steam support page that reveals the total amount of real money you've ever spent through your Steam account. The feature isn’t advertised on the main dashboard and is buried deep within Steam’s support site, but it offers an unfiltered glimpse into your spending history since the day you created your account.

Read more
This is the only Blue Prince starting tip you need
Gameplay from Blue Prince.

The best game of 2025 is out today -- and it's not Grand Theft Auto 6.

Blue Prince is the best reviewed game of the year so far, beating out Split Fiction and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. You'll understand why as soon as you start playing it. The puzzle game is one of the most unique video games I've ever played, taking the mysterious vibe of Riven and slotting it into a brainy roguelike about an ever-shifting manor. It's filled with tough puzzles that might take you years to solve without a guide, and that's a good thing. While you might be tempted to look up answers as soon as possible, Blue Prince is better the less you know about it.

Read more
Google’s Firebase Studio lets you prototype apps in minutes — no code needed
The Google Gemini AI logo.

Google is giving its mobile and web app development platform, Firebase, a vibe coding makeover -- transforming it from a dev tool into a DIY AI app builder. It's in a preview phase right now but any individual Google user can give it a go.

Just as chatbots like ChatGPT generate text or images from your prompts, Firebase Studio endeavors to generate app prototypes. For businesses, the idea is to majorly speed up the prototyping process, but the reason "vibe coding" is getting attention right now is that non-techie individuals can use these tools to build personal apps as well.

Read more