Goonhub
Wanna get Goonstation (and BYOND broadly) running on a Linux machine? The good news is that as of BYOND version 516, we finally can!
Up until now, this has been impossible because of BYOND's reliance on Trident (the engine responsible for Internet Explorer) as the backbone of much of BYOND's UI. Unfortunately, Wine is not able to run the version of Trident used - but version 516 has finally ditched Trident in favour of WebView2 (a component of Microsoft Edge), which Wine absolutely CAN run.
Now, don't get me wrong, BYOND will still fight you every step of the way - but with a little gumption and a whole lot of Works On My Machine, we can do it!
PREREQUISITES:
STEP 1:
Open up winetricks and create a new Wineprefix. Call it whatever you like - 'BYOND' is as good a name as any for clarity. Both 32-bit and 64-bit should work fine, though I imagine that a 32-bit prefix might have less overhead or something. I don't know, I'm not an expert.
STEP 2:
Once the prefix is made, open up the 'Install a font' menu, select 'Corefonts', and confirm. What follows next is an eldritch dance where winetricks will throw meaningless error messages at you for a while - rest assured that this, confusingly, means it is working. Just continually dismiss the messages for a little while and eventually they'll stop and the menu will open back up.
If the messages continue their assault and you're sure that it's been a good while of dismissing them, try looking up winetricks font troubleshooting advice on your search engine of choice.
STEP 3:
Back at the winetricks menu, select the 'Run a commandline shell (for debugging)' option. The correct window will be a native system terminal navigated to the C drive of your new prefix. It should NOT be an emulated Windows terminal - that's a different option.
Then, execute the command 'winetricks dxvk vcrun2022' This will begin the install process for a pair of dependencies required by BYOND. This process can be a bit lengthy and will require you to manually confirm some things like SHA mismatches.
If for whatever reason either of these packages fail, you can probably find help online about it. Works On My Machine.
STEP 4:
Once more unto the winetricks menu breach, open up the 'Run winecfg' option.
With the 'Default Settings' entry selected, click on the 'Windows Version' dropdown and select Windows 7.
Then, click on 'Add application'. You'll want to navigate to wherever on your system you downloaded the WebView2 bootstrapper .exe, and select that.
Once this is done, there'll be an entry for MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe - select it and then set the Windows Version to Windows 10.
Once you're done, confirm your changes and you'll be dropped back at the winetricks menu.
STEP 5:
We're almost done! The filesystem is now ready to install WebView2 and BYOND. From the winetricks menu, select 'run an arbitrary executable' and open up the WebView2 bootstrapper.
This will open up the WebView2 installer. In the same way that all good installers don't, it will silently close itself without a message upon a successful install. (If it fails on account of requiring Windows 10, go back to Step 4 and make sure you've set the compatibilities right.)
Now, at long last - we can finally install BYOND! Using the same 'run an arbitrary executable' option as before, open up the BYOND installer and go through the motions.
FINALE:
If all went well, BYOND should now be installed onto your system. The BYOND installer will close with an option to open up BYOND - if this doesn't actually launch BYOND for whatever reason, you have a couple other ways.
On at least some distros, installing a program this way via Wine will automatically add a system shortcut to your usual desktop environment's search bar, as if it were a native Linux program. BYOND web links from your browser will also work, so you can use Goonhub's 'join' buttons. (I know this is true on Mint at least, not sure about other distros.)
Otherwise, you can use the winetricks 'run an arbitrary executable' option to navigate within your prefix and launch BYOND's executable. On 32-bit prefixes this'll be Program Files/BYOND/bin/byond.exe, on 64-bit prefixes it'll instead be Program Files (x86)/BYOND/bin/byond.exe.
Congratulations! You can now log into the BYOND pager and play Goonstation.
TROUBLESHOOTING & KNOWN ISSUES:
Some of these issues are effectively guaranteed, others may be on a case-by-case basis, and you might even encounter problems that aren't here. If that happens: I probably can't help, sorry.
CLOSING STATEMENTS:
Despite the technical issues listed above, Goonstation on Linux is 100% playable - I've been doing so since January 2025 and have had no trouble playing even high-engagement roles like AI and HoS. It's far from ideal, but hopefully the ongoing march of TGUI will fix what issues remain.
Up until now, this has been impossible because of BYOND's reliance on Trident (the engine responsible for Internet Explorer) as the backbone of much of BYOND's UI. Unfortunately, Wine is not able to run the version of Trident used - but version 516 has finally ditched Trident in favour of WebView2 (a component of Microsoft Edge), which Wine absolutely CAN run.
Now, don't get me wrong, BYOND will still fight you every step of the way - but with a little gumption and a whole lot of Works On My Machine, we can do it!
PREREQUISITES:
- Your Wine should be at least version 10. (Certain 9.x versions may also work but there's no harm in updating.) You can check your current Wine version by executing "wine --version" in a terminal. If it's not at least version 10, search around online for how to update Wine on your specific distro.
- Winetricks. Many distros come with this pre-installed, and all good software centers & package managers have it regardless.
- The most recent version of the BYOND installer. Note that you must specifically get the Windows version, not the Linux one - as mentioned on the website, the Linux release of BYOND is only useful for server hosting, not playing games.
- The WebView2 evergreen bootstrapper. At time of writing the BYOND download page contains a link to it, but just in case: here. Make sure you get the 'evergreen bootstrapper' specifically.
STEP 1:
Open up winetricks and create a new Wineprefix. Call it whatever you like - 'BYOND' is as good a name as any for clarity. Both 32-bit and 64-bit should work fine, though I imagine that a 32-bit prefix might have less overhead or something. I don't know, I'm not an expert.
STEP 2:
Once the prefix is made, open up the 'Install a font' menu, select 'Corefonts', and confirm. What follows next is an eldritch dance where winetricks will throw meaningless error messages at you for a while - rest assured that this, confusingly, means it is working. Just continually dismiss the messages for a little while and eventually they'll stop and the menu will open back up.
If the messages continue their assault and you're sure that it's been a good while of dismissing them, try looking up winetricks font troubleshooting advice on your search engine of choice.
STEP 3:
Back at the winetricks menu, select the 'Run a commandline shell (for debugging)' option. The correct window will be a native system terminal navigated to the C drive of your new prefix. It should NOT be an emulated Windows terminal - that's a different option.
Then, execute the command 'winetricks dxvk vcrun2022' This will begin the install process for a pair of dependencies required by BYOND. This process can be a bit lengthy and will require you to manually confirm some things like SHA mismatches.
If for whatever reason either of these packages fail, you can probably find help online about it. Works On My Machine.
STEP 4:
Once more unto the winetricks menu breach, open up the 'Run winecfg' option.
With the 'Default Settings' entry selected, click on the 'Windows Version' dropdown and select Windows 7.
Then, click on 'Add application'. You'll want to navigate to wherever on your system you downloaded the WebView2 bootstrapper .exe, and select that.
Once this is done, there'll be an entry for MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe - select it and then set the Windows Version to Windows 10.
Once you're done, confirm your changes and you'll be dropped back at the winetricks menu.
STEP 5:
We're almost done! The filesystem is now ready to install WebView2 and BYOND. From the winetricks menu, select 'run an arbitrary executable' and open up the WebView2 bootstrapper.
This will open up the WebView2 installer. In the same way that all good installers don't, it will silently close itself without a message upon a successful install. (If it fails on account of requiring Windows 10, go back to Step 4 and make sure you've set the compatibilities right.)
Now, at long last - we can finally install BYOND! Using the same 'run an arbitrary executable' option as before, open up the BYOND installer and go through the motions.
FINALE:
If all went well, BYOND should now be installed onto your system. The BYOND installer will close with an option to open up BYOND - if this doesn't actually launch BYOND for whatever reason, you have a couple other ways.
On at least some distros, installing a program this way via Wine will automatically add a system shortcut to your usual desktop environment's search bar, as if it were a native Linux program. BYOND web links from your browser will also work, so you can use Goonhub's 'join' buttons. (I know this is true on Mint at least, not sure about other distros.)
Otherwise, you can use the winetricks 'run an arbitrary executable' option to navigate within your prefix and launch BYOND's executable. On 32-bit prefixes this'll be Program Files/BYOND/bin/byond.exe, on 64-bit prefixes it'll instead be Program Files (x86)/BYOND/bin/byond.exe.
Congratulations! You can now log into the BYOND pager and play Goonstation.
TROUBLESHOOTING & KNOWN ISSUES:
Some of these issues are effectively guaranteed, others may be on a case-by-case basis, and you might even encounter problems that aren't here. If that happens: I probably can't help, sorry.
- If BYOND fails to launch at all, either after your first setup or just in general... yeah it does that sometimes. You might have some luck with using your task manager to kill byond.exe, otherwise a system reboot will usually do it. (From experience, though: after a fresh system startup, wait a minute or so before trying to launch BYOND.)
- You'll probably suffer from a severely flickering chatbox. My hope is that the eventual TGUI-ification of chat will fix this, but in the meantime you can click on the 'Text' button at the top of the area to close the commands window, and this does fix it. It also prevents you from accessing commands. Tradeoffs.
- Item & ability tooltips are at war with euclidean geometry. More news at 7. (I have found no fix for this.)
- It has trouble reconnecting automatically after a round restart. SOMETIMES it does. Usually it doesn't. Closing Goonstation and re-launching is your friend.
- Sometimes, after rebooting while in a round, Wine will immediately crash upon trying to load back in. This will go away on its own once the round ends, but don't despair: you can fix this immediately by opening up your BYOND pager (the BYOND application itself), clicking on the gear icon in the top right, 'Preferences', 'Games', then click 'Clear Cache'. You should then be able to reconnect (albeit it'll take a good 10-30 seconds to redownload all the assets that you just cleared.)
- LINUX MINT USERS SPECIFICALLY: By default, Mint will consume any alt-clicks, which prevents you from using Goon's alt-click to examine feature. You can fix this by opening up Mint's 'Windows' settings menu (literally just search 'Windows'), going into the 'Behaviour' tab, then setting the 'special key to move and resize windows' option to disabled. Voila - you can now examine again.
- One time I must have cast some voodoo spell or some shit because I wound up having a considerably more stable chatbox at the cost of crashing almost every time I entered or exited a pod, or whenever the round reconnected, or whenever trying to resize the chat window. I don't know how to reproduce this, I don't even know what I did differently to begin with. It went away after a reinstall.
- The respawn timer/button's text, the one you see as a ghost, is all fucked up. I assume it's trying to use some special font that corefonts doesn't cover, but I don't care enough to trawl through them to find out if this is the case. Luckily the actual functionality of the button is fine all the same.
- You may have a bunch of black windows (such as viewport, camera terminal, chatboxes) upon booting up Goonstation. The chatboxes can be dismissed by using the 'Fix chatbox' command, but the others are stubborn - as far as I know, the only way to be rid of them is to reboot Goon until you get lucky and they're not there.
- Upon tabbing back into the game, you'll probably have to click in order for the game to be re-focused and BYOND to start reading your inputs. Keep in mind that the click itself will be registered by the game so don't accidentally harmbaton someone or something. (I've misfired a Lawbringer before because of this.)
- No, I don't know how to clear your IE cache if you're running Goonstation via this method.
- When playing as the AI, exiting out of your shell can take a hot minute.
- TGUI works great, but sometimes it really doesn't like trying to have multiple TGUI windows open at once. Your mileage may vary.
- Sometimes, certain non-TGUI UI windows (such as the PDA, latejoin job selection, and character setup occupation selection) will blank after a good 10-ish minutes of playing. Rebooting Goonstation fixes this. (This might just be some kind of cache issue, I don't know.)
- When closing out of Goonstation and even BYOND as a whole, the WebView2 process might not end properly - leading to a lingering, dead process consuming memory just laying about in your system after every close. It also seems to make the game respond slower and slower with each one accrued. I advise going through your task manager regularly to kick these vagrants out.
- The BYOND pager's offer to update BYOND for you if there's a new version is a bold-faced lie.
CLOSING STATEMENTS:
Despite the technical issues listed above, Goonstation on Linux is 100% playable - I've been doing so since January 2025 and have had no trouble playing even high-engagement roles like AI and HoS. It's far from ideal, but hopefully the ongoing march of TGUI will fix what issues remain.