[guide] How to install Aslain's modpack for World of Warships on Steam

I just spent half an hour trying to figure this out so I thought I’d write it down somewhere in case it helps someone else in the future.

Aslain’s modpack contains a whole lot of quality-of-life mods for WoWs, for example Battle Expert (formerly known as Navigator) which shows the exact relative angles between your ship and the enemy’s. Almost feels like cheating to me, but Wargaming has endorsed this modpack and it even has a dedicated channel on the official discord server. Theoretically you have the same information without the mod, but it can be difficult to see how a ship is turning or changing speed by just looking at it.

These instructions are for when the game is installed through Steam, which looks like it uses some kind of overlay filesystem. This led to that the game install folder didn’t show up for the modpack installer when I tried other methods.

1. Install protontricks, I used the version available in Fedora’s repos.
2. Download the modpack installer from the official site
3. Find the WoWs install folder in Steam. Right-click World of Warships in the Steam games list, select Manage and “Browse local files” and the folder should open in your default file manager.
4. In a terminal, run the modpack installer .exe file in the game’s Wine prefix. I’m not entirely sure this makes any difference compared to running it in a new prefix as long as it can access the game files, it mostly seemed convenient to me. The app id for WoWs is 552990 and it should never change, but you can get it with protontricks -l if you’re curious. Change the file path so that it matches the file you downloaded and run:
   protontricks-launch --appid 552990 ~/Downloads/Aslains_WoWs_Modpack_Installer_v.13.6.1_01.exe
   It will print a lot of “failed to create” error messages for system dlls and exes, but that appears to be normal, and the setup window should open after a while.
5. After some release notes etc. the installer will eventually ask you for the game’s install dir. As far as I can tell, the game files do not show up anywhere on C:, but Steam mounts your Linux file system on Z: so we can use that instead. Browse to the game install folder, which we located in step 3, and select it. My install folder on Linux is
   /mnt/faststore/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/World of Warships/ so I select
   Z:mntfaststoreSteamLibrarysteamappscommonWorld of Warships in the modpack installer.
6. Either manually select the mods you want or use the recommended selection. As I wrote before, many for these mods feel like they give you an in-game advantage over other players, but WG has said they’re legal…
7. The first time I ran the installer it hung on “Finishing installation”. It appears to happen to a few Windows users too but the mod dev doesn’t know what causes it. I noticed that there was a cleanup process running in Wine C:windowssystem32cmd.exe /C DEL /s /f *.orig which shouldn’t take so long time so I killed it (in Linux) and the installer continued. The next time I ran it this didn’t happen, and it only took a few seconds to finish the installation.

If you have the game installed as standalone, e.g. Lutris, then I think you can just run the modpack installer in the same Wine prefix, and you should see the game’s install folder under C:\Program Files as you would on Windows. I.e. select the game in Lutris, click the tiny arrow next to the wine glass button and select “Run EXE inside Wine prefix” and then choose the installer you downloaded. But I haven’t done this so I promise nothing.

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of World of Warships, I borderline hate this game and only play it because some of my friends are obsessed with it. The gameplay is a bit too slow paced for my taste, there are a lot of hard counters which you can’t do anything about in random matchmaking, and carriers (planes) can turn any game into pure suffering. I also dislike the game’s monetization scheme, lootboxes are expensive and most have a tiny chance to give something really good and a big chance to give you complete garbage. The game might be f2p, but at higher tiers it becomes unplayable without a premium subscription (€10/month) since ship maintenance gets more expensive than your earnings. To maximize your ship’s performance you need a high level captain, expensive modules and also buffs which are consumed each game. My friend tries to argue that the game is not pay-to-win because you can also grind ingame resources to buy those, but you’ll spend many hours playing at a disadvantage if you don’t buy your way past it. Just my personal opinion of course.

If you despite my warnings felt an urge to try this game (honestly I thought it was quite fun at lower tiers) then check if any of your friends are already playing it and ask them for a referral code. Both of you get free stuff from being recruited by someone else and once you’ve created an account it’s too late, unless you stop playing completely for 3 months. If you do that it is possible for your friend to send you a recruiting link if you want to start playing again.

Just a heads up, I’ve read that it’s impossible to connect an existing wargaming.net account to a Steam account on Linux, so make sure you authenticate through Steam when you create the account if you plan on playing it through Steam. Though if you have Windows dual boot then I think you can link the accounts there if you need to.