selja@hepta

after several days of wiggling it around, i may have managed to lift the curse on the steam deck that i previously mentioned.

it turns out that it probably just had to do with something going fucky with the battery management. it'd crash around certain reported charge thresholds - unclear why, or what those actual thresholds were, but there was basically a Zone where it would crash and outside that it wouldn't. it'd additionally report a way too low battery charge. one time i thought i'd already fixed it, but i'd done several things wrong

so, let's document here what the community is calling "recalibrating" the battery. i guess it does recalibrate the battery management, but it's really not great for the battery in all likelihood. let's go

note: apply this procedure only when your battery indicator is patently wrong. if in desktop mode it claims your battery health is 20% when your deck is brand new, if your battery health suddenly dropped from a high to a low number, if it appears to discharge very quickly but gets stuck on 3% while you can continue playing halo for two hours... that's when you can do this.

do not completely discharge and recharge a lithium battery repeatedly. if you've experienced nickel-based battery chemistries, for instance in early 2000s cell phones, you may remember those batteries sometimes needing deep discharge and recharge cycles to recover capacity. this is not the case with lithium batteries, and the problem here is with the system keeping track of the battery capacity. there's nearly always such a system in a device powered by lithium batteries, because (unlike nickel chemistries) lithium batteries love to catch fire and explode if you overcharge them, and they short out if you discharge them too much

okay, now let's go.

1. discharge the battery until the device no longer turns on. presumably a full discharge isn't necessary for the procedure, but the main symptoms include the battery getting stuck on a very low number like 3% for an extended amount of time, possibly even hours. therefore you need a full discharge to be sure that the battery actually is low
2. plug the deck into a charger and turn it on. the battery charge indicator should show less than 5% (because it's actually depleted!). leave it charging in game mode until the battery indicator reaches 100%. note: it has to reach 100% exactly. the battery charge indicator might reach 99% very quickly, and much like with discharge, it's the rest of the way from 99% to 100% that's important for getting the numbers to start displaying right. we want a full charge, specifically. this could take three hours
3. once the battery has charged enough to show 100%, you can reboot the device. now the battery numbers should seem a lot more correct, and the battery health in desktop mode should be back to where it was (probably close to 100%)

if this procedure does not work, your battery may be faulty. this is something that happens. if your deck is two years old and youve subjected it to a full discharge and recharge cycle daily, the battery may just be starting to wear out. that's normal. also, in general, if a multi-cell battery appears to charge to full but somewhere halfway through it suddenly drops to below 10%, it's possible that one or more cells in the battery pack are damaged. in this case, the battery should be replaced.

anyway that's my take on steam deck batteries. turns out "recalibrating" is indeed something you have to do sometimes. it's unclear if it will still crash, but i've seen no sign of such crashes.

let's hope it doesn't need further uncursing.