Discovery on Linux. Article Guide (2025) (Requires update by Koshi materials)

[Sally]

So here's a summary of how I install Disco through Wine:

1. Get the needed runtime deps here, the vanilla game here, the mod installer here and a Wine runner that has been tested, for example this one.

2. Extract the tarball on "~/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/" and mount the Freelancer CD ISO somewhere, /mnt should do, mount it with "sudo mount --read-only /path/to/Freelancer.iso /mnt".

3. Create a launcher for the game on Lutris and select "add locally installed game", on "Game options" leave the executable field empty for now, but point the "Wine prefix" path to an empty directory, the prefix architecture to 32bit, go to "Runner options" and make sure to select the correct wine runner, unless you have DXVK 2.7.1 or newer listed on the DXVK context menu, set DXVK to "Manual". You can also enable the DXVK FPS overlay with the DXVK_HUD=fps environment variable on the system tab.

4. Select the launcher we just created and open a Bash terminal, type "winetricks directplay msacm32 dotnet48" to install these. You must do this step exactly as described because spawning a regular Bash terminal won't set the environment variables that point to the right wine prefix, don't use a regular terminal, once winetricks is done you can close the window.

5. Select the launcher again and this time click on "Run an EXE inside Wine prefix", head to /mnt and run SETUP.EXE, when the installer launches select "Express install", this will install Freelancer 1.0, the fonts and whatever bit is needed to run the game into the prefix.

6. Run another EXE inside the same Wine prefix, and install Discovery this time, change the default install path for Discovery to "C:\Discovery" for the sake of convenience so you don't need to dig deeper into the prefix if you wanna browse the game directory, once done run EXE again and install "vc_redist.x86.exe".

7. Open another Bash terminal inside the prefix, change directory to "drive_c/users/<your username>/", delete the Documents symlink to your regular home Documents and create a directory, this will keep the game saved config and accounts inside the prefix, in case you wanna play other mods or vanilla, you can do so with "rm Documents && mkdir Documents". Close it once done.

8. Select the launcher and click "Configure", in "Game options" now we can set the game executable to the Discovery Launcher, which if you followed the docs step-by-step should be "/path/to/prefix/drive_c/Discovery\DSLauncher.exe".

9. Select the launcher and click "Play", see if the launcher starts, you may come accross this issue which has been reported and hopefully will soon be fixed, but other than that the game should launch and work.

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"I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute." - RMS