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Civilization 6 and "Beyond Earth" are not launching (Linux Mint)
Racoon1604 Oct 31, 2023
I just got the humble bundle with a bunch of the Sid Meier games.

Yesterday, Beyond Earth started fine and played the opening animation and then got stuck on a splash screen, the music continues, but that's it, no menu. I then tried turning off the DLCs (The expanded maps one and Rising Tide) and was then able to play for several hours.

When I tried playing again today it won't launch at all. The Steam "Play" button turns back to "Play" a few seconds after pressing it. No windows launch or anything.

Similar with Civ6. Yesterday it launched but then froze at a black screen saying "Loading, Please Wait" but never seemed to load. Today it's the same as BE, no windows launch, nothing, just the Play turning green again.

I'm on Linux Mint 21.2. I've tried launching the games regular (the Linux version) and through Proton. I've also tried the Runtime thing but that didn't change anything.

I just reinstalled both games, have verified the installs, rebooted the laptop. No change.

There's lots of threads, but I can't actually find any solutions.

I'm on Linux Mint 21.2. I've tried launching the game regular (the Linux version) and through Proton.

Any advice?
tuubi Oct 31, 2023
I'm not sure this helps you at all, but I just installed Civ 6 to test and it seems to start and run just fine for me. I started up the native version, switched graphics to 1080p Ultra, ran the Graphics and AI benchmarks, shut down and restarted the game. No problems at all.

While I'm on Mint 21.2, I'm running an upgraded kernel (6.5.9) and Mesa from Kisak's PPA. You can see my hardware under my avatar.

I don't own Beyond Earth so can't test that one.
iwantlinuxgames Oct 31, 2023
perhaps try launching the game from a CLI...you'll need to have steam running so it can do it's DRM thing. the console should give you an idea of what's going on.
eldaking Oct 31, 2023
Both games have known issues on Linux. Civ 6 needs you to manually point the game to the right version of a library, and then it works - but with quite bad performance. It is usually better to run the Windows version using Proton (Steam's tool for running windows games), though that still needs some tinkering to disable the awful 2K launcher that trashes performance. Here is a guide to get Civ 6 working - if you need help with Proton or setting launch options, we can point you to comprehensive guides as well. Since they added the blasted launcher, I haven't been able to play the native Linux version, not even skipping it... on Windows skipping it works, though I have some bugs I didn't have before.

It has been a while since I played BE, but it and Civ 5 both had library problems (not the same library, weirdly enough). For BE, it is libtbb.so.2; I don't remember if I had this problem, or if I had an easier solution, but one source that is generally trustworthy (and uncluttered by people's personal reports and questions) is the arch wiki (don't mind that it is for Arch Linux, it is just a good source generally, and in this case if the game didn't work for you this solution should do).

Both games do work, and I have played them a lot on Linux; but they do require some extra steps (for Civ 6 it is particularly annoying because it didn't before...).

P.S.: the fact you were able to play BE and it stopped working is particularly weird, but since it is no longer working do try the general fix; if it doesn't work, then gotta debug more. Also, if a game doesn't work on Linux, trying the Windows version with Proton is worth a shot; sometimes the port is old, and Proton is more up to date, for example.

Last edited by eldaking on 31 October 2023 at 11:46 pm UTC
tuubi Nov 1, 2023
Quoting: eldakingCiv 6 needs you to manually point the game to the right version of a library, and then it works - but with quite bad performance.
Doesn't seem to be necessary here. The game launched just fine. Performance might not be great, but seemed good enough.
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