Ah, Cities Skylines 2:
I recently got back into Cities Skylines 2 after leaving the game for a while due to the release of PDX Mods essentially breaking all of the mods I had been using via r2modman at the time.
Now that some time has passed, I decided to give it another go. I was quite interested to see that the Skyve mod manager has now come to C:S2, meaning that I didn't actually have to directly interact with PDX mods and could use a proper mod manager instead. Installing Skyve is supposed to be a two-step process, first you install the Skyve "mod", which is essentially just an installer, then you use that installer to install the actual Skyve program. Once installed, Skyve is a free-standing application that interacts with the C:S2 data without requiring steam or C:S2 to be running at the time. Not only can Skyve install and uninstall mods without needing to launch C:S2, but it also alerts you when other users have flagged a mod as broken or incompatible with another mod you have installed.
Unfortunately, while C:S2 runs beautifully on Linux without any additional configuration (likely better than it does on Windows), Skyve was a different story. Skyve requires the Microsoft dotnet framework and doesn't appear compatible the opensource alternative Mono, which is commonly what would be used on Linux. It took a bit of trial and error to get Skyve running, so I thought I would share the process which ultimately worked for me:
The first step is simply installing the Skyve "mod" via PDX Mods. After installing the Skyve mod and restarting C:S2 twice, the "Install Skyve" button appeared in the menu as it was supposed to and clicking on it did bring up an installer interface. The installer appeared to run, but ended with an error message. I switched from Proton Experimental to Proton GE 9.20, using ProtonUP to download and active the new Proton version. ProtonUp isn't needed, but it does make the process very simple.
After switching, the installer ran without any errors, but Skyve itself would not start.
Next, I used ProtonTricks to install the .Net 4.8 framework:
Open ProtonTricks and select the game:
Then select the "default" Wine prefix:
Then install component:
Then select .Net 4.8 (other 4.x versions might work):
That installed .Net, but when I tried to launch Skyve, I received an error about the .Net "RootInstall" registry not being found, so my next step was to install that:
In ProtonTricks, select "Run regedit"
Once in regedit, I navigated to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/.NETFramework
There, I created the missing registry key, pointing to the .Net framework path:
Finally, my last step was to run Skyve.
I ran the binary via ProtonTricks' application launcher, which ensures that the program is run in the correct prefix. Skyve started and immediately recognized the C:S2 install and correctly listed all of my current mods and even suggested a few I should remove. After confirming that I wanted to remove the mod, I booted up C:S2 and found that the mod had been successfully removed. I tried installing a new mod as well, and that worked exactly as intended.
Hopefully this might be helpful to someone else who finds themselves struggling to get Skyve running.
Thanks for reading!
