Obtaining asset files
=====================

vkQuake is an open source Quake engine, it does not ship
with any proprietary assets (textures, sounds, etc) from
the original game. If you want to play the game in all of
its glory, you'll need to obtain these assets. Either the
original, or the Enhanced (2021) version by Nightdive
Studios should work. There are many ways to obtain these
assets:

game-data-packager
------------------

This is the recommended, Debian-native way to obtain and
manage Quake 1 (and other) game asset files. You can either
point it to an existing directory or let it download the
shareware version of the game from the internet. It'll then
compile the found assets into one or more .deb files for
installation and management by the Debian package manager.
Install the game-data-packager package and read
game-data-packager(6) for more information.

Proprietary game stores
-----------------------

vkQuake has support for auto discovering your
already-installed Quake game if it was purchased from
Steam, GOG, or the Epic Game Store. If it matters to you:
GOG will provide you with a *DRM-free* game.

Once purchased, you should be able to just launch the game
and have it auto discover the installed game and its
assets. You can tweak which game store(s) to probe using
the -[no]egs, -[no]steam, -[no]gog launch flags.

Copy the assets manually
------------------------

Or, you could also manually create a .vkquake directory in
your home directory and copy over the 'id1' directory from
your installed game. It should contain at least a
'pak0.pak' file. Please not that these paths are
case-sensitive; use lowercase. If you're using the
remaster, you can copy 'QuakeEX.kpf' to the .vkquake
directory instead. ~/.vkquake is the default "base
directory", you can change where the game finds this by
using the -basedir argument.

If you have both the original game AND the remaster
installed, you can use the -original/-remaster flags to
prefer one or the other.

Any mods that are included with any of these installs can
also be copied over, e.g. the hipnotic, ad, rogue
subdirectories. They can be launched from the in-game menu,
or via the '-game <mod>' argument, where <mod> is the
directory's name.

Launching the game
==================

By default, vkQuake will look in ~/.vkquake for your game
data (or use the store detection logic described above),
this can be changed with the -basedir argument, e.g.

	vkquake -basedir /usr/share/games/quake

This will point vkQuake to use the assets installed from
the .dpkg files you created and installed if you used
game-data-packager mentioned above.

You can also launch a mod directly using the -game flag:

	vkquake -basedir /mnt/games/quake -game qbj3

This will launch you into the Quake Brutalist Jam III mod,
which can be downloaded for free from:

https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-brutalist-jam-iii.549/

It must be extracted to a "qbj3" subdirectory in your base
directory (-basedir).

The quake package
-----------------

You could also install the quake package, which will
provide you with a more Debian native way to discover
(using the alternatives system) and launch your preferred
Quake engine with any necessary arguments to use the assets
installed by game-data-packager. It also provides desktop
launchers for the base Quake game and any discovered mods.

User data
=========

By default, vkQuake will use the .vkquake base directory to
store its user data (configs and save files), this can be
changed by supplying the '-multiuser' flag, which will
cause the game to better follow the XDG Base Directory
standard, and instead store these files in
~/.local/share/vkQuake.

 -- John Rowley <dpkg@johnrowley.me>  Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:50:23 +0100
