Playing Minecraft in VR! (Quest 2 + SteamVR + ALVR + ViveCraft + Linux Mint)

I've tried getting VR working under Linux 3 or 4 times in the past year without any results. There's a lot of moving pieces, and the documentation on many of them is not clear. I'll detail how I finally got it working here, so if you have a similar setup you can (hopefully) do the same.

Disclaimers

The Quest 2's OS, Minecraft, and Steam/SteamVR are all proprietary software. If your goal is to run Minecraft in VR, obviously the setup won't be fully FOSS, but hopefully the setup can be somewhat improved with a FOSS headset and alternative to SteamVR. This is the only headset I have access to, and SteamVR (paired with ALVR) was the only program I found to work for me so far.

Secondly, I won't pretend to know much about what I'm talking about here. As far as I'm concerned, making this work was simply a puzzle of invoking the right complicated incantation. This is a guide to invoke a similar incantation, not to explain how the pieces actually work. If this doesn't work for you, I won't be able to help troubleshoot.

And third, this guide would probably work on Debian 12, but I've only tried it on Mint and all the commands assume as much.

Guide

Installing Prismlauncher for Minecraft

I use the Prism Launcher. It's FOSS, and makes managing different combinations of mods and versions extremely easy. Their main method of distribution is through Flatpak, but ViveCraft wasn't able to communicate with the headset through the Flatpak sandbox, so I had to use their Debian package.

Here's the relevent documentation at time of writing

As per the documentation, we need to add the "prebuild-MPR repository" first. I replaced the lsb_release variable with "bookworm" in these commands so it works on the most recent version of Linux Mint.

wget -qO - 'https://proget.makedeb.org/debian-feeds/prebuilt-mpr.pub' | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/prebuilt-mpr-archive-keyring.gpg 1> /dev/null

echo "deb [arch=all,$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/prebuilt-mpr-archive-keyring.gpg] https://proget.makedeb.org prebuilt-mpr bookworm" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/prebuilt-mpr.list

sudo apt update

Now, we can install Prismlauncher:

sudo apt install prismlauncher

Prismlauncher should be installed now. I won't go into detail about every button to click as the graphical UI is pretty intuitive, but you'll next need to:

  • Sign into your Minecraft account
  • Create a new "instance", select whatever version of Minecraft you'd like, and add a mod loader (I'd recommend Fabric)
  • Edit that new instance, and in the mods tab, search for and add the ViveCraft mod

    • Installing Steam and SteamVR

    Steam is already in Mint's repostories, so you can simply run "sudo apt install steam" and you'll get it. Accept the dependencies it'll ask about.

    Inside Steam, search for and install SteamVR.

    ALVR

    Here's the relevent documentation at time of writing

    Follow the instructions in the installation guide to download and extract the alvr_launcher executable. You'll need to run "chmod +x [path-to-launcher]" to make the file executable.

    On Linux Mint, I was getting an error unblocking the relevent driver, and after finding this issue discovered it was because ALVR expects the Steam config directory to be in a different path than where it's installed on Mint. This was fixed by symlinking the config directory to where ALVR expects to find it:

    mkdir .local/share/Steam

    ln -s ~/.steam/debian-installation/config ~/.local/share/Steam/config

    You'll also need to install the ALVR apk on your Quest. I found it in the Meta store, so there was no need to sideload it.

    Follow the few remaining steps in the linked documentation to link your Quest to your PC.

    Usage

    Assuming you've successfully installed Prismlauncher + ViveCraft, Stream + SteamVR, and ALVR on your PC and Quest, you should be ready to play. Open ALVR on your PC, run SteamVR (there's a convenient button to start SteamVR from the ALVR launcher), launch your modded Minecraft instance, launch the ALVR app on your Quest, and everything should be connected and you'll be playing Minecraft in VR.

    While this was written with Minecraft in mind, this setup has also let me play VRChat and Overte, which makes me feel optimistic about other VR games.