I honestly cannot figure this one out and searching online and the steam troubleshooter have been no help.
about a week ago my Deck stopped connecting to my WiFi as I was playing a game on it, one minute it’s fine, then the wifi connection is gone. I go to reconnect, it gets stuck on “connecting to [SSID]” and it will stay there for several minutes and say “failed to connect” and prompt me to re-enter my password. Double check password, it’s all good. Restart router, problem persists. Restart Deck, problem persists. Check my other devices, everything is connecting fine. Check if Steam is working on my laptop, it’s fine. I give up on tinkering with it because I’ve got a big trip coming up and I’d rather play Fallout 4 and Risk of Rain 2 offline than play nothing at all.
cut to my trip, deck connects to airport wifi, in-flight wifi, hotel wifi, all with no problem, no sign anything is wrong. Deck works perfect.
get home, deck still won’t connect to my WiFi, “fine I’ll just play RoR2 in bed offline” game says its launching but then never does, just gets stuck there. Try other games, and same thing happens with every single one.
“maybe a factory reset will do the trick? I’m desperate enough at this point” I go to settings and factory reset. It says “preparing 0%” for a second and then just gives up on resetting. “oh, so this thing is FUCKED fucked” I turn it off and hold the quick menu button to get into the boot menu and factory reset from there. It works, deck is reset, I try to connect to wifi… same fucking problem.
I have no ideas, im willing to try anything at this point. my Deck is basically a paperweight. i had a vanilla setup going too, no developer mode, no deckyloader, nothing at all. I’d poke around with my router but that shit is LOCKED DOWN by my ISP so I can’t change shit, and that doesn’t really explain all the weird shit it’s been doing offline, like with not launching games or factory resetting it. Please help, this is my main gaming device.
If it works fine on other networks then it’s your router provided by the ISP that’s the problem. If you can try setting 2.4 and 5Ghz networks to separate SSIDs with different passwords. I’ve got a couple of devices on my network that refuse to work if the networks are combined. You could try a different WiFi access point, an older unifi can be picked up cheap on eBay on if it’s just for testing. I was having similar issues with a Nintendo switch whilst working away, the hotels WiFi was just messed up
Sounds like it’s an issue with your router configuration and NOT your steam deck. If you have tethering on your cell phone you can use it temporarily to test if you get Wi-Fi that way, though I wouldn’t download anything while tethered to your phone if you have a data cap for your cell phone.
Since it sounds like your ISP has complete control of your router I would call their customer support and let them know you have a device that cannot connect. Most likely they’ll either do something like a factory reset on the router or ask for specific hardware information (like the MAC address) about the device you’re having trouble with (in this case your steam deck) so they can check the setting and ensure it isn’t blacklisted or something.
If they for some reason still won’t help or can’t get it fixed, you can always go out and buy your own router and hook it up. You’ll still have to contact your ISP again to get it setup but at least you’ll both have full control over the router configuration, and you won’t have to pay a monthly fee to rent a router from them.
EDIT: You may also be able to factory reset the router yourself. They usually have a pin hole in the back or something you can press with a paperclip or needle that will factory reset them when held down for a few seconds. Keep in mind anyone else connected to the router will have to redo all connections for all of their devices. If you live with other people it would probably be a good idea to let them know you want to try this before doing it so they aren’t thrown off the internet unexpectedly.
EDIT2: The reason you may have had issues launching games and factory resetting the device may be due to the fact that it had a Wi-Fi connection setup but it couldn’t get internet. Usually when the deck is online (even if you are playing an offline game) it will still try to contact steam servers to do things like notify friends you’re playing x game and update cloud saves, as well as ensure you aren’t playing games on more than one device (this last one is annoying). As a result, the game wouldn’t launch because it got stuck in limbo trying to reach the steam server, thinking it could because it saw it had internet access, but never getting a response because it didn’t actually have internet access. Going into the settings and setting the console to offline mode would fix this issue, assuming this was the cause. The factory reset could have been something similar, it may have been trying to check online for any update during the reset. Unfortunately both of these are conjecture and not something I can say for certain, but it at least means there’s a chance nothing is wrong with your steam deck. I would try getting it connected to the internet again and testing things before reaching out to Valve for support on the steam deck, since it sounds like it is mostly an issue with your router that you are unable to connect to the Wi-Fi currently.
If your Deck connects to everything but your home connection, then yeah, it’s very likely your router being the issue here. Assuming you did not have any config changes or firmware updates there then it may be dying, but I’d at least check the settings for some clues, maybe change the wifi frequency if it is fixed.
Try contacting support. Especially if it’s still under warranty.
Is this an OLED deck? The OLED deck wireless chip can connect to wifi 6 networks, but when it first came out there were a lot of issues with the Deck wifi chip stopping working at all when you would connect to wifi 6 networks with specific wifi 6 features turned on. After trying to connect to wifi 6 network, the wifi would stop working altogether until a reboot.
Valve released some updates for the OLED deck that fixed it for me, but the issue you’re describing sounds a lot like this. It’s possible your router updated with some new firmware and enabled a new wifi feature that’s crashing the deck’s wifi chip. It’s also worth mentioning that SteamOS recovery image doesn’t have the later wifi fixes that valve released, so if you try to use a recovery usb and connect to a wifi 6 network you’ll have issues.
Some network changes you can try to do (if you’re able to with your ISP router) are separating your wifi into 2.4 and 5ghz networks, and after a deck restart try connecting to the 2.4ghz network (make sure the deck isn’t set to automatically connect to the 5ghz channel). If that works, you can go through router settings and look for wifi 6 (AX) features and try turning them off. If you can’t do anything with the router, you’ll either need to get your ISP to issue you a new router (in case that one’s defective) or buy your own router and use it instead (this is usually the better option anyways, most ISPs charge you a rental fee on routers that’s a way worse deal than buying your own).
You can also do something like buy a wifi extender, the cheap ones are $10-15 and 2.4Ghz only. Make sure it has a different name from the main network (something like network_ext) and it should let you connect your deck.
