Okay so, I just got party-wiped fighting a weird knight-thing after the party regrouped.

Two questions:

1. When is the “point of no return” on using the save crystal? When the party reunited, the save crystal was greyed out in my inventory. I moved around a bunch, but it never became usable

2. When the party split up, my “mains” (Tifa and Red XIII ) left me, and their Materia was put in my inventory. I got Vincent and Cait, and thought, okay cool! I’ll just give them the Materia, and then when the party regroups, I’ll get it back!

…that didn’t happen. The party regrouped, and I was given the option to put Tifa and R13 back in the party, but Vince and Cait still had my mainstay materia (including my major healing mats).

That led to me getting squashed as I was desperately looking for a place to use the Save Crystal.

So….what am I supposed to do here? I haven’t decided if I want to restart the entire dungeon again, but if I do, I want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Okay, so not technically, but practically speaking, it did.

This is going to be a long post, so TL;DR: For some reason, Moonlight with the Steam Deck while docked has for some reason become absolutely terrible, and I have no clue why.

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MY ORIGINAL SETUP

I would say I play 90% of my games streaming from my PC to various devices around my house (usually the NVIDIA Shield or the Steam Deck).

For the majority, I streamed from my PC to the NVIDIA Shield.

My PC is about 50 feet away from the Shield. To make my controllers work with rumble (and other bells and whistles), I snake a 25-foot USB Extender down the stairs, and connect it to a 4-port USB data hub (where the controller, M+KB, and Headset dongles plug into). The "main event" is Apollo on the PC, and Moonlight on the NVIDIA Shield (plugged in via ethernet).

No real issues on any of this. Occasionally, I would also Moonlight on the Steam Deck through WiFi. No issues here either. Everything ran like a dream.

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I Got the Steam Controller

Cool, right? I was a big fan of the original Steam Controller, and was excited to replace my 8bitdo controller with this. I plugged it into my USB hub and it worked!

And then I updated the puck and controller.

And then it didn't work!

For some reason, the controller won't connect to the PC via the data hub.

It also (like other controllers) won't really work when plugged into the NVIDIA Shield. The Shield detects it as a controller, but you lose features (such as rumble), and Steam Input also doesn't really recognize it.

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Enter: The Steam Deck Dock

No big deal though, right? I've got a Steam Deck, and a dock! Moonlight works great on that, so I'll just replace the Shield with the Dock and get back to playing.

I plugged it all in, fired up Moonlight and...

The performance was terrible. Awful. Not even the game, but I mean the Moonlight App itself. Like it was running at half the frames. Streaming-wise, just as bad. The host would be running at 90fps, and the stream would spit out 20.

Turning off V-sync in the Moonlight settings helped a little, but the output was still what I would call unacceptable (at the very least, not at all what I was used to).

From there, I started just throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall:

• tried a third party Dock (didn't work)
• tried WiFi instead of Ethernet (duh, didn't work)
• tried wiping Moonlight and reinstalling (didn't work)
• wondered if I was crazy, and tried Moonlight on the Steam Deck in handheld mode (worked like a dream!)

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Steam Remote Play?

My cup of desperation runneth over, so I eventually said, "ah, what the hell, I've give Steam Remote Play a shot!" and...it was shockingly good! Couldn't tell a difference in latency, and the visuals seemed to look better (but maybe this was just wishful thinking).

But, it was incredibly finicky. Some games (Diablo IV) ran with no problem.

Others (Battlefield VI) would launch into outer space (so I'd get a black screen); I'd have to force shutdown the Steam Deck, and then after the restart, connect to the Stream.

Even more would work sometimes. Wolfenstein: The New Order/Hades 2 would occasionally boot just fine, but at some point during play the stream would break; my "frames" would skyrocket to 6,000 - even though it felt like 20. The only fix was to shut the game down and relaunch.

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In Conclusion (Help?)

So, I really have no idea what the solution is (other than going back to my 8BitDo controller and the NVIDIA Shield).

The trigger seems to be the dock. Has anybody else run into this issue and found a solution? I'm open to ideas.