Bloodborne for Linux

The PlayStation 4 version of Bloodborne running natively on Linux. The game's own code runs directly on the CPU and its graphics are translated to Vulkan: it is not an emulator.

This fork is built on bbport by deadinside28. It adds improvements of its own, and others from the community, taken from pull requests and other projects (credits).

No game files are included. You need your own decrypted dump of Bloodborne with update 1.09, from a retail release (which ones). This project is not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment or FromSoftware.

The players' guide: installing, playing online and seamless co-op, the Steam Deck, and what to do when something goes wrong.

• Multiplayer: online messages, bloodstains, ghosts, bells and summons, on The Hunter's Dream or a server of your own; Seamless Co-op (experimental), co-op that lasts through deaths, lamps and areas, for up to 5 hunters; and local co-op (split screen), 2 to 4 players on one PC, each with their own controller.
• In-game map (Hunter's Atlas): a fullscreen map with where you are, lamps and items, and fast travel to the lamps you've found.
• Frame rate unlocked (up to 120 FPS recommended; the game's movement can break above it) or capped at 30, 60 or 90, and changed while you play from the in-game menu. Resolutions from 720p to 4K, and any aspect ratio (4:3 to 32:9 ultrawide, how).
• Upscaling: AMD FSR 3.1 and FSR 4, NVIDIA DLSS (GeForce RTX) and TAA, and frame generation (FSR 3.1, or DLSS on GeForce RTX 40 and newer).
• Any controller: PlayStation, Xbox and Switch pads with their own button prompts in the game, and keyboard and mouse, with keys you can rebind (bbport 0.7's Dark Souls III-style layout, or the classic one of earlier Linux versions), movement keys that keep a sprint through turns (the last of two opposite keys wins; keyboard_movement=0.7 in bbport.ini for bbport 0.7's ramped stick) and the mouse as a pointer in the game's menus.
• Exit to desktop from the game's title and System menus.
• Cheats and gameplay tweaks: never die, stealth, camera distance, ragdoll physics and more.
• Trophies and the platinum, with a notice in the game like on the PS4.
• Add to Steam in one click, and Discord Rich Presence with your area, your co-op partners and a button to this repository.
• Launcher and in-game menu (Insert, or hold L3 + R3) in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
• AppImage ready for any distribution and the Steam Deck, which updates itself from the launcher (and can go back to an earlier release).
• Mods and community patches, without touching the game files (how).

• Linux x86-64 and a GPU with Vulkan 1.3: AMD or Intel with Mesa, or NVIDIA with NVIDIA's driver.
• About 6 GB of free memory, 10 GB for 1440p or 4K.

1. Download Bloodborne-bbport-x86_64.AppImage from the latest release.
2. Make it executable and run it.
3. Choose your game folder (the one with eboot.bin) and press Play.

Saves and settings go to ~/.local/share/bbport; Setup → Saves exports your saves into a .zip and imports them back, or from shadPS4, and can keep a copy of them from before each game (off by default). The Game of the Year edition already has The Old Hunters; with the base game, its DLC goes in Setup → DLC folder (how).

In the launcher's Multiplayer → Online tab, turn on Play online, choose a server and press Test in the Status row (every line should get a check mark):

• Seamless Hunt (the default): the community server of Seamless Co-op (BBSC), with players on the Windows port. Make an account from the launcher with Create (docs/ONLINE.md).
• The Hunter's Dream: sign in with Discord. You play with bbhost's players (docs/ONLINE.md).
• Your own server: for your group, with Docker and Tailscale (docs/SERVER.md).
• Seamless Co-op (BBSC), in the same tab: every player needs it, and summons across areas need its game server, which your own server can run (docs/ONLINE.md).

With online play on, the game starts online by itself, as PLAY ONLINE on a PS4. If you turned off Skip the “play online / offline” choice and pick offline, choose Log In on the title screen later for online play; until then the co-op bells are greyed out.

Everyone in a session needs update 1.09. Turn cheats off when you play with others. Ports, firewalls and the rest: docs/ONLINE.md.

Several games on one PC, one per player, each in its part of the screen with its own controller (the launcher's Multiplayer → Local tab): choose the players (2 to 4), the layout and each player's controller, then press Play together. Player 1 plays with the launcher's settings and saves; players 2 to 4 get their own saves and settings in ~/.local/share/bbport/coop/player<N> (copied from player 1's the first time, about 400 MB each), without online play or Discord. One player can use the keyboard and mouse. Only player 1 has sound unless you turn that off. The windows can go to a monitor of their own (Monitor), and Copy player 1's saves gives another player the same characters (their own saves are backed up first). The windows are placed through X11, which works in a Wayland session too (XWayland).

On Arch Linux (or CachyOS, Manjaro…):

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake ninja python python-gobject gtk4 libadwaita sdl3 \
    vulkan-headers vulkan-icd-loader glslang spirv-headers spirv-cross ffmpeg boost fmt \
    robin-map xxhash zydis miniz protobuf nlohmann-json openssl miniupnpc python-pillow ttf-dejavu
paru -S magic_enum vulkan-memory-allocator xbyak   # from the AUR

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ayozetr/bloodborne_linux
cd bloodborne_linux
bash build.sh
python3 launcher/bbport_launcher.py

With Nix, bash build.sh gets every dependency by itself. DLSS needs bash tools/build_dlss.sh once; the AppImage is bash packaging/appimage-sharun.sh, which bundles the libraries of the PC it runs on. Releases are built with bash packaging/appimage-in-arch.sh (Docker, plain Arch Linux): on distributions built for newer processors (CachyOS's x86-64-v3 repositories, for example) the AppImage would otherwise not start on CPUs without AVX2. Environment variables for the launcher's Advanced → Developer → Extra variables: docs/ENVIRONMENT.md. Problems: docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md.

If you need a Windows version, I recommend Supermedo's Windows port and Awakenchan's LanternEngine.

This fork is built on the port deadinside28 created, but it has a lot of hours of work behind it, and above all hours and hours of testing things and hunting down fixes so it runs as well as it can. I always try to fix every report as soon as possible, because I know how much this game means to some people. If it's useful to you and you'd like to support it, you can on Ko-fi.

Built on bbport by deadinside28, with shadPS4's renderer, and with work from many people and projects: everyone is in docs/CREDITS.md. It includes code from Lantern Engine by Awaken (https://github.com/Awakenchan/LanternEngine). Components and their licenses: BBPORT.md.

GNU GPL v3 or later (LICENSE). Files taken from other projects keep their own notices: most are GPL-2.0-or-later (bbport, shadPS4), which allows them to be distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later. Third-party components keep their own licenses. NVIDIA and DLSS are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.