• On a standalone host that knows its own hardware, the plugin now trusts the host's device identity. When the host reports what device it's running on (and which plugin version it loaded), device-aware shelves use that, falling back to the plugin's own detection otherwise — and the Diagnostics panel and bug-report text now show the host's device and that version too.
• A new Performance panel (Settings → Advanced → Developer mode) shows how busy the home-screen layer is — boot/mount timing, how many timers and watchers are active, and how often the home screen is re-checking itself — for anyone helping diagnose a slowdown. It only updates when you press Refresh, just like the existing System Information panel.
• Lower background CPU/battery use on the home screen. Several background checks that used to run on a fixed timer (to keep the native Recents row hidden correctly and to highlight the focused game) now only run in response to an actual change, and every shelf shares one check instead of each running its own. Highlight tracking also fully pauses while you're in a game. No visible change to behavior — just less work happening when nothing's changing.
• New smart shelves no longer show your hidden games by default. A shelf like "Recently Played" or "On Deck" used to treat a hidden game the same as any other — now it's filtered out from the start. It's a regular, visible filter on the shelf, so you can open the shelf's filter settings and remove it (or set it to "any") if you want hidden games back on that one. Shelves you already created aren't affected.
• A faster startup. A few background trackers that aren't needed for the home screen's first paint now start a beat later, once things settle, instead of competing with it right away. No visible change otherwise.
• More resilient startup. If the home screen's shelves ever fail to finish loading, the plugin now backs off automatically after 20 seconds — restoring Steam's own recents row too — so Steam's own home stays usable, instead of potentially getting stuck.
• Fixed a shelf reading from a Steam collection sometimes showing incomplete content for a few seconds right after restarting Steam, then correcting itself a moment later. Most noticeable on a composite shelf that combines a collection with other sources. Confirmed fixed on a real library that hit this every restart.
• Fixed the home screen's hero background sometimes briefly showing the wrong game's art while things are still loading on restart, before settling on the right one a couple of seconds later. Confirmed fixed with a frame-by-frame recording of an actual restart.
• The home screen no longer visibly reorganizes itself while shelves finish loading after a restart. Steam's own home now stays fully visible and usable the whole time; your shelves then appear all at once, already in their final order, instead of shifting around as each one finishes loading.
• Shelves built from a Steam collection — on their own or combined with other sources — now show up noticeably faster after restarting Steam, and smart shelves remember their last result across a restart instead of recalculating from scratch every time. Combined, these measurably shorten how long the home screen takes to settle after a restart.
• The Performance panel's numbers are now color-coded (good/worth-watching/worth-investigating), matching the same color language as the existing on-screen debug overlay, so you don't have to know what "normal" looks like to spot something off.
• Fixed a few Performance panel labels showing up in English regardless of your chosen language, and one label missing everywhere, including English. Both are now fixed across all supported languages.
• Fixed the home screen sometimes sitting on Steam's plain home for a few extra seconds before your shelves appeared, and gamepad focus occasionally getting stuck with nothing selectable afterward. Both are fixed together — the shelves now appear as soon as they're actually ready, measured dropping from over 4 seconds to about 1 on a real device.
• Shelves that pull from your wishlist or the Steam store now load noticeably faster when you return to the home screen, instead of waiting on the network every single time.
• Fixed gamepad navigation occasionally freezing completely after returning to the home screen — shelves visible, but nothing selectable and no way to move focus. This could repeat on every return until Steam was restarted; it's now caught and avoided.
• Fixed shelves disappearing for an entire session after restarting Steam while you were in a game, the Quick Access panel, or settings, instead of on the home screen. A safety feature meant to catch a genuinely stuck startup was mistaking "home hasn't been opened yet" for "home is stuck" — it now waits correctly.
• With cloud sync on, one device's profile no longer bleeds its settings onto another (e.g. a docked machine's "Showcase" profile no longer shows up on a handheld running its own profile).
• Game artwork no longer re-downloads every time you return to the home screen, which was adding avoidable delay — your custom artwork still updates instantly when you change it.
• Fixed a card's "Update" hint sometimes still showing after the update had already finished, making the quick-launch action look like it launched the game instead of updating it — the action itself was always correct, only the label was stale. It now stays current.
• Even less background work while you're in a game. Two more Home-screen helpers (the card badge overlay and the Side Nav panel) now pause entirely while a game is running, instead of continuing to watch for changes with nothing to show — picking back up the moment you return.
• Coming back to the home screen is now fast — about a second instead of five or six — and it no longer shows Steam's plain home first. Whether you return from a game's page, the Library or anywhere else, your shelves appear complete right away and your previously selected game stays selected. Measured on a real Deck across 20 back-and-forth trips.
• Snappier home rebuilds in general: a few per-card costs (price lookups, layout checks, animation sampling) now happen once per rebuild instead of once per game. The plugin also stops watching the whole screen for changes once your shelves are in place (it watches just the home area), which cut the return-to-home time further to about 0.65 s on average.
• A safety net for bad starts. If the home screen fails to finish loading on three Steam starts in a row, the plugin steps aside on the next start — Steam's own home stays usable — and tells you in the Quick Access panel, with a "Leave safe mode" button to try again on the following restart.
• Even less idle work: background checks for friends activity and launcher catalogs now run only if something you've set up actually uses them, and the hero background pauses its focus tracking while you're in a game.
• Shelves show up as they load, top to bottom, instead of all at once at the end. The first shelf appears as soon as it's ready and the rest follow in order — nothing ever jumps in above what you're already looking at.
• The hero zoom now pauses when you leave the home screen idle (after a minute without input) and picks up again on the first press — the same behavior as Steam's own home, and no more background work while the Deck just sits there.
• Fixed the first shelf sitting glued to the top of the home screen on installs without a CSS Loader theme — it now has the same hero band above its title as the native recents row.
• Fixed gamepad focus sometimes getting stuck in Steam's search box after a restart — shelves visible but impossible to reach with the d-pad until Steam was restarted again. The plugin now reliably moves focus onto the first card once the shelves are up.
• Fixed the home screen occasionally coming up completely blank after a Steam restart — no shelves, nothing to select, and only another restart would bring them back. Two of the plugin's own startup paths could collide and one wiped the other's shelves; they can no longer touch each other.
• Much lower battery drain while the home screen just sits there. Two things kept Steam's renderer busy the whole time the Home was open — a loading shimmer that never stopped on cards outside the visible area, and the slow hero zoom redrawing a screen-wide image 60 times a second. The shimmer now ends on its own and the zoom drifts in small steps that look the same; measured on a Deck, an idle home screen went from about one and a half CPU cores to a fraction of one.
• On an install with two hosts, saving settings no longer logs occasional "mirror write failed" errors when both hosts happen to save at the same moment.