How can I change where Steam installs games?

Question

I have a Lenovo u410 laptop. My recent install broke, so I reinstalled with 13.04 daily. It's on a 30GB primary SSD, and I want to offload large files to the 1TB hard drive that also resides in my system.

I installed steam and it defaulted to my SSD as expected. Is there anything special I would have to add to the fstab for my second ext3 HDD? Is this as simple as symlinking to a directory on the hard disk?

Conclusion:

I mounted my hard drive disk as /home in fstab. Since it's now ext4 steam installs games and dependencies there by default.

Answer 1

You can choose another drive directly in Steam. But than you have to choose this drive at every Download.

To change the default Download folder,

Just quit Steam (important!) and move the entire Steam folder to another location

mv ~/.local/share/Steam /new/path

and start Steam again. It says something like "can't find Steam, did you move it?" and than you can choose the new folder location.

Answer 2

When you click on a game to install it on the first window that pops up there will be a drop down menu. On here you have a choice to install on the default directory or to create a new library.

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When you choose to install in a new directory you will get a choice of where to install.

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

1. Go to the "Steam" menu and select "Settings"
2. Click "Downloads" on the left and press the "Steam Library Folders" button
3. Press the "Add Library Folder" button and select a new directory
4. Right click on the new entry and select "Make Default Folder" from the context menu

All new installations will default to the new location.

Answer 4

And if you want to make these libraries before installing the game, see my answer to this question Not enough space on hard drive for tf2