Your Steam Deck is connected to a slow charger
Since procuring a Steam Deck, it has continually been my go-to gaming device. While I do the majority of my gaming in handheld mode, I have been dabbling more into playing on the TV. My current rig for big screen play includes a docking station, an Xbox One controller, and an 8Bitdo arcade stick. Sadly, during my most recent gaming session, I was advised that I was using a slow charger.
Seeing as I use the "Official Steam Deck Dock" purchased directly from Valve, using the "Official Steam Deck Power Adapter" that came with said "Official Dock", this warning seemed like it was a farce. So I went through the normal things I do when troubleshooting an issue:
- I unplugged the official Steam Deck adapter from the wall and back in.
- I unplugged the official Steam Deck adapter from the dock and back in.
- I unplugged the Steam Deck from the official Steam Deck dock and back in.
- I restarted the Steam Deck.
- I checked that there weren't any updates for the dock.
In retrospect, I probably should have tried unplugging everything and then plugging it all back in. Another option I didn't try, nor do I like as a "solution" would have been to reboot into desktop mode and then back into gaming mode. Regardless, none of that worked ended up working so I had to explore some other options.
One option was that evidently the Steam Deck's USB-C power delivery gets confused and just starts to think that everything is a crappy slow charger. I'm quite shocked that a reboot didn't resolve this. Guessing maybe a full power off cycle and waiting a few moments could have helped, but that's all speculative.
So how do we clear up the confusion with the USB-C power delivery? Funny enough, it's a simple two-finger salute, quite similar to how you get the Apple TV remote's volume to start working again.
To reset the USB-C power delivery, simply press and down the ... and -
(volume down) buttons at the same time, holding them for 5 seconds.
For me, the volume turned all the way down, the shortcuts menu was displayed, and then eventually the Steam Decks will make a sound, and the shortcuts menu goes away. Once that happened, I plugged the Steam Deck into the dock and it no longer complained about the charger being slow.