It has come to my attention that Survivalist crashes on Steam Deck as soon as you start a new game - or at least it used to, as I've now issued a patch which fixes that. Hooray!

I've tested that you can at least start a new game and get as far as Fort Kohai on Proton 7.0-5 and Proton 7.0-6. As it turned out there were multiple issues, and they were all a bit weird and arbitrary, maybe Valve will fix them in a later version of Proton - or maybe they'll introduce more bugs, who knows. If you read this news post in the future and you have a problem with the game, try going to Settings -> Compatibility and switching to one of the above versions of Proton (and let me know at survivalist.game@gmail.com).

It's a pretty great game for the Steam Deck, being originally designed around a gamepad and all. Hopefully I can get it green tick verified now.