Announcements

Lith now runs on macOS and Linux

Update (July 23): The CrossOver requirement is gone. As of launcher 2.0.31, macOS runs on the launcher's own bundled runtime by default, so you no longer need CrossOver to play. New here? Grab the launcher from the download page. Already playing on Mac through CrossOver? Update your launcher, then flip on "Use bundled Wine" in Settings to drop it. The story below is how we got here.

For the first time in MapleStory 2's history, you can play it on macOS and Linux. The launcher runs natively on your machine and the game runs with it.

This was never possible before, not even when the official servers were alive. The official client shipped an anti-cheat that refused to run under Wine or Proton, the compatibility layers that run Windows games everywhere else. Lith doesn't ship that anti-cheat (moderation happens server-side), so for the first time there's nothing standing between MapleStory 2 and the tech that already powers Windows gaming on the Steam Deck and the Mac.

What you need

  • macOS: just an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). The launcher brings its own runtime and downloads it on first launch (about 150 MB, one time), so there's nothing else to install.
  • Linux: the umu-launcher package (preinstalled on Bazzite and most gaming distros).

Head to the download page to get started. If you hit something weird, tell us in Discord and run the launcher's built-in diagnostics report.

What shipped with launcher 2.0.29

  • Native launchers for macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux, alongside Windows.
  • A one-line install script for macOS that sidesteps Apple's false "app is damaged" warning (Apple shows it for any app whose developer doesn't pay their yearly fee; the script installs cleanly without it).
  • Self-updates on every platform. Windows already had them; macOS and Linux AppImage installs now keep themselves up to date too.
  • First-launch progress feedback, smarter troubleshooting diagnostics for each platform, and translation fixes across all six languages.

How we got here

Want the war story? It took four days, one rented Mac, and a lot of blank windows.

Linux: the easy one

Linux went first, and it was almost suspiciously smooth. The launcher itself is now a native Linux app (AppImage, deb, and rpm), and the game runs through Proton, the same Windows-compatibility tech Valve built for Steam, launched via a small tool called umu. On our test machine it went from "let's try this" to fully in-game with zero tweaks.

If you're on a gaming-oriented distro like Bazzite, it works out of the box. Everyone else just installs one package (umu-launcher) and plays.

macOS: the four-day boss fight

macOS was a different story. Nobody on the team owns a Mac, so day one started by renting a cloud one. Outside of the pure horrendous performance for the first hours of the VM which made the dev go insane, after a ticket and a restart we got to work on it for real.

Attempt 1: run the game under regular Wine. The client's anti-tamper protection said no. Not a crash with an error message, just a silent death and a blank dialog box. Lovely.

The breakthrough: it turned out the protection passes under CrossOver's Wine (the same lineage Proton comes from), but not under vanilla builds. Swapping Wine builds got the game past its own defenses for the first time. Then it died again, one step later: the cloud Mac's virtual GPU couldn't create the game's 3D graphics device (50 dollars for what?!). Progress, but we'd hit the limit of what a rented VM could prove. We needed real Apple hardware.

Enter the community: We rallied up the community on discord and players with a real Apple Silicon Mac volunteered as the test pilot. First plan: run the whole Windows launcher under CrossOver. Result: the launcher's window rendered completely blank. The app was alive underneath, but not a single pixel reached the screen.

The pivot: instead of forcing the Windows build through Wine, we taught the launcher to run on macOS directly. Same launcher, now built for the Mac: it renders on your screen normally, downloads the game at full speed, and only hands the game itself to CrossOver at the moment you press Launch.

On July 21st, our testers pressed that button on real hardware and reached the character creation screen. Four days after "let's rent a Mac", Lith runs on one. Since then, other community members have taken the builds for a spin with the same result.

And we didn't stop at CrossOver. We built our own Wine runtime from open-source parts and taught the launcher to download and manage it for you. As of 2.0.31 that runtime is the default on macOS, so CrossOver is no longer required at all: a fresh Mac needs nothing but the launcher.

Thank you

To the community members who offered their time to test our launcher on their own machines, this port exists because of you. The same goes for every player who keeps reporting bugs patch after patch: you make this server better every single week.

And to the wider community: our Discord has grown to over 3,100 members in almost a year and a half. For a home-grown project, that's wild. Thank you for being here.

One more thing: this port is just the warm-up. Take a look at the roadmap to see what's cooking, because things are about to get heated. See you in game, whatever you're playing on now.