I am desperately trying to play Zero-K, one of my favorite games ever, but since I got a MacBook with an M chip instead of my old Mac laptop that could run Windows through Bootcamp, I am struggling.
I have the basic idea of why this is hard - Spring and MacOS don't meld very well.
I was able to briefly play for a few days with only minor graphically glitches through VMWare Fusion - but then it just fell apart, and as I understand it the Spring engine graphics just don't work with the hardware of this MacBook (Still unsure why it worked for ~10 hours of gameplay before dying)
I have tried Parallels, I have tried updating VMWare, many suggested random settings fixes given to me by techy friends and some throwing rocks at an AI (which has helped me with Mac issues in the past). I have tried downloading different versions of Steam through PortingKit. All end with the same issue - either the game doesn't launch at all, or it crashes immediately on match start when I make my first action (moving commander, menuing, etc.) None of the sprites load in correctly, its actually quite a bizarre sight.
I am throwing my last Hail Mary to this forum. Me and my friends discovered this game years ago and love it so much. I want to be able to play so badly!
I know the easiest fix is a machine that can run windows, but I figured I'd give this a shot.
Please let me know if anyone has found a magic fix. My specs are below
2024 MacBook Pro
Apple M4 Pro Chip
macOS Tahoe 26.5.2
From apples website
12-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
16-core GP
Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
16-core Neural Engine
273GB/s memory bandwidth
