If you’re like me, you probably installed Arknights: Endfield through the standalone Gryphlink launcher months ago when it was the only game in town. Then the game showed up on Steam, and the thought of pulling down that entire client all over again made you close the store page immediately. Here’s the thing — you don’t actually have to. I’ve done this migration myself, and it’s mostly a copy-paste job that takes a few minutes, not a full download that takes an evening.
The trick is that Steam will happily adopt a pile of existing game files as long as they’re sitting in the exact folder it expects. So we’re going to let Steam build that folder for us, drop your Gryphlink files inside, and let Steam verify instead of download.
Two Things to Sort Out Before You Touch Any Folders
Neither of these takes long, but skipping them can leave you stuck at the login screen afterward. If you’re already playing through Gryphlink, just confirm you can actually sign in to your Gryphlink account right now — you’ll need that working login to link everything up at the end. And if you’re brand new to the game and never used Gryphlink at all, no worries: the first launch through Steam will give you the option to connect your Steam account instead.
Step 1: Get Steam to Build the Target Folder
Open Steam and kick off a download of Arknights: Endfield, picking whatever drive and library you want the game to live on. Don’t walk away from it — you only need a few seconds here. Once Steam has created the game folder, cancel the download and uninstall the game from your library.
Now close Steam completely. And I mean completely — clicking the X and watching the window disappear isn’t enough. Check the system tray in the corner of your taskbar and make sure the Steam icon is gone too. This is the part I fumbled on my first attempt, and I’ll come back to that in a moment because it genuinely changed how the whole process went for me.
Step 2: Locate Your Existing Gryphlink Files
Open the Gryphlink launcher. Next to the Play button there’s a three-line menu button — click that, then choose Game Settings. Inside those settings you’ll find the game directory path. Follow it and select everything inside that folder.
On my machine the path ends in something like this:
...\Arknights Endfield\GRYPHLINK\games\EndField Game
Copy all of it. Every file and folder sitting in there goes with you.
Step 3: Paste Everything into Steam’s Library
Now head to your Steam library folder, which typically looks like this:
...\Steam\steamapps\common\
Inside you should spot the Arknights Endfield folder Steam created back in Step 1. Open it and paste your Gryphlink files directly into it. Not into a subfolder, not next to it — straight into that folder.
Step 4: Install It and Watch for Verification
Fire Steam back up, find Arknights: Endfield, and hit Install. Here’s the payoff moment: instead of beginning a massive download, Steam should start validating files. If you see that, you nailed it — Steam is checking the files you pasted and using them, which is exactly what we wanted.
What Happened When I Skipped the Full Shutdown
I’ll be honest with you — on my run I didn’t fully exit Steam. I just left it running, navigated to the folder it had created, and pasted the Gryphlink files in. It worked fine. Validation kicked off and the game was good to go.
The problem came when I did it the “correct” way on a later attempt. After closing Steam properly and then hitting download again at the end, I ended up with a duplicate folder. So my real-world advice is this: you don’t need to shut Steam down for the copy-paste to take. Leaving it open worked for me and avoided the duplicate-folder headache entirely. Do whichever feels right, but don’t stress about the shutdown step if you’d rather keep Steam open.
Step 5: Linking Your Account (Read This Carefully)
When the game boots up through Steam, it’s going to ask you to link an existing Gryphlink account. Slow down here and actually read each prompt instead of clicking through on muscle memory. This link is permanent — it ties your Gryphlink account to your Steam account for good, so make sure you’re linking the right one before you confirm.
One quick bit of troubleshooting if things go sideways: if Steam starts a full download rather than validating, the culprit is almost always misplaced files. Double-check that everything landed directly in the Arknights Endfield folder and didn’t slip into a subfolder somewhere.