I got hella bored today while doing laundry. Like, super hella bored. So bored, in fact, that I didn’t even feel like starting up a game of Civ at the time--but I wanted to listen to the music. Like, crazy wanting to listen to the music. But I didn’t have the soundtrack to the expansions, and I wanted to listen to the soundtrack to the expansions, and maybe some of the pretty idle, nothing-is-going-on, the empire is at peace right now-music. You know, the stuff that rarely makes it into the final OST.

I had an idea then: Like the time I got around Steam to launch Kerbal Space Program during the time a beta bug, I could get into the local content to see where it was and listen to it from there.

With a few clicks, I was in the file explorer and looking at the Vanilla music, found in .ogg format. Interesting, I thought, looking at it.

Granted, I have the Vanilla OST—it came with the Bundle—but after wandering around I noticed that oh hey, there’s the pretty idle music!

…let’s poke around a little more, shall we?

After about fifteen minutes of poking around, I found what I was looking for.

I am now in the process of deciding which device to put this lovely ear candy on to listen to while I get the writing done.

“Whoa whoa whoa, you nerd! How am I supposed to do that on a Steam game?!”

Hold your horses, I’ll explain it. It’s simple. DISCLAIMER: You damn well better not otherwise manipulate the files other than a cloning. I am not responsible for any bricked installs. It also goes without saying this is personal use only (don’t be piratin’ yo). They all start the same:

1. Jump into your Steam.
2. Right-click the game in the sidebar.
3. Clck properties.
4. Click “Browse local content.
5. Find the folder with the music. DO NOT CHANGE OR MOVE ANYTHING.

After this you have a couple options.

Here’s a pair of methods:

SUPER RIDICULOUS EASY METHOD:

Sync the folder with the music with your Google music manager folder. Upload, refresh, boom, done, it’s in the cloud.

LESS EASY METHOD:

Clone the folder to the desktop, if space allows, and move it to a secure place—an SD card, a device, a sufficiently powerful phone. …depending on the device this could take a while. DO NOT MOVE THE ORIGINAL FOLDERS.

THINGS TO NOT DO:

DO NOT USE ITUNES. While it sounds like linking the original folders to the library is simpler, iTunes especially likes to tweak things’ metadata and can easily cause problems.

IN FACT, DO NOT USE ANY MEDIA MANAGERS THAT WILL CHUCK SETTINGS AT THINGS. Keep the entire process manual. It’s best you not have to need to turn around and reinstall anything, because—especially if you’ve got the kind of connection that I do—that can take hours.

Boom. =D Enjoy your new game music.