Open File Explorer and type this into the search bar:
kind:=video size:>100MB
This finds all videos over 100 MB. Change the size to >1GB for the biggest space hogs.
rm -rf /home/deck/.local/share/lutris/runtime/steam/steamapps/fg_optional_unused_videos
Note: Steam/Fossilize may recreate the link next time it processes shaders for that AppID.
| Keep | Delete | |------|--------| | Personal memories | Corrupted or 0-byte files | | Ongoing project footage | Old game replay files from 2024 | | Licensed downloads | Duplicate copies of the same file |
In modern flight simulators, "video" assets generally serve one of two purposes:
A. Flight Instruction / Tutorials
Older iterations of flight sims often included video files ( .avi, .ogv, or proprietary .bin wrappers) that played during interactive tutorials. If this binary is labeled "unused," it is likely a remnant of an old tutorial system that has since been replaced by text-based checklists or scripted JavaScript tutorials within the simulator. fgoptionalunusedvideosbin link
B. Texture Pre-caching Sometimes "video bin" refers to a sequence of frames used for animated textures (like a moving map display or a weather radar) stored in a binary format for faster I/O streaming. If the feature was deprecated but the file remained in the repository, it becomes an "unused binary."
When Mara discovered the obscure folder on her old laptop—titled fgoptionalunusedvideosbin link—she expected junk: half-finished edits, forgotten screen recordings, a few corrupted clips. What she found instead was a breadcrumb.
The folder contained a single text file named README.txt and three small video files labeled 001.mp4, 002.mp4, and 003.mp4. The README was brief:
—Play in order. Watch quietly. Do not share.
Curiosity overrode caution. Mara opened 001.mp4. The screen showed a dimly lit room and a desk covered in blueprints. A woman’s hand—callused, precise—traced a line on paper, fingers pausing over a mark labeled “link.” A voice, breathy and distant, read: “We tested the bridge twice. The fourth time, something stayed.”
002.mp4 began outdoors: a thin, rusted pedestrian bridge spanning a dry ravine. The camera moved slowly across its length as if searching. The narrator, the same voice, now older, said, “Optional pieces can become essential when you remove the rest.” The video zoomed on a small metal loop welded beneath a plank—an extra, unnecessary link someone had added and then forgotten. Open File Explorer and type this into the
By the third clip, the story unfolded. The woman was an engineer named Lina who’d worked for a grassroots collective rebuilding connections between neighborhoods after the flood. The “optional unused videos bin” had been her private archive—recordings she made to document small fixes and oddities. The link beneath the bridge, at first a redundant safety tie, had bent during a storm and snagged a stranger’s bag. When the stranger reached down to free it, they found a scrap of paper with an address and a time.
Mara felt the room tilt. The address led to a community center where, months earlier, Lina and a handful of volunteers had arranged a clandestine meeting—a distribution of supplies, a map of safe routes. The forgotten link had turned into a signal. The clip ended with Lina smiling into the camera and whispering, “We hid what we needed in plain sight.”
Mara replayed the videos. Details she’d missed before now mattered: the corner of a mural visible behind Lina, the number on the bus that passed in the background, the faint scent of sea salt she could almost imagine from the shore shot. Each small clue mapped to places in a city Mara thought she knew.
She felt compelled to follow the breadcrumb. The address in the clip was close. When she arrived, the community center had new paint and a bulletin board full of posters—lunch drives, tutoring, a flyer tacked in the corner with handwriting she recognized from the README: Lina’s looping lowercase letters. A young man behind the counter shrugged when Mara asked, “Do you know Lina?” “She left a while back,” he said. “Said she needed to chase something. Left these behind.” He handed her a small envelope: inside, a train pass, a faded photograph of a bridge, and a note—Play in order. Watch quietly. Do not share.
Mara realized the videos weren’t meant to expose a secret so much as preserve one. Lina had used that oddly named folder to tuck away moments that, when assembled, made a map of care: hidden caches, rendezvous points, the small interventions that helped people cross broken parts of the city. The link—the literal metal loop beneath a bridge—was the simplest of anchors for a network of trust.
That night Mara sat at her kitchen table and wrote down everything from the videos. She labeled the folder on her own laptop fgoptionalunusedvideosbin link and copied the files into it, renaming none. She added one more file: 004.mp4. In it, a short clip of her walking beneath the rusted bridge, fingers brushing the metal loop. She didn’t speak. She simply left her palm there for a moment and filmed the way sunlight found the worn edges. This finds all videos over 100 MB
When she uploaded the folder to the cloud—ironically making the private public—she encrypted it with a password she never wrote down. The next morning, the videos were gone from her account, but the envelope’s photo remained on her shelf and the community center’s bulletin board had a new poster: a sketch of a small loop beneath a bridge, and beneath it, in Lina’s handwriting, a single line: Leave what helps someone else cross.
Mara never found Lina. But the link did its work. People still crossed the ravine with care. Someone repaired the plank the next spring. A child left a ribbon tied through the small metal loop, bright as a flag. And in a folder with an odd name, somewhere on an old laptop, a string of tiny videos kept quiet watch—optional, unused by the world’s standards, but indispensable to anyone who needed them to find their way.
—end
ls -lh
Occasionally appears in:
unusedvideos is a logical name for a directory but is not a system-reserved term.