Okay, going into .local/share/vintagestory. All that's there for me is the install.sh, run.sh and three desktop files (all empty, I tried opening them in text editor for clues to where the executables might be). There's also the tarball for 1.21.4 which I think I put there when trying this before, when attempting to install 21.4.
Another thing I forgot to add on my previous reply, I use cinnamon now but back when I was using gnome for some reason attempting to run install.sh would somehow corrupt the entire folder it was kept in (to the point of nuking my downloads folder at one point, lol). I'm guessing that some difference in the way Nemo handles directories vs Nautilus stops this from happening? But either way that doesn't happen anymore