dferstat Posted April 24 Share Posted April 24 I had, quite deliberately, set my FO4 update preferences in Steam to "Wait until launch the game", and then, again quite deliberately, only run the game through Vortex. This should, on the face of it, have kept me on Old-Gen FO4. Imagine my ... dismay (to avoid being more explicitly accurate) ... when I fire up Vortex this morning, only to get two error messages, one telling me that my archives have to be updated, and another telling me that my game has been updated, and F4SE requires updating! Feck, feck, and feck again! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraquar Posted April 25 Share Posted April 25 That was one of the main reasons I moved to GOG. Once the Bethesda titles (Elder Scrolls and Fallout) moved to GOG I uninstalled Steam altogether. Didn't need it anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
363rdChemicalCompany Posted April 25 Share Posted April 25 On 4/24/2025 at 6:09 AM, dferstat said: I had, quite deliberately, set my FO4 update preferences in Steam to "Wait until launch the game", and then, again quite deliberately, only run the game through Vortex. This should, on the face of it, have kept me on Old-Gen FO4. Imagine my ... dismay (to avoid being more explicitly accurate) ... when I fire up Vortex this morning, only to get two error messages, one telling me that my archives have to be updated, and another telling me that my game has been updated, and F4SE requires updating! Feck, feck, and feck again! I did the exact same for a while but did not trust it after a while based some reports in the community of Steam shanigans like this one. So I went to my games .acf files and set it to "read-only" never wanting to deal with fixing my hard earned modslist. And low and behold despite me having the same steam setting you just described and only starting via F4SE I now get "update failed" messages every time I start the game. In other words, they attmepted to "update" (ie degrade ) it and my read only .acf file prevented it. Hopefully that last firewall will still hold for a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraquar Posted April 25 Share Posted April 25 (edited) Which doesn't help him - he's screwed. Like so many others. Good advice, but it's advice that needs to be known and implemented BEFORE the rogue update - so it doesn't rogue update... ----- Steam update method makes perfect sense for a multiplayer platform game - where everyone needs to be on the same page to even play. It makes no sense in a Single Player game when you are the only one playing - with nobody but the AI. And no reason to update when all that is really offered is content you didn't want anyway - and a big fat modding headache. Edited April 25 by fraquar 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leroymcqy Posted April 26 Share Posted April 26 I tried locking the file and removing all permissions to the file(s) needed for the game to be updated. That didn't work. I am still working on finding new ways to secure the update. Right now, the game thinks it is still using the latest version. I took the .acf file from the newer version and replaced the older version with it. Nexus mods still register the older version, while Steam shows a newer version, and thus, no update is required. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dferstat Posted April 26 Author Share Posted April 26 6 hours ago, fraquar said: Which doesn't help him - he's screwed. Like so many others. Good advice, but it's advice that needs to be known and implemented BEFORE the rogue update - so it doesn't rogue update... ----- Steam update method makes perfect sense for a multiplayer platform game - where everyone needs to be on the same page to even play. It makes no sense in a Single Player game when you are the only one playing - with nobody but the AI. And no reason to update when all that is really offered is content you didn't want anyway - and a big fat modding headache. I'm not, technically, screwed. I could follow the downgrade procedures enumerated elsewhere on this forum. Or I could use my GOG back-up installer files. (Yes, I did buy GOG versions of FO4, and Skyrim, even though I already have them on Steam). But where I really have problems is trying to find somewhere on my choked-to-the-gills more-than-a-decade-old PC I can actually fit a new install of FO4. I desperately need a new PC. But I also desperately need NAS/server, and somewhere to put them. Ah, well. Using the lemons-to-lemonade philosophy, maybe this'll be a good thing. But right now, it's fecking frustrating. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
subaverage Posted April 26 Share Posted April 26 (edited) I know that it's too late for dferstat, but perhaps interesting for others. What one can do is to make a copy of the entire Fallout 4 folder. If you have the Creation Kit it will be copied, too. Then update the game. Afterwards delete the updated game folder and play the copy back. I did this once and now Steam believes the game is updated as long as I don't verify game file integrity for FO4. I would still recommend to take all known actions to prevent the update. Only to be sure. Edited April 26 by subaverage 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeinGaming Posted April 26 Share Posted April 26 42 minutes ago, subaverage said: I know that it's too late for dferstat, but perhaps interesting for others. What one can do is to make a copy of the entire Fallout 4 folder. If you have the Creation Kit it will be copied, too. Then update the game. Afterwards delete the updated game folder and play the copy back. I did this once and now Steam believes the game is updated as long as I don't verify game file integrity for FO4. I would still recommend to take all known actions to prevent the update. Only to be sure. To second that. I'm using FreeFileSync for that. basically, to every know and then refresh my "backup of FO4 running well", without that taking long if there are few changes. also use it to make full copies of my MO2 profile and mods folder, for troubleshooting or experiments, basically, to create a copy of my load order I can recklessly mess around in, until I found the culprit of something -- then I revert from the backup, and apply just that one change that fixes it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraquar Posted April 26 Share Posted April 26 (edited) What I meant by you are screwed is you basically have to reinvent the wheel to get your game back where it was. Either by installing the GOG version, or by doing a clean Steam install and downgrading. Either way it's a hassle you shouldn't have to go through to play a single player only game that is 10 years old already - forced updating. Edited April 26 by fraquar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HeyYou Posted April 28 Share Posted April 28 Does F4SE work with the gog version? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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