Steam install just upgraded itself despite settings

[CeeBod]

I have Fallout 4 set to "Wait until I launch the game" for updates and only ever launch through Mod organizer's F4SE executable.  I had a fairly long running play-through that was running absolutely fine and played more of it earlier today - my exitsave from that is timestamped 09/03/26 19:17:24.  About 3 hours later I fired it up again to continue and got the dreaded "You are using a newer version of Fallout than this version of F4SE supports" message, and looking at my FO4 files, a whole raft of them are showing as last updated 09/03/26 17:38

 

Anyone got any idea how it is that Fallout not only updated itself despite those same settings previously preventing that happening through multiple updates, and over the course of months of play (and on a day when there is no update scheduled too) but also managed to do it seemingly while I was in the middle of playing modded without disrupting that game in any way (and yet also completely fucking my ability to continue that play through!)?  Does the "Steam Cloud" setting affect it? Any other settings that need locking down? - I thought the door was locked, and the horse has already bolted, so I'm pissed, but all i can do is try to prevent it happening again next time!  

 

 

[Franco Cozzo]

There are ways to make your steam version a non-steam version so this problem never happens again, basically you just crack your legally owned legit version (not encouraging piracy on this forum), especially if you don't want to/don't intend to run it from steam.

 

Best you can do now is rollback to an older version.

[subaverage]

In addition to the other measurses you need to set the Fallout 4 appmanifest to "read only" to be sure. In this case the download would simply fail when you accidentically started the update and you don't get the message again. But as it is you either have to see whether you get F4SE and your F4SE depenent mods for the new game version and hope your savegames would still work or downgrade the game to your previous version and set the appmanifest to "read only" afterwards. There are several guides on the Nexus Fallout 4 forum and also several tools available.

[CeeBod]

8 hours ago, subaverage said:

In addition to the other measurses you need to set the Fallout 4 appmanifest to "read only" to be sure. In this case the download would simply fail when you accidentically started the update and you don't get the message again. But as it is you either have to see whether you get F4SE and your F4SE depenent mods for the new game version and hope your savegames would still work or downgrade the game to your previous version and set the appmanifest to "read only" afterwards. There are several guides on the Nexus Fallout 4 forum and also several tools available.

 

Thanks I didn't know about the Steam appmanifest files, and that looks like it'll potentially be a useful way to stop some of my other modded games doing the same thing in future too (though a thread on Reddit has someone else saying that Fallout 4 seems to be the only game that randomly ignores Steam settings and decides to be a dick and update itself!)

I might try downgrading FO4 at the weekend to see if I can still salvage the saves, but I'm not holding out much hope!

[Veladarius]

On 3/10/2026 at 1:44 PM, CeeBod said:

 

Thanks I didn't know about the Steam appmanifest files, and that looks like it'll potentially be a useful way to stop some of my other modded games doing the same thing in future too (though a thread on Reddit has someone else saying that Fallout 4 seems to be the only game that randomly ignores Steam settings and decides to be a dick and update itself!)

I might try downgrading FO4 at the weekend to see if I can still salvage the saves, but I'm not holding out much hope!

Just do a search for the Fallout 4 depository <version>, 1.10.163.0 is the version from 2019 that was around for a long time before they started fucking with it again, worked very well for me and was pretty simple. The search will give the depository file names that are needed for that version and you can copy them into the console and it will download them. I suggest making a backup version of them in case something happens.