In August, Bethesda Game Studios announced patches for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as well as Fallout 4. The update for the latter was recently released, and players are not particularly happy about it.
The developers said that they updated the credits, fixed some technical issues and crashes on Steam Deck, and also improved mod support. However, players soon complained that their mods simply broke and the developers were "preventing them from playing."
This slightly affected the game's rating: there has been a surge of negative reviews for Fallout 4 on Steam. However, few decide to "give a thumbs down," so the rating of recent reviews is still holding in the "very positive" zone.
Players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are watching in fear – they are next in line for an update. Some, like user rp_001, are looking for ways to block potential updates so that installed modifications don't break.
Captain_Gars suggests setting the option in Skyrim's properties on Steam to "Update on launch" and then going offline to play:
Set the game to "Update on launch," and then put Steam in offline mode before launching Skyrim through your mod manager. This is the only method that has consistently worked for me with Fallout 4; it should work for Skyrim as well. If you have free space on your drive, you can also make a copy of the current version of the game to restore it if the update does install.
Some set the "appmanifest_489830.acf" file in steamapps to "read-only" mode to prevent updates from installing.