Featured Image Credit: Bethesda Entertainment
Fallout 4 may have been out for a long time, but it's still very popular with players who can't get enough of the barren and irradiated wastes of Boston after nuclear war brings it to the brink.
A big part of that replayability goes far beyond Bethesda's original work and into the world of modding, where the community continues to bring new experiences to players set within the parameters the base game lays out.
Even more excitingly than that, Bethesda recently announced the Anniversary Edition of Fallout 4 which, as well as including all the DLCs in one bundle, also adds around 150 pieces of Creation Club content to the game.
Whilst this obviously sounds cool, if you don't intend to buy it, it actually might have some pretty devastating consequences for those of you who are planning to keep playing your modded versions of earlier editions of Fallout 4.
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Over on Reddit, one user shared a guide on how to stop your game updating automatically when the new edition releases. You do this by going to the Updates section in the game settings and selecting "Wait until I launch the game."
For those of you who are running the Fallout 4 Script Extender (which is a critical part of many of the game's most popular mods), it shouldn't register to Steam as though you are running the game. This will then keep it in a state of limbo where it doesn't update automatically, which should stop it from breaking any currently functioning mods you have installed.
As one of the top comments points out, Steam does often end up forcing the update after some time anyway. To avoid that happening, you'll need to get a little more technical and head to the app manifest for the game, before setting it to read only. This should put your copy of Fallout 4 in stasis indefinitely.
Players of the game already have a fair bit of experience with this process, after the next-gen update, which in all fairness brought some much needed improvements across the board, also rendered many player's modding setups moot.
The good news is that you've got a little while to sort everything out, with the update associated with the Anniversary Edition not set to roll out until 10 November.
Here's hoping that, when it does, our precious save files don't get kicked into the ether.
