Tell it to only update on launch. If you then ONLY launch the game through the Script Extender, this doesn't count as a steam launch, and it shouldn't update. You don't necessarily need to be using any SKSE mods to launch that way, it just bypasses the normal launch process.

At least, that's the way it has always worked in the past. If you installed SKSE through Steam, YMMV; just get it direct from the dev website.

Edit: Just tried it out, and this mostly works. "Online Services" are disabled until you update, so any Bethesda.net mods installed inside the game itself may break, but mods installed from Nexus appear to be fine.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 4 points 11 months ago

That is working for me (on linux) but the other thing you can do is make a backup of the game files before it updates and then restore the old version afterwards, according to this post on nexus

[–] Yokozuna@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Damn unfortunate for me because this time around I didn't feel like using TES5Edit, Loot, and whatever other programs you needed to mod it properly and just did some light modding through the in game mod manager. Guess I'm just gona unplug my ethernet cable and launch it in offline mode for a few weeks.

[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Idk what all those are, but Vortex works damn near flawlessly for me.

[–] Yokozuna@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

They are extra programs to add extra stability to the game when heavily modded. It goes hand in hand with vortex, just a real big pain in the ass because when I mod using vortex I get a little too over zealous with the mods. It also allows you to merge mods together to further increase the amount of mods because you're capped at a certain number and also helps clean up loose code in the base game that is redundant. It gets to be a bit much, and I was controlling myself from that inevitably.