Dealing With The Fallout 4 Update
So it has been two days since the Fallout 4 "Next Gen" update landed, and apparently the survivors currently envy the dead. Forty years of darkness, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Sigh. Please get a grip, people.
If you didn't take steps to block this update, your game is still entirely playable and actually in better condition than it has been in five years. What you're missing is F4SE, anything dependent on F4SE (such as PANPC), and anything that depends on the binary state of the game's executable.
We've been keeping track of things. Ian's xSE team is working on the F4SE update, but evidently the changes were extensive enough that it is taking a little longer than usual. Bethesda updated their BA2 archive format from v7 to v8 (the version used in Starfield), which means that any archival tools also have to be updated. Elminster's XEdit crew have already updated FO4Edit to support the new archives and XEdit 4.1.5f is available for download now on their Discord.
As predicted, this update currently breaks a lot of Wabbajacks. ScreamingLake decommissioned the Fallout 4 Experiences modlists a few days early (and I can't blame him), meaning that Stay FROSTy, Lost World, etc. are now unavailable. If you didn't download and archive them, they're now gone.
Meanwhile, the Great Fallout Boom of 2024 continues at full speed. At this time of writing, Fallout 4 has about 160,000 concurrent Steam players going, meaning we're likely to see up to 200,000 Steam players at the regular Sunday traffic peak. That is more than at any time since the game launched in 2015, and about ten times the normal traffic level.
So.
If you happen to be sitting there with a broken Fallout 4 mod list, waiting for F4SE to be updated, you have some options for getting back on the road. At this time, they seem to be:
Attempt a rollback from depot. This isn't a recommendation, and I have no idea how well this works, but read this pinned comment on the F4SE Nexus page and good luck.
Go buy FO4 GOTY on GOG for $10 while it's still on sale, and keep it around for situations like this. It has no DRM, no next gen update, and will work with all your mods. It's only missing CC content. And when they do make the update available for the GOG version, it will be preventable and easily rolled back.
There is a Fallout 4 Downgrader now up for download at Nexus. However (this was just pointed out to me) the authors require your Steam login, so I'm not linking that here. Use at your own risk.
Just wait. Usually xSE gets turned around within 24 hours of a game update, but the changes from this "next gen" update were apparently more substantial than usual. However, I would be shocked if it wasn't ready within the next couple of days. Go take a break, play something else for a while, watch the Fallout TV show, or maybe go take a walk. It's okay to just wait it out - it will be fine.
But finally - for the love of God - don't scream online about how mean Bethesda "nuked" your game. They didn't. What they did was improve Fallout 4 for the first time in five years, and as is completely usual and normal, now all the unofficial third party tools need some time to catch up.
And next time, when people tell you to block automatic updating in Steam, and to back up your game's installation directory, please do it. Thanks.
Yours in the Wasteland,
G.