Is it possible to disable/enable automatic download of subscribed workshop items between different computers?

[Tsubame ⭐]

Hello! I have a couple of games such as Cities Skylines and Transport Fever 1 and 2 that are very mod-heavy from the Workshop.

This is obviously not an issue at home. However, I travel often for work, and use a laptop to play abroad.

I would still like to play these games away, but HD space is a huge bottleneck on the laptop - I am talking of hundreds of GBs of mods between these 3 games alone.

So the question is, is it possible to play Steam games "vanilla" on the laptop, without Steam there trying to automatically download hundreds of GB of subscribed mods meant to be used in my desktop PC, or without having to unsubscribe from these mods?

Using collections and unsubscribing and resubscribing as needed is NOT an option for me due to the time required to redownload everything again, and particularly the very high likehood of this breaking saves, especially on Cities Skylines.

Thanks in advance for your replies!

[Seraphita]

What I'd do is throw all of them in a favorite folder. (I did this specifically for starbound) then unsub from all. Well, the problem might be that it may remove those if you have any installed but at least it won't install any of it when you play on other device. That's one idea... o.o

Otherwise, I don't really know any other way to block it. If you download a game where you have subbed mods, it WILL download them automatically. If anyone knows of a new options that disables this, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe this actually exists. I think.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Yea that was my guess, but figured it does not hurt to ask.

With Steam Deck coming up Valve should have a look at this IMO.

[Seraphita]

Originally posted by Tsubame:

Yea that was my guess, but figured it does not hurt to ask.

With Steam Deck coming up Valve should have a look at this IMO.

I went to check at my own stuff and I have old subbed stuff but yeah, no options to disable them if I decided to re download the game. You could make a suggestion thread about this and tell your reason that you think it's a good idea. Sell your idea, hope Valve makes it.

Also, I totally get you with save breaking concerns. It can do bad stuff but I think it only does if you launch the game with missing mods. Still, yes, it's a big risk. Steam could make a kind of switch that you turn on and off to allow workshop download and/or updates to client?

[my new friend]

Your best option is to create an alt account and family share the games.

[Clement]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.