rootninja

There are many reasons why forcing people to play their games through services like steam is wrong. But let’s save that for another day and get you playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim without connecting to steam.

This does not decouple the game from steam. You still have to have steam, but you will be able to play without being connected.

I found this fix when all of a sudden, a wild STEAM ERROR appeared.

My connection is fine. I’m browsing, streaming music, etc. Yet because steam is down right now for whatever reason, I can’t play my Skyrim?

Time to fix this little problem.

Create “steam.cfg” in your Steam directory. For me this is C:\Program Files\Steam.

Next, open notepad and copy and paste the following line into your new file.

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable ForceOfflineMode=enable

Now when you launch steam, you should be prompted to start in offline mode. Do it.

There, all better.

At this point you should be able to launch your games. Some people complain about Origin being an invasive piece of trash forced down your throat, yet they think Steam is just fine. I think the two are basically the same.

Ready to play.

At least that was easier than setting up the Sandboxie chroot with firewall rules to lock Origin out of my system while I played Battlefield.

Problem?

If you created the file in the Steam directory and you’re still having problems starting in offline mode, make sure you didn’t accidentally create “steam.cfg.txt”.

If you haven’t changed your folder options to show file extensions, you may accidentally create a .txt file instead of the .cfg file.

Go to control panel, find folder options, and uncheck that stupid setting.

I can’t believe after this many generations of Windows, they still default to hiding file extensions. But hey it’s microsoft, should I really be surprised?