Guide - How to rollback your Skyrim - Manifest not available fix

This guide explain how to revert to an older version of Skyrim after a stealthy update in spite of the locking system put in place by Steam last update. It will permit you to play until a new SKSE version is released. It is useful if you

Purposes:

Each times Bethesda update our favorites games, they break compatibility with SKSE and a lot of its plugins. The best way to avoid that is to block automatic update from Steam (as explained below). Problem, if the game is already updated, you are screwed.

Most of the update contains only fixes or features to improve the Creation Club...

So most of us doesn't care about them as most of the bug fixes are already covered by the mods which can be found here.

If you are a CC users and you use mod from here, you can try this method, it is easy to undo, if you face problem you simply need to rerun the update.

How?

We will need to restore an older Skyrim version directly from Steam server. For that we will use SteamDB to get Skyrim's  AppID and DepotID then use Depot Downloader command to download the needed version.

I will explain every steps below, you can download a PDF which contains the needed command line directly from the download section for each skyrim version.

After following this guide and to avoid to redo all the steps, if you can, do a backup of your entire Skyrim SSE Folder ;)

Important Note:

Don't use the numbers from the screenshot, it was for Skyrim 1. 5. 39.

Main files from download section contain command to rollback to 1. 5. 97 / Skse 2. 0. 20 so pre-made files

Old files are for previous version (check skse version to choose which one you need), previous version of Depot downloader use batch file "depotdownloader.bat" instead of an exe like last version, so you must change it (simply replace .bat by .exe in command line).