If I Uninstall A Game...........

[Zanderat]

Such a noobish type question............... :dry: If I uninstall a game and its mods, will Vortex retain enough info so I can reinstall it, say a year or two from now, and simply get back my modded game?

[Pickysaurus]

What kind of data are you hoping Vortex retains if you remove all of that?

[Tannin42]

Vortex doesn't drop any information automatically that it can't automatically recover.

So if Vortex auto-discovers the location of a game via - for example - the steam database, it doesn't store the game location, it just re-discovers it every startup. If you uninstall the game, Vortex won't discover it, when you re-install it elsewhere Vortex will pick up on the new location on the next start.

Everything else, your installed mods, profiles, plugin rules, file conflict rules, all of that is not affected, you'd have to manually remove them.

 

It's not that uncommon for our users to have their games installed on network drives or external usb drives and then not have them connected when they start Vortex. Thus we can't really know whether a game has been uninstalled or is just temporarily not available, so cleaning up stuff just because the game is (currently) not there isn't an option anyway.

[rmm200]

My personal recommendation would be to Purge the mods before uninstalling. Otherwise you risk mod damage when Steam deletes the game.

Tannin is the authority - but I suspect when you delete the last profile for a game, Vortex has no files left that reflect the state of that game.

@Tannin42 - any comments on what deleting the last profile for a game actually does?

[HadToRegister]

My personal recommendation would be to Purge the mods before uninstalling. Otherwise you risk mod damage when Steam deletes the game.

Tannin is the authority - but I suspect when you delete the last profile for a game, Vortex has no files left that reflect the state of that game.

@Tannin42 - any comments on what deleting the last profile for a game actually does?

 

 

I was curious about this as well, could I put a game in a state of "Suspended animation", by purging the mods, then uninstalling the game (Which would leave everything behind that the game didn't install)

 

Then later, reinstall the game, and hit DEPLOY.

That's what I did with my installation of Fallout 4, but I highly doubt I will ever install it again, as I have completely burnt myself out on the game.

[rmm200]

 

My personal recommendation would be to Purge the mods before uninstalling. Otherwise you risk mod damage when Steam deletes the game.

Tannin is the authority - but I suspect when you delete the last profile for a game, Vortex has no files left that reflect the state of that game.

@Tannin42 - any comments on what deleting the last profile for a game actually does?

 

 

I was curious about this as well, could I put a game in a state of "Suspended animation", by purging the mods, then uninstalling the game (Which would leave everything behind that the game didn't install)

 

Then later, reinstall the game, and hit DEPLOY.

That's what I did with my installation of Fallout 4, but I highly doubt I will ever install it again, as I have completely burnt myself out on the game.

 

 

That is certainly the way I would expect it to work. I know for sure that Purge followed by move game to a new disk followed by Deploy works great!

Well and move the staging directory to the new disk as well prior to Deploy...

[HadToRegister]

 

 

My personal recommendation would be to Purge the mods before uninstalling. Otherwise you risk mod damage when Steam deletes the game.

Tannin is the authority - but I suspect when you delete the last profile for a game, Vortex has no files left that reflect the state of that game.

@Tannin42 - any comments on what deleting the last profile for a game actually does?

 

 

I was curious about this as well, could I put a game in a state of "Suspended animation", by purging the mods, then uninstalling the game (Which would leave everything behind that the game didn't install)

 

Then later, reinstall the game, and hit DEPLOY.

That's what I did with my installation of Fallout 4, but I highly doubt I will ever install it again, as I have completely burnt myself out on the game.

 

 

That is certainly the way I would expect it to work. I know for sure that Purge followed by move game to a new disk followed by Deploy works great!

Well and move the staging directory to the new disk as well prior to Deploy...

 

 

 

I had a feeling it would, I used a PURGE, uninstalled Steam Fallout 3, and installed GOG Fallout 3, and just redirected Vortex to the new Fallout 3 directory and was able to just Deploy.

It's what made me appreciate PURGE

[Zanderat]

I was going for something like HTR mentioned, but one better. I was hoping to uninstall a game and remove the mods from the staging folder (but keep in the download folder) and have Vortex remember the staging info, stored in some sort of database or text file maybe. So that at a later date, I could reinstall the game and have Vortex install, enable, and deploy the previously installed mods from the download folder using the staging info from a previous install. The reason being is that I play certain games every so often. But keeping the game folder plus the unpacked mods in the staging folder takes up a lot of space. It would be nice to be able to reinstall, say FONV plus all its mods, easily.

[AugustaCalidia]

 

I was curious about this as well, could I put a game in a state of "Suspended animation", by purging the mods, then uninstalling the game (Which would leave everything behind that the game didn't install)

 

Then later, reinstall the game, and hit DEPLOY.

That's what I did with my installation of Fallout 4, but I highly doubt I will ever install it again, as I have completely burnt myself out on the game.

 

 

The process you describe works beautifully.

 

Over the past two years, I've successfully used it several times with established games for Fallout NV, Fallout 4, SkyrimSE, Enderal, and Witcher 3. Originally, I just wanted to see if it could be done, and so I tested the process on one of my gaming computers. Once I proved to myself that it worked, I successfully transferred most of my established games to two other gaming computers. (Why do I have three gaming computers? I just like to collect them.)

 

There's a trick I learned when transferring and recreating established games on a different computer. I'll explain, using Fallout 4 as an example. When I recently transferred Fallout 4 (with three profiles) to my latest gaming computer, I purged first. The purged Fallout 4 game folder now contained only the vanilla assets plus custom features such as ENBoost and the F4SE version compatible with that particular Fallout 4 build. Since I wanted to preserve these custom features when transferring Fallout 4, I first downloaded, installed, and renamed a fresh Fallout 4 on the new computer. Then I copied the custom Fallout 4 folder from the old computer and used it to replace (not overwrite) the new installation, Once I verified that the custom Fallout 4 was working properly, I simply deleted (not uninstalled) the renamed vanilla copy.

 

This "trick" works best only if you have a large system drive. Fortunately, my three system drives are all 1TB SSD's.

[rmm200]

Now there is an additional wrinkle when you change computers.

Vortex keeps important, game specific information in AppData/Roaming/Vortex. That is where Mastewrlist, Profiles, Snapshots, and inis live.

Did you copy those directories to the new computers, or ignore them and all was well?