As of 2024/3/25 you can now access the old build of ROUNDS via a beta branch. To do so, right click on the game in steam. Select properties, then beta, and under Beta Participation set it to "old-rounds-for-mods"

this is all you need to do, steam will download the old version and you can continue playing mods as normal without worrying about updates. To get back to the current version simply revert the setting.


The rest of the guide will remain here for historical reasons, but is no longer needed.

Please read the entire guide before continuing. Doing just step 1 will not be enough to get mods working.

To start with, you will need to open the steam console. you can do so by pressing Win + R and typing into the run dialogue box. alternatively pasting this into the url bar of your web browser should work.

once you do that, you should see a CONSOLE tab at the top of steam. click it and enter the command This will tell steam to download the old build of rounds. it should print out and then eventually (this may take a long time, and steam will provide no feedback till it is done) something similar to Make note of the location, it will be needed for the final section of this guide.

I was going to write here about how you can now change the rounds directory to the newly downloaded version inside of the mod manager by going to Settings > Locations > Change ROUNDS directory. But it turns out, that setting does seemingly nothing... not on R2 or on Thunderstore.

As of right now, you have to chose between being able to play modded and being able to play vanilla. To play modded you must overwrite the game's files with the ones you downloaded during part 1. Right click on ROUNDS in steam, go to manage > browse local files. delete everything in that folder, then copy the files over from the depot you downloaded. you will now have the old 2021 build of rounds. If you ever want to go back to playing vanilla, simply tell steam to uninstall then reinstall the game.

A user by the name of Galllaxy made a video of the guide that you can follow along with if you need.