Lethal Company: a version per crew

I keep a small shelf of Lethal Company builds for exactly the reason below, and downpatching this one has become routine for me. Lethal Company's whole mod ecosystem lives on BepInEx plugins from Thunderstore, and BepInEx plugins are exactly the kind of mod a patch breaks: every game update strands some fraction of the catalog until authors catch up — and some never do, which is how beloved modpacks end up married to old builds. On top of that sit the challenge communities: high-quota crews and speedrun categories pin specific versions because spawn logic, item economy and movement quirks changed patch by patch (early versions are even formally banned in some categories — version numbers carry rules here). And since this is a lobby co-op game, none of it is solo: everyone who plays together runs the same build with the same mods, so "which version" is a decision crews make collectively. The game is paid — -username with an owning account throughout.

01The manifest table

Lethal Company is refreshingly simple on the depot side: one game depot, 1966721. The community keeps version→manifest maps — the long-running Steam guide covers v35 through the v72 era, and the High Quota community mirrors the list with notes on which versions their scene actually uses. The entries people ask for most:

For anything between the rows, the usual method applies: release dates from the version history wiki matched against SteamDB's manifest list.

02Downloading a build

The game is around a gigabyte, so a shelf of versions costs nothing. Community tutorials mostly demonstrate the Steam-console route (download_depot 1966720 1966721 <manifest>) — it works, with the usual friction: files land in steamapps\content\app_1966720\depot_1966721, and the next download overwrites that folder, so the tutorials all include a "rename and move it somewhere safe" step. -dir exists so you don't need that step: each version lands in its own named folder, done.

03Launching and lobbies

1. Add the downloaded folder's Lethal Company.exe as a non-Steam game (Steam → Add a Game → Browse) — the game needs Steam running for lobbies, and this gives you a launcher per version, sitting alongside your current Steam install untouched.
2. Saves are simple here — runs are short and profiles shallow — but lobbies are strict: you join and host with people on your exact version, mods included. The crew coordinates or nobody plays; that's the whole versioning culture of this game in one sentence.
3. No VAC drama applies — it's a co-op game with no secured competitive servers — but the same courtesy rule as everywhere: keep modded, downpatched setups in your own lobbies.

04Modding an old build — the profile transplant

The community's standard technique, straight from the challenge-run scene, and it's neat enough to steal for other BepInEx games. Old game build + current mod versions = crashes; you need era-correct mods, and the mod manager does the era bookkeeping for you:

1. In r2modman (or the Thunderstore app), create a fresh profile for your target era. Thunderstore keeps every old version of every mod — on a mod's page, the versions tab lets the manager install the build-appropriate release. Challenge communities also share ready-made era modpacks as profile import codes.
2. Launch the game from the manager once, load into a save, quit. (This forces all plugins to initialize — skipping it is a classic source of phantom issues, and it's the step I forgot the first time and spent an evening chasing.)
3. In the manager: Settings → Browse profile folder. Copy everything there — the BepInEx folder and friends — into your downpatched game folder.
4. From now on, launching that folder's exe launches the old build, modded, no manager needed. Caveat from the people who do this daily: mods disabled in the profile come across as empty husks, so trim the profile before transplanting; and to update the pack later, delete BepInEx\plugins in the target and re-transplant clean.

05Status in 2026

Lethal Company is the young-game case on this site: its entire manifest history fits inside the post-2023 window, and recent manifests are exactly what Valve's restrictions bite least — community lists were still verifying their IDs as working through the v70 era, and fresh downpatch requests succeed routinely. The fine print is that this game's history is still being written: every new patch makes yesterday's build one notch older, and nobody can promise v49 answers forever. A one-gigabyte folder per era your crew cares about is the cheapest insurance on this entire site — the high-quota people already keep their versions like save files. Do likewise. If it were my crew, I'd grab the build our modpack runs on tonight rather than gamble on it answering next month.