When I sorted my own library into these tiers, the order fell out naturally. The tiers below run from safest to most fragile. "Safe" here means one thing: how sure you can be of getting a specific old version next year. An official archive is safe; a depot manifest is usually fine but subject to Valve's gating; a community archive depends on volunteers. The same tiering logic applies beyond games, too — non-game software on Steam rarely keeps a version shelf at all, which puts most of it squarely in the depot-only tier below. Wherever a game sits, the same closing advice applies — the version you can reach today is only guaranteed if you keep a copy yourself. Find your game, read its guide, and archive the build that matters to you.
1The full archive
The gold standard: the developer keeps the past available on purpose, often outside Valve's pipeline entirely, so access doesn't depend on manifest weather at all. If your game is here, you're lucky — use the official archive first, and the depot route is a convenience, not a necessity.
| Game | What keeps it safe |
|---|---|
| Factorio | Wube hosts every version ever as self-contained ZIPs on factorio.com — the best shelf on this site. |
| No Man's Sky | Hello Games put the four pre-NEXT eras on the Internet Archive themselves; depots cover the builds between. |
| Kerbal Space Program | A finished, collectible catalog — portable installs, branches back to 1.0, and a history that stopped growing in 2023. |
2Deep official shelf
No standalone archive, but the developer keeps a long run of versions on Steam's Betas tab — often reaching back years. For most needs the dropdown is the whole answer; DepotDownloader earns its place for side-by-side installs and the occasional build the shelf skips.
| Game | What keeps it safe |
|---|---|
| RimWorld | Branches back to beta18 — but pin the Workshop mods too, they have no version history. |
| Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord | A near-complete museum of e1.x and v1.x builds; mind the Harmony/ButterLib stack under your mods. |
| 7 Days to Die | An alpha museum back to Alpha 8 — with one empty case where Alpha 6 used to be. |
| Hollow Knight | The named patches sit on the Betas shelf; the speedrun community documents the depot fallback too. |
| Euro Truck Simulator 2 | SCS labels the branches "for incompatible mods" — the shelf with a signpost. Same for American Truck Simulator. |
| Stellaris & Paradox | A deep shelf for EU4/CK3/HOI4/Stellaris — but the keys live in your Paradox account, not the dropdown. |
| Project Zomboid | b41/b42 and point branches in the Betas tab; pre-b41 builds were retired and are tier 5. |
| Terraria | tModLoader keeps official legacy branches (1.3, 1.4.3); vanilla itself leans on depots and a community wrapper. |
3Shallow or conditional shelf
An official branch exists, but it's narrow — one slot, a couple of curated versions, or branches that appear on patch day and rotate out later. Good for the common case, but for anything specific you'll often drop to the depot route.
| Game | The catch |
|---|---|
| Valheim | The default_old branch holds exactly one version — yesterday's. Anything deeper is depot work. |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | An official 1.63 legacy branch and select 2.x versions (GOG has a fuller picker); the rest is by manifest. |
| Subnautica | One official legacy branch (pre-Living Large); the 2.0-era builds are depot date-matching. |
| Stardew Valley | A legacy branch and a compatibility branch — and the only game whose modding wiki prints a DepotDownloader command. |
| Baldur's Gate 3 | Larian publishes stay-behind branches on patch days — but they come and go; older patches are by manifest. |
| Slay the Spire | Some versions on Betas, but the pre-2.0 build that classic mods need is usually a depot pin. |
4Depot is the only door
No official version shelf at all — rolling back means downloading an old build by manifest. This is the tier DepotDownloader was made for: access is real and usually reliable, but it rides on the depot history staying available, so these are the games to archive sooner rather than later.
| Game | How you get back |
|---|---|
| Skyrim Special Edition | Depot manifests for 1.5.97 / 1.6.640 (or the Best of Both Worlds patcher); manifests still answer despite 2025 gating. |
| PAYDAY 2 | Depot manifests per update — the pre-Epic U236.1 build is the classic target. |
| Left 4 Dead 2 | Depot builds plus the speedrun community's curated packages; mind the genuine VAC line. |
| Lethal Company | One depot, a community manifest table (v40–v72); a version per crew. |
| Risk of Rain 2 | The Devotion-build manifest — the downpatch that went mainstream after Seekers of the Storm. |
| Sons of the Forest | Depot date-matching; mind the October 2025 Unity security patch when picking an old build. |
| Cities: Skylines | The exemplar — Paradox declined version branches, so the depot is the only door there is. |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Depot manifests for single-player modding; Legacy is unlisted but still installable. Never on GTA Online. |
| Team Fortress 2 | Depot builds back to the 2013 SteamPipe floor — everything older is tier 5. |
| Palworld | Server version branches plus client depot builds; the backup before the patch is the real downgrade. |
5Beyond the depot
The fragile tier: versions Valve no longer serves or the developer formally retired, surviving only because someone outside the official pipeline saved them. These are the cautionary tales — proof of what "too late" looks like, and why the other four tiers are worth acting on while you can.
| Case | Where it lives now |
|---|---|
| TF2 before 2013 | Pre-SteamPipe builds (Gold Rush, WAR!, launch) exist only in the community TF2 Archive — GCF files, not depots. |
| Project Zomboid before b41 | Retired by the developer and gone from the depots — a shelf the publisher cleared on purpose. |
| Any gated manifest | Old builds that return "no manifest request code" since the 2025 restrictions — preserved only where someone archived early. |
★The takeaway
Read the tiers top to bottom and the site's whole argument falls out of them: preservation is a choice someone makes, and the further down this list your game sits, the more likely that someone has to be you. A game in tier 1 will probably outlive your interest in it. A game in tier 5 outlived everyone's — except the people who kept a copy, often the same archivists who go on to datamine the old build's assets once the bytes are safely in hand. Whichever tier your game is in, the action is the same and it's small: open its guide, pull the version that matters, and put the folder somewhere safe — the wider routine for that, across more than one game, is laid out in archiving your Steam library. The tool is free, the disk is cheap, and "I'll do it later" is exactly how tier 5 gets new entries. The mistake I made first was trusting a Betas shelf to stay put; now I keep my own copy of anything I'd actually miss.
New to the whole idea? Start with the universal downgrade guide for the mechanics, then come back here to find your game. Hitting a wall? The old-versions status page tracks what's currently gated, and the request-code guide decodes the refusal when a manifest won't answer.