Here I am stuck for hours with a crappy 80kbps mobile connection, and Steam wants to update itself and half my library. Of course I don’t have days to update the game I want to play. Why does Steam insist on ramming updates down my throat for a single player game? This happens even if I try to launch Steam in offline mode, and set the game to only update when launched, and then launch it from Windows File Explorer. This is maddening…
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sadly for you if you want to play your games your gonna need a better connection.
typically a steam update is less than 50mb and most of the time its just the game library database for steam store thats being updated.
but the real issue for you is your crap internet. its just not up to the job even of updating steam.
which means time for upgrades.
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You cant stop steam from updating but you can stop single player games from updating. If I recall correctly open the library tab and right click the game you dont want to update. Somewhere in the game properties is a check mark you can remove to stop autoupdating.
But these days of severe vulnerabilities popping up everywhere, it may be best to keep things up to date.
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I looked up on this issue. Turns out that it’s something to do with pre-shader cache that Steam rolled out with beta client last year that went live this year somewhat recently. apparently it’s to give some games performance uplift and cuts down on stuttering or something like that.
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I have a problem where Steam tries to update and then fails to launch. I can check in the Task Manager and see that Steam is running. Even if I kill the Steam task and re-launch Steam it will not run. This can happen nearly every day.
My only solution is to reboot the PC and then Steam will update.
Can you set some single player games to slightly older versions? like in the properties-betas then a chosen version?
I’m not sure if they still get updates
I wish, Horizon Zero dawn 1.11 broke all plant textures on proton. 
I think there is a window-only option that is sort-of hack that can let you download previous versions of games that you’ve already downloaded, but most games aren’t set up to let you download alternate versions.
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I know KSP, Factorio and some other “early access” games let you stop at a certain release level. Wasn’t sure how far it goes.
And they are the ones with more common frequent, smaller updates.