Since I haven't seen anybody else make this point, let me do it now (just so there might be less unnecessary howling in the forums in the coming days).

If you wish to ensure that you are able to use the Creation Kit without interruption, just about now might be the right time to set your Steam client in offline mode and keep it there.

That makes certain that once 1.8 goes out of beta, you can avoid being automatically patched to it. After previous patches, there has always been a number of gamers, who have been "surprised" by a patch, that has made some of their mods incompatible with the freshly patched game. This time the 1.8 patch makes Update.esm incompatible with the current Creation Kit, effectively preventing one from using it at all, if one has Update.esm as a master to one's mod as one usually should. So, unless you have strong faith in Bethesda updating the Creation Kit immediately after 1.8 goes live, you might consider taking this simple precautionary step to avoid a compulsory break of unpredictable duration in CK availability.

P.S. And sure, there may be other ways to achieve the same (including removing Update.esm as a master, which is of course possible though perhaps not good practice), but going offline in Steam is pretty straightforward. The Steam setting "Do not automatically update" will not do the trick, as it merely postpones updating until you launch the game to test your mod.

A very valuable advice, indeed, thank you Inki.

Unfortunately, I cannot put Steam into offline mode as I use it for far too much else. But I've turned off automatic updates, which may or may not work.

Thanks for the tip. I generally run in offline mode anyway to save time while developing, but I'll make sure to disable the auto update as well in case I need to go online for something.

I fear that may not be enough, because that setting really means "Do not update automatically if I am not playing, but wait until I launch the game, and update it then." But I have this faint recollection from some prehistorical post on this forum, that your mod may not have Update.esm as master at this point, which would mean that it would not be impacted.

I think I have seen somebody somewhere mention some way to avoid updating the game, using some sort of additional/external tool or something, but unfortunately I have never grasped what that was all about.

Ah, that makes sense. Regardless, once it's patched I can just avoid opening Skyrim until the CK is updated to match.

I'm newly using the beta and discovered Update.esm no longer loads in CK. How long does it normally take them to update the CK?

A semi-related question - should Update.esm appear in the Data Files list from the launcher, or does Skyrim just include it automatically? I thought I remembered it used to appear in the list, but it doesn't appear for me now.

They wont update the CK at least until 1.8 is out of beta. Once it's officially out, it can take them anywhere from 1-5 days to update.

Skyrim.esm and Update.esm are automatically checked by the launcher, and thus to save space, they do not show up.

Thanks very much for the answers, Alexander!

So is the CK updating today or something? Because my Steam screen shows it as "Paused" at "99%" of something or another but it won't run the CK, even in offline mode. What's up with that?

CK wont update until 1.8 is public. Probably not for a few days after.

The CK gets stuck at 99% because Steam is bugged. You need to reinstall the CK for it to work.

Alex, are you serious? *groans*
on rural internet??

*sigh* okay how do I go about uninstalling and reinstalling (I never had to do that with the CS, I kinda wish we had that back)

Well, you may want to back up your scripts and whatnot, though the CK shouldn't remove any of those.

Just go to Tools in steam, say Delete Local Content, the Install. Just like you did the first time. It will redownload, and you should be able to resume modding as though nothing had changed. Luckily the CK download is small, so as long asyou have not-completely-terrible internet it's very fast.

lol @ not-completely-terrible ... Dial up at 33.6.... That's pretty terrible, yes? But thank you, that did work. So the patch mentioned above is a patch to Skyrim itself?

The reason I ask is that I have Skyrim set to the choice that's "keep it updated" and I don't want to "break" Skyrim and be unable to play it for like 32 hours (that's how long it takes to install Skyrim for me)

Definitely backup ALL of your scripts, especially any modified vanilla ones. Modified vanilla ones will be overwritten without question by Steam.

Since I can't use the CK without Steam in online mode anyway, I just make a habit of checking the forums and/or Bethblog site before a patch goes live and I prepare for it ahead of time before trying to launch Steam. It's pretty much all one can do when Steam's own advertised features don't ever work as described.

Thanks for the tip.
Why should I backup my own scripts? Is it possible a CK update might delete the folder???

The better question is why wouldn't you back up your own scripts?

Thanks for reminding me. I only back-uped the BSA and esp and the bsa did not comtain the sourcecode. Now it contains all.

Usually it's been under 5 days. It's been a while since the last major update, though, so I don't remember how quickly the CK gets patched.

A CK update probably isn't going to delete the folder AFAIK (though you never know), but it may overwrite any same-name files that are there that you may have modified, however.