What are the pre-requisites for playing offline?

Switch to offline mode. That's it.

AND close steam!

Can you elaborate? Where is the 'switch to offline mode' button? Why does 'Play Offline' frequently not work? If by 'offline mode' you are referring to 'play offline', then my question still stands: what are the pre-requisites for playing offline?

Just select go offline from the steam menu! Thats it!

when you open Steam, on the top left click on "Steam" and select "Go offline". It will restart and so on. There are no per-requisites that I know of, I do it all the time and I do nothing special. The reason why it doesn't work all the time is similar with why automatic updates don't work all the time - because sometimes Steam does whatever it wants to.

If you want to be sure to play offline, unplug your internet before opening steam so you won't sign in.

Great - thanks! Sorry for the impatience, but I've had recurring problems playing offline. Can you tell me if 'go offline' effectively "freezes" your setup so that it will behave consistently until the next time you go online? If so, does steam honour the offline choice even if you exit and start it again while connected to the 'net?

This is the part that has caused problems in the past - starting the game, only to have to wait for 5 minutes while steam figures out it can't connect to the network before closing without starting the game. Hence the query about pre-requisites.

After going offline, everytime you re-launch Steam, you are given the choice of remaining offline or putting Steam back into normal online mode.

I can't launch skyrim from steam in offline mode, the game is missing from my library, when i re-launch steam in online mode it reapears.
It's a retail dvd not steam dwnld.

clamzek try running skyrim.exe from the skyrim directory that should open the steam program, then choose to stay in offline mode and then the launcher should come up.

Personally i only play in offline mode. When ever there is an update i can't hit off offline fast enough after the update to make sure Skyrim can run without an internet connection. I live in the mountains and occasional internet outages occur so better to be 100% safe in offline mode, one of the reasons ill never use steam workshop.

Yea, i think the only pre-req for offline mode is for the game to be fully patched.

nope, tried both skyrimluancher.exe and tesv.exe, it does start steam and i can select offline mode but no game. ive updated steam and the game, started the game in online mode, exited, then retried offline mode and nothing. the game just vanishes.