Does DCS uninstall itself after a period of inactivity?

Does DCS Uninstall itself after a period of time on steam? I haven't played it since 9/2/18. Steam doesn't have a "play" button, it has an "Install" button, but my game is physically installed on one of my drives, it is still physically there. Why is steam not seeing it as installed? When I try to click on install, it tells me I have to download this huge file that is larger than the hard drive space I have. How do I force it to see that the game is already there, I don't want to download 100's of gigs again when it's already on my hard drive. I installed it on steam and it worked well enough for me to put 400 hours on it, I just took a break and now it doesn't work. What happened?

DCS does not automatically uninstall itself under any condition. Besides, it sounds like DCS is not uninstalled at all, rather, your steam client seems to have forgotten you have it installed.

The first thing I'd try is to go to steam (top left menu button) -> settings -> downloads and then press the library folders button. Make sure that the folder that contains DCS appears here.

Thanks for the replies everyone, yes the files are all physically still on the hard drive. I went to manage folders and the folder that had DCS was no longer there, so I went to add it and it says this: ""selected drive already has a steam library folder. Steam will manage multiple game installs in a single folder for you" and it doesn't do anything to the game in steam itself. Did steam just randomly remove the existing folder from that area so steam no longer knows where to look for DCS? How and why does this even happen? I certainly did not go in there and remove it myself, I didn't even know how to do it before I posted this. I understand it's showing uninstalled because it doesn't know what path to look in for the installed game, is there an easy way to point to it? Why is it giving me a warning saying there's already a steam folder, then it doesn't even add the directory? Is the only way to fix this really to wast all that bandwidth and re-download all 132 gigs of data again? It's not worth it if that's what I have to do.

It's unfortunately a little brainfart on Steam's end. Luckily the issue is rare. I've only seen this once before. What is also unfortunate is that Steam does not allow for multiple folders on a single drive, hence you're receiving complaints when trying to create a second one.

In the downloads folder menu, find out where the (new) folder for steam games is located on the drive you want DCS world to be. Then navigate to that folder, -> steamapps -> Common. Move the DCS world folder to this place. Restart steam. If it says "install", run that (it should know all the files you already have, so no huge amounts of data should be downloaded). If it says "play", run an integrity check before flying. Hopefully the issue is now solved.

Thanks for the help everyone. Steam said All I have to do is go to re-install the game and point to the directory it's already installed on and it'll just re-verify everything. The problem is that this game is so huge it takes it's on dedicated hard drive. I only bought a puny 250 GB SSD. So when I try to point to it, it doesn't pass because there's not enough room left on the drive to do the install even though it's not going to install anything. This all became such a huge pain in the ass, I just erased the entire DCS folder and re-downloaded it. It took a while,but not too long. By the time it all finally got installed and updated, I was too exhausted to even play the game. I still haven't loaded it, I just hope steam doesn't uninstall it again. I'll probably get on this weekend, I forgot how much time flight simming takes...

Thanks for the help everyone.

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This all became such a huge pain in the ass, I just erased the entire DCS folder and re-downloaded it.

Steam knows if a game is installed using manifest files that are stored two folder levels higher than the game. If you move a game folder between Library folders, it's important to transfer the manifest file as well.

Using my C:\ install as an example :

the DCS manifest file is

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\appmanifest_223750.acf

and the DCS folder is

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\DCSWorld

----------------------------------------

If I wanted to move the folder to my library folder on D:\ it would be to :

• D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\appmanifest_223750.acf

and

• D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\DCSWorld

Hopefully this will help next time.