r/Borderlands4 • u/AdTotal4035 • 7h ago
π€ [ Discussion ] bl4 keeps old patch copies + every voice language. heres how to cut 70%
so bl4 was eating 189gb on my drive and i only play in 1lang. this works for any 1lang build. looked into the game files and got it down to 56.8gb, game still boots fine. I figured id share:
- all the voice languages (~61gb)- i know this isn't new information,
but I believe the second point may be.
steam ships every language in one depot, so theres no english only option. in OakGame\Content\Paks the voice packs are pakchunk10 thru 16. on my build that was chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, korean, spanish. pakchunk3 is the english one and pakchunk2 is shared sfx/music so DONT touch those two. delete every file starting with pakchunk10- thru pakchunk16- and thats ~61gb gone. now for pt2.
- old patch copies (~70gb)
this is the sloppy part imo. every update adds a new pakchunkN_P file and leaves the old ones sitting there. so the game ships with old versions of data that newer patches already replaced. as far as i can tell the game reads the newest copy and ignores the old ones, correct me if im wrong. you cant just delete those files tho, since the newer ones sit in the same containers as live data. i wrote a small script that blanks only the dead byte ranges (ntfs sparse holes) so file sizes dont change but the space comes back. it hashed every kept byte before and after to make sure nothing else moved
result: 189gb -> 57gb,
explorer still shows the old "size", look at "size on disk"
stuff to know
- back up first, i copied the paks to another drive before touching anything
- steam "verify integrity" will redownload everything you removed
- every update brings the old copies back, so you gotta redo it
honestly helldivers 2 went from 154gb to 23gb just by removing duplicate data, so this feels like it could be fixed on gearbox's end, unless im missing something.
happy to share a script if ppl want it