Dropping -beta from app_update does not leave a beta branch. SteamCMD wrote
"public" into the manifest's UserConfig and left MountedConfig on "unstable",
so the install stayed on the 42.14.1 build from February while reporting
success. The config had already moved to the bare mod-ID syntax that 42.20+
wants, and 42.14.1 still requires the backslash prefix, so all 283 mods
loaded as "required mod ... not found" and the server came up vanilla.
Naming the branch explicitly is what actually remounts the content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
