EAC Detected Local File Integrity Violation: Unknown file version (Athena\Content\Paks\[file name].pak). Application shutting down.

After trying for a long time I found a fix to this problem:

I uninstalled steam and every game I had on steam. After that I installed them again, this time making sure that sea of thieves and steam were on the same drive. This worked en now I can play again. I tried just reinstalling the game again and that did not work. just make sure to save your characters and worlds in games like terraria before uninstalling steam.

I have no idea why this worked, I just noticed that on my old pc and for my friend sea of thieves did work and this was the only difference I could think of.
hope this helps some people

Also getting this issue on what's basically a fresh install of Windows. Has there been any word from the Devs on this at all? Fully half the folk I know that picked up on the Steam sale are getting this error every ~10-20 minutes.

Just bought this game on steam wanting to play it again as last I played it was a few years ago on console. Now I find out I cannot play the game I just bought because of this error. :(

I have the same problem but I think I have the solution, ask for the money back, since I have 1 hour spent trying to fix this error.

@fansea97 hey there! Did you ever find a solution for this? My app just started doing this same thing starting 2 days ago and I have tried everything I can think of. Thanks!

Throwing mine out there as well, same issues as above, none of above solutions works.

If it isnt fixed soon that'll be a refund job for me. Which sucks as I used to play it on xbox a couple of years ago and was keen to see the new changes that my mates were excited to show me.

Same thing occurs on Linux (arch-based) + ProtonGE9-10. I tried everything here but it still does not work as it used to. RARE please fix your anticheat, EAC is really bad, and it always was.

Post 3.1.0 update I have started having the same issue, my previous 30 hours I never had the issue, but after the update I get the error - on Steam, totally ruining what was supposed to be an enjoyable grind with some friends.

Following someones advice from this thread, I added the Sea Of Thieves directory to a whitelist in the windows defender then verified the integrity through steam, it installed the missing files and then I played 4 hours perfectly fine.

1. Open windows security
2. Virus & threat protection on the left
3. Under Virus & Thread protection settings click "Manage settings"
4. Scroll down to "Add or remove Exclusions"
5. Add an exclusion and add the directory of your game that opens when you open the directory. For me it was D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Sea of Thieves.

Then I verified integrity in steam and it said there was 2 files missing. It replaced them and then I ran fine.

After a few weeks of relative stability (I count over an hour without crashing as "stability"), this is back with a vengeance for me in Season 13. It's happening to me now in the menu before I even load into a session. I crashed once browsing the emporium from the menu, once browsing the seasonal rewards from the menu, and twice while trying to load into the game.

I added all the exceptions in Windows Security. Doesn't matter.

Don't say "verify your integrity." Just stop.

EAC has messed up this game on Steam. Rare needs to acknowledge this.

@fansea97 things i've tried that i got from this forum and they haven't worked. (i still can't play)

-installing the game on another disk, didn't work
-deleting the files it mentions in the game and checking the files through steam, didn't work
-installing steam on the same drive as the game, didn't work
-deleting the athena and EAC files from the C drive, didn't work
-deleting the EAC file from the game folder, didn't work
-deleting the EAC file from the game folder and downloading it again through steam, didn't work
-making the EAC executable solve the problem, didn't work
-checking the EAC compatibility issues and having win11 fix the problem, didn't work
-making my antivirus (kasperski) whitelist the drive where i have the game installed, didn't work

just uninstall the game and play something else

What I found worked for me is deleting the whole 'Paks' Folder and then running 'Verify this game's files are installed correctly'

Sea of Thieves Properties > Installed Files > Browse > Athena > Content. Delete Paks folder.
Go back to Installed Files and click Verify this game's files are installed correctly.
It will re-download that whole file, which is about 100Gb.

After trying to run the game the first time, it had some issues. Let it run its diagnostics; it took about 10 minutes. (This might of been just my issue cause I was playing another game at the time of it downloading again)

After it corrected that issue, I had no problems.

Just played for 5 hours without running into the error again.

Got the same issue and it starts to be really annoying. It pops on randomly since beginning of this year, verification always redownloads one file and then it either runs fine for few hours or crashes after few minutes with another file verification needed.

Recently, in last two days the game also hang up twice, out of the blue. One time it happened to me and other crew mate at the same time, second time only for me. There were noticeable stutters also from time to time. Not sure if this is related, but never experienced that before.

I've removed game completely and reinstalled it yesterday, today I've launched game to look at some guild stuff in menu and it detected another integrity violation. All the files in paks folder were last modified when the game was being downloaded, nothing else touches them.

@moistascetic said in EAC Detected Local File Integrity Violation: Unknown file version (Athena\Content\Paks[file name].pak). Application shutting down.:

What I found worked for me is deleting the whole 'Paks' Folder and then running 'Verify this game's files are installed correctly'

Sea of Thieves Properties > Installed Files > Browse > Athena > Content. Delete Paks folder.
Go back to Installed Files and click Verify this game's files are installed correctly.
It will re-download that whole file, which is about 100Gb.

After trying to run the game the first time, it had some issues. Let it run its diagnostics; it took about 10 minutes. (This might of been just my issue cause I was playing another game at the time of it downloading again)

After it corrected that issue, I had no problems.

Just played for 5 hours without running into the error again.

EDIT: After a few more days and many more hours of playing. I can guarantee that this has solved my issue.

just to add my experience here,
i got into this problem right after recent installation on steam. But after checking integrity it replaced 1 file and the problem did not occur since then.

I have the same problem, nothing has been written for 3 months. Is there anything new about solving the problem?

Fresh Windows 10 install, fresh Steam install with Sea of Thieves on it. Got that exact error. Will ask Steam for a refund. Never tried anything like it.

I've had this problem 5 month ago, 3month ago and today, can't believe this is still an issue. Everytime i've managed to fix the problem tho temporarily, and I still don't know how. I've verified the files, reinstalled the game, reinstalled eac, updated my drivers, followed the instructions on this website given by the sot support : https://web.archive.org/web/20240309182103/https://easy.ac/en-us/support/game/issues/guide/ . nothing works until it does for some reason i hope the website can help people more than it helped me.
I hope in the future their will be a concrete way to fix it or the devs fixing it.

Hi all, steam user here. I've the same problem but I believe it's a bit different, because the anticheat refuse to let me start the game (with a different error code each time, marvelous) or sometimes accept and that's when the problem with EAC file integrity occurs, when I launch the game, however, each times I booted the game after veryfing file integrity or booted EAC setup and the game as an admin, it somehow worked, I've played for the past 6 month , before EAC on SoT, and this error occured when I restarted to play the game from a long pause lasting season 12 and the beginning of season 13, right with EAC

New player here.
Didn't have an issue until 18 hours in.
Now it's a roll of the dice if EAC lets me play.

Instant crush when trying to play this game. If integrity check doesn't work, I dump the game. It's just nonsense.