[smileybarry]

It's been years since I last had corrupted downloads, and I think that was back when Steam used its own download protocol, off colocated Valve-owned mirror servers. As of some years back it's all HTTP-based[1] now and off Akamai CDN IIRC. (I don't mean to say "works on my machine" but trying to theorize why it's so common for you while saying why it's generally more stable nowadays)

Have you ever tried to reproduce this on a different ISP or even hotspot? Wired vs wireless? Maybe there's some transmission corruption going on over the wire that's only caught during final validation? (And thus having to redownload chunks much later instead of inline)

1: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamPipe

[Brybry]

Even chunks are checksummed. Or at least they are in third party implementations. [1]

One thing that happens is some games keep config files in their game directory instead of using a host OS user directory and thus those games will fail validation after any configuration change.

Combine that with mods that break games, but the mod files aren't in the manifest and thus invisible to validation, can create scenarios where users are doing repeated full validations and still having issues.

[1] https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader/blob/master/Depot...