Rust is a survival horror game where you kill to survive. Anything and everything will try to hunt you down, and in recent days, there’s been a new entity named Steam Auth Timeout that is hunting everyone in the game. Jokes aside, this is a recent bug that has been circulating on Steam for a few weeks now. That’s not all; this bug has been troubling players recently in many games, like Overwatch 2 and more. So, what is this, and why is it occurring? Let’s find out.
The Steam Authentication Timeout error kicks you out of your game upon showing up. As you can guess by now, this is very annoying and can destroy your hours of grinding in an instant. Rust is already a menace due to its difficult gameplay mechanics, and now this issue is only posing a hard time for the players. Anyway, without further ado, let’s move on to the workarounds that might help you fix this issue.
Rust Steam Authentication Timeout Error: How to Fix it
We have quite a few workarounds that might make the game work again. Also, you may fail to log in once this error pops up. It’s random, so there is nothing to be done except try the given workarounds.
Check the Game Files Integrity
The first thing you can do is check the game for errors or corrupted files. To do so,
- Open the Steam Client.
- Now, select the Library tab. After this, find and right-click on Rust.
- A window will open; now tap on Properties.
- Yet another window will pop up, but this time with a bunch of different options and tabs. You will need to click on the tab named Local Files.
- Here, select the Verify Integrity of Game Files option. Click on it and wait for the process to finish.
Unsubscribe to Beta
Steam offers beta patches for its beta users. In other words, you are running the latest and greatest version of Steam with the latest and greatest bugs if you are a beta user. So, this issue may be with the beta version of Steam and the game. Therefore, what you can do is opt out of the Beta version and then subscribe to it again. Doing so might fix the issue (as reported by many). To do so,
- Open the Steam client and select the Steam option. Now, click on Settings.
- Got the Interface section? Here, you will see many options, one of which is Client Beta Participation.
- There is a button on the right side of it. Select it, and choose “No Beta Chosen”.
- Select that and restart your Steam Client.
- After this, you can enable beta participation once again and launch the game. Doing so should fix the issue.
Repair Anti-Cheat Engine
Although this is not common, the EAC Engine may be the reason for this issue. To reset the Easy Anti-Cheat Engine, just follow these steps:
- Go to the game’s installation directory.
- Now, use the search bar in File Explorer and type “easy”. It will filter the EAC folder in the search results.
- Open the EasyAntiCheat Folder and run the EasyAntiCheat_Setup.exe file.
- A new window will pop up; select the Current option from the middle menu and press Repair Service.
- After the repair is completed, it should fix any issue resulting in such an error.
Clear the Cache Files
If even doing all that didn’t fix the issue, then the last thing you can do is clear the saved cache files of the Steam client. To do this, you need to follow the given steps in order:
- Click on the Steam option, which is located in the top-left corner of the Steam client.
- Click on Settings, and that will open yet another window.
- Look for Downloads and press that.
- Now, just click on the Clear Download Cached button.
- After this, relaunch Steam, and then start Rust.
You may ask, should I reinstall the game? If some files were corrupted while downloading, the first workaround will mark them as such. As we know by now that this is mostly a server-side issue, uninstalling the game won’t do any good. In some rare cases, some bad files can cause an Authentication Timeout error, which will get fixed if you follow these simple workarounds properly. However, you can still try reinstalling the game. That said, we hope this guide helped you fix this issue in Rust. And if it did, then make sure to follow Android Gram for more.