[HOWTO] Download Updates With Broken Package Manager

[Tony Li]

This issue has been affecting Asset Store publishers quite a lot, so I thought I'd write a HOWTO:

In all Unity versions as of this post, Unity's Package Manager window is broken. If you click the Update button to download an updated version of an Asset Store package, it will keep the old version in the Asset Store download cache folder instead of the newly-downloaded version -- even though the window says that it has downloaded the updated version. So when you then click Update, it will import the old version instead of the new.

The only solution is to delete the old package from the cache folder first, then refresh the Package Manager window before downloading.

The cache folder is located here:

• Windows: [user]\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store 5.x
• Mac: ~/Library/Unity/Asset Store-5.x

[Tony Li]

Update:

Unity will be putting a Package Manager fix in these releases:

• 2021.2.0a9
• 2021.1.0b12
• 2020.3.1.f1 LTS
• 2019.4.23f1

[digiwombat]

They pushed an apparent fix to some other versions (happens to me in 2020.2.6, which otherwise fixed the basic updating), but they seem to have introduced a different bug where updates sometimes only show after restarting the Unity editor, so if you're confident there should be updates to your asset, close Unity and re-open it and that should hopefully help.

[Tony Li]

Thanks for that info.

BTW, for Pixel Crushers assets, the version is always listed in _README.txt. If you want to make sure you've imported the latest version, compare this file to the version number shown on the Asset Store.

[Tony Li]

In some versions of Unity, the Package Manager may show an up arrow next to the asset. If you see this, you may be able to expand the asset's foldout to update to the latest version.