Epic Games seemingly changed the format of their .pak compressions, giving headaches to some of the most experienced Fortnite data miners. Until they find a way to unpack the .pak files, it may be for a while. Also, the AES key is changed, and even if they manage to discover it, they’ll still hit a roadblock set by the .pak format change.
This will somewhat require advanced programming to see what kind of compression it uses to crack those files open. For now, everyone’s simply stuck to decompressing them, and as said before, it may take a while until a certain way is discovered.
Lucas7yoshi, which is known as one of the very popular data miners, have claimed and showcased that the files are using a different format. You can find the tweet below:
alright boys its going to be a while pic.twitter.com/AMSfiHDtoz
— Lucas7yoshi – FESTIVAL ARC??? (@Lucas7yoshi) April 10, 2019
Just a bit later after that, he also added that the umodel version he uses doesn’t recognize the .pak files at all.
Just want to add that normally umodel actually recognizes the pak version being something it doesn't support, but it literally doesn't even know its a pak file this time
— Lucas7yoshi – FESTIVAL ARC??? (@Lucas7yoshi) April 10, 2019
Feelsbadman. Due to this issue, some of the core changes included in Fortnite’s patch 8.30 will most likely remain undiscovered. There will be minor data mines that are currently not secured as the big changes, so we’ll make sure they surface any time.
Other dataminers have managed to snatch some skins and styles but most of them are coming without a name, which doesn’t necessarily prove its integrity.