Dear team,
first of all, I have really been enjoying this game (until the crashes started). I am going to post in this thread as it matches my experience and EDenney did a good job analyzing the issue already.
Short (sad) story (long story below):
I am experiencing the same problem as EDenney with one big difference now.
I am now at a point that when returning to my main island the game would just crash right when still loading the island. Every time! Reproducible! (in-game time is day 480)
Details:
I am going to try to include as much information as I can (remember).
- It is a single player save created with version/build [2033]
- It is at default settings
- No custom islands (seed?)
I have been “living” with this issue (game crashing every few saves) since the the interaction bug was fixed. Same as EDenney I was playing and saving when the interaction bug kicked in (introduced with version/build [2071]). After version/build [2073] fixed the interaction bug I was continuing playing that same save that was affected by the interaction bug - haven’t had an issue with interaction since. However my game started to crash after some “quit to main menu” / “continue” cycles. Even with version/build [2074] which was supposed to fix the crash at save issue it was getting worse and worse.
The crash could be triggered (at least for my save) when doing some continued “quit to main menu” / “continue” cycles and for me was then happening either on returning to menu (when the menu loaded) or when hitting continue and the game tried to load the save or when trying to save at the shelter. I think all these have in common that on all these instances the save file is accessed (either loading or saving). I also concur with EDenney’s suspicion that this could be some memory leak kind of bug that builds up on consecutive save/load cycles. I also concur with his observation that it may have to do with how many resources / structures are collected / built on the main island.
From my observation the crash could also be triggered after traversing from one island to some other (I believe this would also trigger some kind of save/load cycle - but the devs should know this better). After a few saves on new island it will also crash. I have not noticed the crashes so far when freshly loading into the game and staying on the same island and doing consecutive saves there.
Until last week the game was “only” crashing when doing one of the above mentioned things. So I could work around that issue by frequently saving, quitting the game and freshly reloading. This helped keeping the crashes to a minimum. However, beginning of last week I started to experience the crash as soon as I returned to my main island and tried to save there. I was about to report the issue when I tried some last time and did “things a little different” - meaning after arriving I did not save right away but did some other stuff first and then only saving after a couple of minutes. This worked and I could continue playing on my main island. I built some more structures with the resources I brought back and as long as I was staying on this island it was fine to save and load. I could even go to two other adjacent islands to get more building material and further build the base. But now I am on the third island trying to get back to the main one and it will always crash on approaching / loading the island.
For me it was getting worse and worse the more stuff I have collected and built on the main island - and I have A LOT of stuff lying around - up to the point right now where it would crash at each approach to my main island.
Before: When approaching the main island the game would start to stutter and come to a complete freeze (in display) but the raft would still move towards the island until it hits the shore (when aimed right before the stuttering starts). After some time the island will appear completely empty (no rocks, no trees, no structures, no loot, nothing but the ground). After a couple of minutes it will start loading the structures on the island and the stuff collected (e.g. crates, materials). At first it looks like all the stuff is just spread everywhere on the beach and in the water. After some more time the stuff will be placed where I previously left it. This whole procedure would take more than 3 minutes.
Now: It is crashing during the loading of the island.
Additional info (not sure this has anything to do with the issues though):
One odd thing I noticed: one of the giant crabs did not show up lately on my home island.
I did not investigate though and just thought it might have been stuck somewhere under water.
Things I did (which I can remember at least) which are probably not intended by the devs
- built a raft base + floor + container shelf where the anchor is (but this never seemed to cause any issue)
- harvested container parts of containers with “multiple” spawns at the same position (got like 5 x 8 walls + 8 doors before the container was broken down)
- tried to build some foundations “around” non-fell-able trees but they were just not aligned with the rest of the structures, so I removed those again
Hope that any of the information can help the devs find and fix the issue so I can continue exploring. Sill have 9 islands left to explore and my building / perimeter is only half finished
Thanks and keep up the good work.
PS: I do not think the latest update [2078] did any change to that crashing issue - and as far as I understood there was no intention in that release to fix the crashing issue.