Do not finish the quest A light in the end of the Tunnel

[Speedycake582]

i just confirmed what some other comment in a thread about Fatal error! Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x0000000000000000
the guy mentioned that Quiets quest causes that error and he is correct at time of testing this i luckily had a save in the section with the electrigeist before you unpower the item you need and the game launched but loading the save immediately after that where i had handed the item to Sidorovich crashes me to desktop instantly so for the time being DO NOT DO THIS QUEST atleast until the devs can fix it

[The Anal Annihilator]

Didn't work for me either. Very annoying.
Thankfully I saved right before going into the dungeon.
I wouldn't recommend anyone doing this quest since there seems to be a lot of bugs involved.
I had the door you need to push the red button to open perma-close for me the first time I ran through the dungeon.
It's a side quest so I recommend everyone to skip it entirely.

[ZgredPOL]

Gentlemen (and Ladies). I got it. There is a way. Or at least it worked for me.
When the game crashes to the desktop, you do a restart, load the game and go towards the stairs. The game crashed about 5/6 times (for me). But today, it just crashed without error. I took a screen shot, alt tab and went back to the game. Continued with no problems.

[Myztkl©-Kev]

Originally posted by ZgredPOL:

Gentlemen (and Ladies). I got it. There is a way. Or at least it worked for me.
When the game crashes to the desktop, you do a restart, load the game and go towards the stairs. The game crashed about 5/6 times (for me). But today, it just crashed without error. I took a screen shot, alt tab and went back to the game. Continued with no problems.

I've heard other people state they just keep trying and eventually it works after half a dozen or so attempts.

[Baron01]

Originally posted by Speedycake582:

i just confirmed what some other comment in a thread about Fatal error! Unhandled Exception: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x0000000000000000
the guy mentioned that Quiets quest causes that error and he is correct at time of testing this i luckily had a save in the section with the electrigeist before you unpower the item you need and the game launched but loading the save immediately after that where i had handed the item to Sidorovich crashes me to desktop instantly so for the time being DO NOT DO THIS QUEST atleast until the devs can fix it

So, something weird is at play here. What game version, Steam or Xbox Game Pass, do you use?

I have a Steam version and I was able to complete the quest A light in the end of the Tunnel without any issues. The only jump scare was when I descended the stairs (many call them stairs of Doom) and the game froze/stuttered for good 4 or 5 seconds. However, other than this one issue I could than run to Sidorovich and complete the quest without any problems.

Same thing is reported for a quest in Zaton/Swamp from Sultan. You need to bring him a brief case and apparently the game can lock you into infinite dialogue without your ability to quit it. If you force-close the game, the quest breaks and you are stuck with permanent quest item in your inventory that weights 5kg. Again, I completed the quest without any issues at all.

I'm not saying this is not happening, I'm just wondering what is triggering this soft-locks and why only some people are impacted.

[ToJKa]

Just did this quest myself, and whenever i'm trying to take the stairs after grabbing the item, the game freezes.

No crash, no error. Need to manually force the game shut from task manager.

[Jahtzee]

Originally posted by Liquid_Softgel:

Not exactly related to crashing, but if you leave midway through the tunnel and come back, the doors are closed and you can not open them again. You're effectively softlocked. So I guess I saved myself not corrupting my file by locking myself out? >.>

There seems to be ways to complete the quest without corrupting your save, but I don't know what triggers it. I went through it two times. The first one corrupted my save afterwards. I loaded a previous one, did the quest again, and this time, everything worked out.
Maybe it is related to picking up a specific item? The only thing I remember doing differently is killing the Poltergeist before picking up the quest item.

[Nelson]

Originally posted by Jahtzee:

Originally posted by Liquid_Softgel:

Not exactly related to crashing, but if you leave midway through the tunnel and come back, the doors are closed and you can not open them again. You're effectively softlocked. So I guess I saved myself not corrupting my file by locking myself out? >.>

There seems to be ways to complete the quest without corrupting your save, but I don't know what triggers it. I went through it two times. The first one corrupted my save afterwards. I loaded a previous one, did the quest again, and this time, everything worked out.
Maybe it is related to picking up a specific item? The only thing I remember doing differently is killing the Poltergeist before picking up the quest item.

I didn't have the option to pick up the amplifyer until I killed the mutant.

[Lens007888]

I completed it first go but did get the 20 odd second freeze on the stairs and noticed that when reaching the bottom a med box and some other stuff fell from the roof, after doing the other bit to get outside it started chugging, easy fix was to save, quit to Steam and relaunch, has worked for any issues so far.

[ToJKa]

Originally posted by Dapper Raptor:

I was able to complete this mission, but I'm on linux so idk if maybe the penguin saved me. I got a MASSIVE freeze as I walked up the stairs where everyone (in the other thread) said they got a crash, but after about 8 seconds it woke up and I was able to keep going.

Ah, that worked for me too. I've had few of these freezes in the game, but not that long before. And saves didn't corrupted either, so dodged a bullet there.

I'm on Win 11, though.

Originally posted by Nelson:

I didn't have the option to pick up the amplifyer until I killed the mutant.

Yeah, same for me.

[Jahtzee]

Originally posted by Nelson:

Originally posted by Jahtzee:

There seems to be ways to complete the quest without corrupting your save, but I don't know what triggers it. I went through it two times. The first one corrupted my save afterwards. I loaded a previous one, did the quest again, and this time, everything worked out.
Maybe it is related to picking up a specific item? The only thing I remember doing differently is killing the Poltergeist before picking up the quest item.

I didn't have the option to pick up the amplifyer until I killed the mutant.

You can shoot it and then pick it up.

[Baron01]

Originally posted by ToJKa:

Just did this quest myself, and whenever i'm trying to take the stairs after grabbing the item, the game freezes.

No crash, no error. Need to manually force the game shut from task manager.

I got the freeze on those stairs as well but the game unfreezed after approximately 10 seconds and everything worked fine. I got out of the base, run to Sidorovich and turned the quest in. No issues.

[BossManJosh]

I was able to complete the quest without issue BUT at the end of the quest after grabbing the psi-whatever there are some stairs where the descent to leave the quest area begins and on those stairs my game froze and then took about 30 seconds to recover. I died to the burer at the very end of the level and had to reload where the game froze in the exact same spot again, but then similarly ended up recovering fine.

[Klastic]

EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x0000000000000000
i dont know if it helps but that indicates it is trying to access an invalid memory address which could point to corrupt software, i would try verifying the game files

[wiewi0r7768]

Originally posted by ZgredPOL:

Gentlemen (and Ladies). I got it. There is a way. Or at least it worked for me.
When the game crashes to the desktop, you do a restart, load the game and go towards the stairs. The game crashed about 5/6 times (for me). But today, it just crashed without error. I took a screen shot, alt tab and went back to the game. Continued with no problems.

Worked for me too, so far it works

Originally posted by MentalDecay84:

I tried to get out of the tunnels, met a burer and got killed by him, now all my saves lead to a crash.

About the burer - I accidentally outricked the game. I've notice it's hole going back from the outpost, notice the mutant - "f*** no" and went back to the village.

It followed me there and got lit up by all the stalkers in town lol

[Arndell]

So I remembered seeing this post, so when i got the mission i was careful.

I have been running the game shockingly flawlessly, not a single crash in 30 hours.
I made my backup saves before touching the emitter.

So when I shot the emitter to break it, I picked it up and the game auto saved, I tried to load that auto save and I got my first crash "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION reading address 0x0000000000000000"

I reloaded my safe files and went and killed the poltergeist to deactivate the emitter instead of breaking it, the game once again did an auto save after picking it up, but this time I can load the save fine.


Is it possible that it's specifically the "Broken" Emitter item that's corrupting saves? if anyone has save files that havn't completed this quest yet it would be good to test out this theory.

I'll keep my backup save for now and do a load more reloads after handing it in and completing the quest to make sure it's actually safe to do so.