All these PC stability issues REALLY need to be fixed!

[davidp4]

The more complex environment my character travels through (the more transitional loading screens), the more the game crashes. The big city environments are the worst, often literally crashing every 5 minutes or so as i go in and out of various buildings and areas. Some areas like The Well are even hard to successfully reload a save into. If I'm walking on most planet surfaces, I can reliably walk around for hours without any crashes happening at all.

Last night I had a particularly bad experience with a big gun fight on a planetside base, where literally the game crashed upwards of 30 times before i could finally eleminate all the enimies and finish it! Not many enemies and not an overly complex environment - but it was sure unstable... Because of this, my playing style has become "take 5 steps -> quicksave", "come to a transition door -> quicksave", "about to start a conversation -> quicksave", etc. - it's getting ridiculous!

Tonight I had an even worse problem, every savefile I tried to reload into crashed (over and over again) until after about 15 tries it finally loaded me into it successfully.

All of these symptoms look a lot like memory leaks or overlays, since they are not necessairly deterministic. If I reload a savefile and it crashes 5 times in a row, it may eventually work on the next try. Sometimes that all that's been saving me!

Nothing seems to be built into the game to capture these events or any information about them, so the developers could actually analyze them and fix them. Why? Doesn't that seem like a no-brainer in 2023? I would assume that they must be aware of these issues and hope they are working on them - because these constant crashes really wreck the imersion of the game! Is there even any way to intelligently report these types of crashes to Bethesda at all?

I play a lot of games on my middle-of-the-road system (6/12 core i7, 32GB memory, Rx-480(8GB) running at low graphical settings at 1920x1080), including many other big, complex, AAA titles with detailed environments and complex graphics. I've never seen a major game with as many easy to reproduce crashes as this one... Yesterday's patch did nothing to change any of these behaviors, but i hope they're working on fixing them anyway! They want me to keep playing this game for 5 years? They really need to fix the stability issues big time!

[Martin]

imo they need to remove alot of the teleports in cities.. i mean you're only loading a single room in most cases.. there's way too many instanced areas. And yes it's causing some kind of memory leak, do it too much and the game starts to glitch and crash. You're actually better off running around between points than teleporting.

Next I'd want the ship building system redone so it isn't so insanely stupidly frustrating to use. Then I'd want all the little bugs like some text lines that are out of whack and there's a shield you get at lv 2 thats 1600 str.. and it costs like 8k creds, then the 3rd and 4th versions cost more creds but are lower str.. it's clearly just a typo.. but a silly one and there's loads of issues like that.

I'd also like to see a proper balancing of the npcs in poi's as well.. goto a lv 40 area and you find lv 5 to lv 65 pirates.. they should all be lv 35-45 ish.. same with ships..

[RodroG]

Every time the game hangs and crashes to the desktop creates a log report in the following folder:

%LocalAppData% > Starfield

The game crash log explains the instructions that failed when the crash occurred. So, you may want to find the report and read it to know which game instruction failed when the game crash happened.

By default and unless you tick the unhide items/files option in the View menu, the 'AppData' folder is a hidden system folder inside your Windows user profile folder.

In my case, the game has been crashing after the latest game patch due to a faulty game instruction related to having the in-game GTAO display setting set to 'Ultra' value.

Lowering the GTAO setting to 'High' stopped the crashing issue after installing the latest patch in my case. So, the stored game crash log helped me to identify a probable root cause of the crash and work around it temporarily.

Also, you may want to send/open a support ticket case from here to inform the developers about your issue:

https://help.bethesda.net/#en/home/product/1218

[davidp4]

Last night I found a little relief from the "unloadable save file" problems I've been occassionally seeing - by installling the "script extender" mod. Oh, the game still crashes a fair amount, but this mod seems to help with not being able to get a save file to load at all.

I'll take a look at the logs you described above, but hope Bethesda is at least aware of these issues and working on fixes for them!

[Mountain Man]

The problem is that these issues aren't affecting everybody. I've been playing on my PC and Steam Deck and have not encountered a single issue, so Bethesda has to first figure out what unique combination of factors are causing the game to crash on some systems, and then figure out how to fix it. Not an easy task.

[Goof]

ive had 1 crash in 200 hours

[alanc9]

That's the problem with developing for PC. Even if the vast majority of people run the game fine, you still have to deal with the few who can't.

[thalx]

Originally posted by davidp4:

All of these symptoms look a lot like memory leaks or overlays, since they are not necessairly deterministic.

I play a lot of games on my middle-of-the-road system (6/12 core i7, 32GB memory, Rx-480(8GB) running at low graphical settings at 1920x1080), including many other big, complex, AAA titles with detailed environments and complex graphics. I've never seen a major game with as many easy to reproduce crashes as this one... Yesterday's patch did nothing to change any of these behaviors, but i hope they're working on fixing them anyway! They want me to keep playing this game for 5 years? They really need to fix the stability issues big time!

It's not the game, it's your PC.

I have over 130h of playtime and not a single crash. And I play everything on Ultra and an additional 230GB of HD textures from Nexusmod. For me it is one of the most stable games in many years. Zero problems.

[Nite69]

its your PC OP I can play for hours on mine

Ryzen 7 2700x
16GB DDR4 3000
RTX 3070
2TB ADATA SX8200 Pro M2 NVME

[dulany67]

Is a 480 even min spec? SSD?

[AoD_lexandro]

400+ hours no game related crashes at all. 3 gpu driver crashes, 2 because of overheating (i forgot to make a fan profile) and one because I had a corrupted install of the latest driver package that needed doing over.

[SylenThunder]

Originally posted by davidp4:

I play a lot of games on my middle-of-the-road system (6/12 core i7, 32GB memory, Rx-480(8GB) running at low graphical settings at 1920x1080), including many other big, complex, AAA titles with detailed environments and complex graphics. I've never seen a major game with as many easy to reproduce crashes as this one... Yesterday's patch did nothing to change any of these behaviors, but i hope they're working on fixing them anyway! They want me to keep playing this game for 5 years? They really need to fix the stability issues big time!

This means nothing.

i7-What? That could be a i7-3930k. (I actually have one of those around here somewhere with a 1060 or 1070 in it.) If your CPU shipped with the GPU, then you most likely have a 5th or 6th-gen Intel chip, which is well below the min spec.
RX 480? WAY below the min spec.
32GB RAM is useless if it's DDR3, which is likely given the rest of your specs.
Do you even have an SSD with that, or are you still on the platter drive that shipped with the rest of your hardware seven years ago.

[maeharaprojekt]

In the first week of playing, I had some odd behavior from the game and adjusted the pagefile size for my internal SSD's.

Assuming that you installed the game on an internal SSD -
Check your pagefile size and if it isn't set to at least 10,000 MB (10 GB) for the SSD you have Starfield installed on, consider doing so. To do this:

1. Go to Start Menu -> Settings -> System -> About
   
2. Click Advanced System Settings
   
3. In the Systems properties pop-up, select the Advanced tab and in the Performance section, click on Settings
   
4. In the Performance Options window, select the Advanced tab, and then click on Change under Virtual Memory.

For more details about pagefile adjustment, check this article on Tom's Hardware: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-manage-virtual-memory-pagefile-windows-10,36929.html

If you are not running Starfield from a M.2 NVMe SSD or SATA III SSD, you will experience a lot problems.

External SATA III SSD's seem to be OK.

External SSD's that connect via USB 3.0 and 3.1 are going to have as many problems as players with HDD. *Generally* speaking, the transfer rate for USB 3.0 and 3.1 is too slow. If you *must* use a USB SSD, your PC must have at least one USB 3.2 port and the external SSD must be USB 3.2 compliant. The cable should be verifiable as USB 3.2 compliant - beware of fakes, because there are many.

Some people who simply cannot move away from HDD, for whichever reason, have been able to eek a little more performance out of their internal HDD by installing the Disk Cache Enabler mod. Note that this does require installation of SFSE or ASI.
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/2245