Blackscreen bug WITH FIX finally.

[Taki]

At about 150hr of total elin gameplay, I am finally defeated by the damned blackscreen.

Launching the game provides the elin window completely black and while it is not 'unresponsive' to windows, it does not respond to any user interaction.

I've verified files, reinstalled, turned off all mods, deleted appdata (while backing up my existence mind you), opted in to nightly beta thing, updated drivers, rebooted several different times, installed a C++ redist.

Lastly I uninstalled, removed a lingering file in the steamapps location and made sure appdata wasn't present, and the black elin window launched presenting three options, English, Japanese, Chinese as it is supposed to on initial run. Upon reapplying the locallow backup files, the blackscreen resumes. Kinda odd that it was still blackscreened when I had removed the appdata files earlier...

Time to feed the functioning file my broken file until I can narrow it down to the criminal...
A file that is not present in the fresh unplayed install is version.txt which contains:

{
"$id": "1",
"minor": 23,
"batch": 38,
"fix": 1
}

After banging on it with a stick to make sure it works, I noted that version.txt appeared and it contained:

{
"$id": "1",
"minor": 23,
"batch": 39
}

This file is located in \AppData\LocalLow\Lafrontier\Elin\Save

It makes me wonder if "fix":1 is breaking the game for some reason. Regardless, deleting the new and properly working version.txt seemed to cause my config file to wipe on run, but did not cause any other issues, so would be a suitable temporary fix for those that hit the black screen bug. At least, the ones that this fixes it for, lol.

TLDR: Delete version.txt to resolve blackscreen bug.

[Taki]

Added all my mods back and even included the original breaking version.txt file. Removing "fix":1 fixed the issue, lol.

[malamaruli]

This actually fixed the issue man. Thanks for the tip!

[Lumi Starveil]

What if I can’t even find version.txt?

[Taki]

Then your nightmare has a different origin. D: