The Cave Support FAQ

[DF Vic]

Hello, everyone! The Cave is a great game about adventuring through a mystical cave with a ...unique… group of adventurers, but sometimes bugs get in the way of your plundering and spelunking, which is not very sweet at all. If you are affected by a badly behaving bug, glitch, crash or other defect, please check out this here FAQ before posting. Many users are affected by the same problems that all have easy fixes, which is what this FAQ is all about. If you have read this FAQ and still can’t find an answer for your problem, do a quick search for other threads on the topic here. If that fails, too, then please post a new thread on the problem!

The Cave is doing something strange and random and glitchy and none of the specific things below help, what can I do?

Computers are fickle beasts and sometimes things go wrong, but fortunately there are some easy things to try that fix a lot of the random issues. If you post about an issue, very likely we’ll ask you to try one or more of these things first.
* Reboot your computer. It’s a simple thing but it’s amazing how many problems this solves.
* Update your drivers, especially video card drivers. Just don’t try to use beta drivers as they will often cause more problems than they solve.
* Verify the Integrity of You Local Game Cache. You can do this by Right clicking on The Cave in your library, choosing Properties, Advanced, and then clicking the Verify Integrity of Local Game Cache button.
* Manually run the DirectX and Visual Studio C++ (vc) redistributables. This ensures that you have all the support libraries installed that The Cave needs to run happily.
* Try deactivating heavy background processes like anti-virus or malware scanners. On some computers these programs are so demanding that they significantly interfere with high performance games. If this doesn’t solve your problem, though, be sure to turn your scanners back on!

The Cave isn’t running smoothly for me and seems to lag or stutter a lot. What can I do to make it run smooth as an emulsion of bovine proteins?

The answer to this question depends on what kind of system you’re running on. See below for specific answers.

On personal computers (Windows, OSX, Linux) the most common cause of performance issues is the GPU (graphics card). Here are some ways to make that better.
* The biggest difference you can make to GPU performance is to lower the resolution of the game. To do this, open the pause menu and then go to Settings->Display and pick a lower resolution. The game will only display resolutions that are valid for your game.
* After you’ve found a resolution that you like, the next step is to disable “special effect” features. These features can be found by opening the Pause menu, chosing Settings and then Visuals. You can chose which features you think help your system the most, but we recommend disabling Shadows last as it has the biggest impact on the core look of the game.
* You can always disable vsync. If your computer is almost but not quite fast enough to run at 30 fps or if you just don’t like vsync, turn this option off. If your machine runs below 30fps, the game will disable vsync for you, but you can disable it yourself just to be sure.
* If you’re using a Retina Macbook or iMac, you almost certainly want to lower the resolution. The game will default to the native resolution which may be more than your graphics card can handle.

When I play The Cave I see lots of strange visual artifacts and can see through rocks and other parts of the world. How do I fix it?

This problem is almost always caused by MSAA being forced on through the video card drivers. Simply set your MSAA settings to “use application defaults” or the nearest equivalent and you’ll be good to go. If you’re forcing any other settings on, you should probably let the application run those, too.

When I play The Cave I see random white flickering over some objects in the game. How do I fix it?

This bug is due to an issue with The Cave’s Depth of Field effect and some video card drivers, especially integrated Intel cards on OSX. You can fix these issues by disabling DOF in the display settings of the pause menu. We hope to correct or auto-disable this in a future update.

I’m playing The Cave on a TV or projector connected by HDMI. For some reason whenever the game starts, I just get a black screen. How can I see this awesome game?

For some reason, some HDTVs report support for some display modes that they don’t actually support. To fix this, you can edit (or create if it does not already exist) the game’s screen.dat. To do so:

1) Go to %APPDATA%\Doublefine\TheCave\
2) Create an empty text file called screen.dat if it does not exist.
3) Open screen.dat in the text editor of you choice.
4) The format of the file should look like the following, but change the details to meet the capabilities of your display.

fullscreen = true
width = 1920
height = 1080
refreshrate = 60
vsync = false

My controller doesn’t work even though it works in other games with Big Picture!

There is a temporary solution for this for you guys until we can add more fixes into the game itself:

1. Configure your controller in Big Picture, make sure everything works there
2. Open “~/Library/Application Support/Steam/config/config.vdf” And find a line which looks like:

“SDL_GamepadBind” “891600000000000000fd000000000000,Razer Onza TE,a:b0,b:b1,y:b3,x:b2,start:b8,guide:b10,back:b9,leftstick:b6,rightstick:b7,leftshoulder:b4, rightshoulder:b5,dpup:b11,dpleft:b13,dpdown:b12,dpright:b14,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,rightx:a3,righty:a4,lefttrigger:a2,righttrigger:a5,”

(Depending on which controller you’re using, the ‘Razer Onza’ part will be different.

3. Copy the second value without quotes
4. Open “~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/TheCave/Cave.app/Contents/Resources/Data/Config/SDLGamepad.config” and paste the value there. For the Razer Onza it looks like this:


6d0400000000000018c2000000000000,Logitech Rumble Pad 2(Mac),a:b1,b:b2,y:b3,x:b0,start:b9,back:b8,leftstick:b10,rightstick:b11,leftshoulder:b4, rightshoulder:b5,dpup:h0.1,dpleft:h0.8,dpdown:h0.4,dpright:h0.2,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,rightx:a2,righty:a3,lefttrigger:b6,righttrigger:b7,

891600000000000000fd000000000000,Razer Onza TE(Mac),a:b0,b:b1,y:b3,x:b2,start:b8,guide:b10,back:b9,leftstick:b6,rightstick:b7,leftshoulder:b4, rightshoulder:b5,dpup:b11,dpleft:b13,dpdown:b12,dpright:b14,leftx:a0,lefty:a1,rightx:a3,righty:a4,lefttrigger:a2,righttrigger:a5,

(Kudos for kpumuk and olliebrown for finding this solution on the steam community!)