Education buildings crash game

[pinke]

Hi all, I was wondering if someone had experienced anything like it before:

I cannot place anything from the education tab anymore – schools, campus buildings, libraries, museums, varsity sports – without the game crashing immediately, nor paint any more university districts. If I want to relocate any existing education building, the same. I can however move and/or copy the buildings with Move It!, and they work just fine. I can use all other assets and district stuff (regular districts, pedestrian, parks, industries) without any problems. I can also adjust existing campus districts by painting with any other district brush, though I am not sure if this was already a function from the getgo.

I thought this might just be me overwhelming my computer as I got carried away with mods and assets, but it still happens after I cleaned out all the accumulated clutter. I still think it could be a technical limitation (MacBook, 2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB), but as this the only part of the game that doesn't work I am a bit confused. Any other ideas? Thank you!

P.S. I absolutely love the in-game experience, but due to a disability it is a very exhausting process for me to find out errors, filter assets, troubleshooting etc., and to write in English, so please be patient with me :)

[Anab]

Well, I can think of a few things interfering with this:

1. Make sure you don't overload your PC with mods. Yes, they make life easier. But they are modifications for your game, and some of them may be incompatible with each other and cause problems within the game itself. And the more mods, the more processing you require from the game. Test a map without mods and see if the problem persists.

2. The bigger the city, the more processing it requires. The more people, the more things, the more processing capacity. Large cities easily bottleneck on computers without powerful processing and video cards. Make sure your PC is capable of handling the size of the city you are building.

3. Cities has clear bugs. It sounds a bit boring to say this, but in some cases cities can be generated with bugs, and there's nothing you can do about it. An error in building the map, a glitch during city creation, etc., all of this can create bugged cities and unfortunately it is rare to be able to fix this and maintain the map at the same time. If that's the case, just delete the city, create another one and move on.
(I'd a city with a bug in public transport at the time I wasn't using mods. My subway simply wouldn't move, I had to delete the line and recreate it. And after a few minutes it would bug again. I even had a station with almost 3k people waiting for a subway that would never arrive lol)

[pinke]

Thanks for your input. I tried a new city and could place it all, so it must be some kind of limitation. I will go with Anad's #3 and keep this build for now, my citizens are almost all well and highly educated anyways, and it's too complex for me to figure out what little thing might be the problem here. so I just ignore it for now. I can do my workaround with copying and placing through move it.

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by pinke:

Thanks for your input. I tried a new city and could place it all, so it must be some kind of limitation. I will go with Anad's #3 and keep this build for now, my citizens are almost all well and highly educated anyways, and it's too complex for me to figure out what little thing might be the problem here. so I just ignore it for now. I can do my workaround with copying and placing through move it.

Just make sure to never delete anything from your computer. There is never a good reason to delete anything. Worst case, just rename the file and back it up. and test what happens with it moved.

Hopefully you have your city with a new name often, so you can make multiple backups so you can go back in time to recover or go back and alter your city.

But make sure you run compatibility report. Make sure to check them all. Some mods have compatibilities listed and you need to decide if it is an actual issue, or just an issue if you enable certain features.

FYI, Move it has issues itself. It can cause issues when moving stuff, and the larger thing(s) you move, the high the change of having issues.

Maybe read up on Move it to get a clearer understanding of it. check comment and other discussion at the bottom of the mod page.

Do this with the other mods that compatibility report gives you on your mods, as they can explain what may be going on in your city. The compatibility report can give you dozens of possible issues in many different combinations. It is a PITA to do, but it helps with peace of mind.

[pinke]

Thanks for your tips! I would have to run Skyve on a Mac, which comes with its own challenges apparently. For now I choose to ignore it, and the game runs smoothly apart from this one issue, so … yeah, I'll leave it at that for now.

[Bomret]

This problem has started in my +100k city as well. I tried disabling all mods and it still crashes. Seems to be a game bug :/

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by Bomret:

This problem has started in my +100k city as well. I tried disabling all mods and it still crashes. Seems to be a game bug :/

More than likely a mod issue. Try reinstalling all mods again. Use "Subscribe All" button to make sure all mods are subscribed. Missing mods may have their own issue and even prevent loading. Not to mention conflicting mods causing the issue as well, since a lot of mods are multi-purpose mods and they can have issues when they try to do the same things at the same time and create weird issues.

Use Skyve and mod compatibility report and look for conflicting mods and read what mods have minor issues, to see if they are what are affecting you.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2881031511

[Bomret]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

More than likely a mod issue. Try reinstalling all mods again. Use "Subscribe All" button to make sure all mods are subscribed. Missing mods may have their own issue and even prevent loading. Not to mention conflicting mods causing the issue as well, since a lot of mods are multi-purpose mods and they can have issues when they try to do the same things at the same time and create weird issues.

Use Skyve and mod compatibility report and look for conflicting mods and read what mods have minor issues, to see if they are what are affecting you.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2881031511

Thanks. Already tried all of that multiple times, even turning all mods off, unsubscribing etc. The issue persists. What is interesting is that I can paint campus districts. But when I try to switch the education overlay to "Elementary", it crashes. So it seems to be related to something in the education overlay crashing the game.

[Bomret]

I found out something interesting. I have two mods that depend on Harmony: Node Controller Renewal and Network Multitool. If they are enabled, it always takes some time until the simulation starts, after loading a game. Meaning: The map is visible, menus are clickable etc. but cars, cims, etc. are frozen in place. If I open the elementary education overlay before the sim starts, the overlay opens just fine. But as soon as the simulation starts, the game crashes. I have disabled and unsubscribed all mods that rely on Harmony, but the crashes still happen as soon as the simulation starts. Might it be that these mods altered the savegame in a way?

I'll try to bulldoze every elementary school in my city next to see, if that might resolve the issue. Maybe one elementary school is connected to a botched network.

[Bomret]

I'll update this so people hopefully can confirm this: I deleted every elementary school in my city and the game didn't crash anymore afterwards. I'll no try to place them again and see what happens.

[MarkJohnson]

If you don't have elementary schools, then your cims won't get educated at all.

Or did you mean unsubscribe all of your elementary school assets from the workshop? This couldn't cause a lot of unhappiness in your city and cause other problems related to educated cims. Plus it would cause issues with all of your services, as their loss of education would make them less efficient. so you would use more water, garbage, sewage, etc.

Maybe post a saved game of your city, and I can take a look at it and maybe offer some more specific advice?

How to upload savegame to Steam Workshop ? #FixMyCity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTDG2KIMPB8

You may need to enable Closed Captioning (CC) if you don't speak the language. But it is fairly easy to follow the steps listed in the video.

[Bomret]

No, I bulldozed them all to see if the problem would be fixed then. And the problem was gone. I rebuilt them afterwards :D Only using vanilla elementary schools.

But: The problem reappeared after I built new elementary schools. I also loaded the save on a Windows machine and very interestingly, the game did not crash, but an ingame error message popped up about a Stack Overflow exception. This window came back as long as I had the elementary school info overlay open, even without any mods. According to a quick search, Stack Overflows seem to happen to a handful of people with and without mods but most times nobody can really pinpoint the cause. But these exception types are definitely caused by programming errors which is bad as we probably will not get another patch for C:SL anymore. It's also strange that the runtime seems to handle (or not handle) exception so differently on Windows and macOS.

@MarkJohnson thanks for the offer. I'll see when I can upload the affected savegame.

[MarkJohnson]

Stack overflow is what is says. You stacked data so high it overflowed and caused an error.

Like I already said, it is usually mod related. You likely have two similar mods and they likely are using the same data array and it filled it up and it crashed when it ran out of room for more data.

Sadly, you just can't randomly remove mods and have it work most times. Some mods are required once you use them, so if you remove them, things get worse or may not load at all.

But my offer still stands, if you post your saved game I can look at it and see what's wrong. I have some free time today while building a new PC.

[Bomret]

I uploaded the save here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3126023604

Thanks in advance! Maybe you can find something.

[MarkJohnson]

This is a new save, do you have an older save around the time when this first started happening?

Also, you have zero mods, which may be your actual issue.

[Bomret]

I'm afraid I don't have an older save anymore. Trying to pinpoint the issue, I overwrote them one by one. Regarding the mods: I probably forgot to link my mod collection to the save.

Edit: The required workshop items are linked to the save file. You don't see them?
The collection can also be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3122732450