Steam Causing Game to Crash Randomly

[Matt]

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I think I've tried everything and nothing seems to work. Here's what's happening, I play rimworld, it could be 5 minutes it could be 3 hours, or it may never happen when I play, but the game will freeze, the screen goes completely black and I have to hard reset my computer by holding the power button.

I've tried everything on the Ludeon Studios website, all the steps. Updated drivers, reinstalled the game, reinstalled steam, disabled virus software, changed the aspect ratio, everything listed. I even contacted the support on the Ludeon Studios website and sent an output log and windows event log to them and they said they couldnt help me. The ONLY consistent event that happens is that steam downloads an update when I open rimworld after every crash. Every. Single. Time. Aside from that nothing happens consistently to trigger the event.

I ran a compatibility test on steam with windows 10 and there seemed to be an issue that I guess windows noticed when running the test? Either way, I tried setting the compatibility mode to windows 8 and 7 (I think 7 was the last version I used before Microsoft decided to autoupdate my operating system about a year ago) to no avail. I have a lot of compatibility issues with games run from steam, which is not only ruining the fun playing these games, but also increasing my dissatisfaction with steam.

I'm at the end of my rope here, please can someone help me fix this?

Here is my set up, let me know if you need any additional information.

GeForce GTX 295
Intel Core i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz
4 GB Ram
Gigabyte Technology P55-D5

[(SCIOG) mattrix]

have you done the integerlly scan through steam on rimwolrd?

if u go to properties on rimworld do the scan and see if the game has a problem atm or steam btw its under local files in the propertises

[Astasia]

Honestly it's likely just too much for your PC to handle. 4gb of RAM can barely run windows 10 by itself, I'm sitting idle with nothing but Steam open at like 3gb of memory used. Then you have a 10 year old graphics card and a 10 year old CPU, trying to run modern games on a modern OS. Steam is most likely not the "cause" of any of your issues, but the tiny bit of extra resources it uses to do things in the background might be pushing your system past its limit.

[Matt]

Originally posted by (SCIOG) mattrix:

have you done the integerlly scan through steam on rimwolrd?

if u go to properties on rimworld do the scan and see if the game has a problem atm or steam btw its under local files in the propertises

Yea I've done this, no issues there.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Honestly it's likely just too much for your PC to handle. 4gb of RAM can barely run windows 10 by itself, I'm sitting idle with nothing but Steam open at like 3gb of memory used. Then you have a 10 year old graphics card and a 10 year old CPU, trying to run modern games on a modern OS. Steam is most likely not the "cause" of any of your issues, but the tiny bit of extra resources it uses to do things in the background might be pushing your system past its limit.

I've thought about this. My system is pretty old. Although Rimworld works fine on my laptop computer, which is not designed for games. Basically has enough to run word since I used it for school, so it makes me think this is fine. Plus I've run games like civilization, Starcraft 2, etc. and never had any issues. I'd like to think those games use up more memory than rimworld, but maybe I'm wrong.

[Astasia]

Rimworld is signfiicantly more resource demanding than any of those games you listed.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Rimworld is signfiicantly more resource demanding than any of those games you listed.

Huh, maybe that is the issue then and would explain why I can't find solutions anywhere. Although I still find it odd that it seems to work fine on my laptop. Although the laptop is only a couple years old. Is there anything in the settings I can change to make it less resource demanding?

[Astasia]

Not so much in the game settings. You can try playing on a smaller map and stick to a lower number of colonists and animals. I don't know if that will help. Just booting the game to the main menu uses about 1gb of memory, which would already cause windows 10 to start unloading stuff in the background. It might not be purely performance though, it could just be an outdated component that doesn't know how to handle a certain call the game makes, or any number of things.

A 2 year old laptop even meant for just web browsing is going to have a lot more power and capability than such an old PC. I mean to be completlely blunt, my cellphone is more powerful, and that's not an exaggeration.

[ASMR gaming]

disable it perhaps the dev can fix it for the next beta reliease

[I Hate Trenches]

I run rimworld on g2b of ram on a old think pad, i don tplay maps above medium size and no more then 2 colonies and have no issues(it hangs if i stream a movie sometimes as i have my pchooked to tv as well.)

[TSP]

If you are certain that Rimworld crashes because Steam started to update a game, you could work around the problem by running Steam in Offline-mode and then starting up Rimworld.

I would assume that this problem is very hard to solve without more powerful hardware.

If however, your problem isn't related to Steam updating something, then obviously this workaround will not work for you.


Worth a shot though, right? Takes almost no effort and no risk.

[sparkysan]

It might very well be that your Windows installation is causing these problems.
Have you checked the eventlog of your PC? Usually under the 'Application'-logs you'll find when a certain module crashes/doesn't respond and generally what causes this.

Maybe also a weird one to try is to create a new user account on your machine and try to start Steam/RimWorld on this account. See if the problem persists or not. If it doesn't then you can be sure that you local user profile is corrupt in which case you'll have to properly remove it.

If the problem still is not solved after trying a new useraccount then maybe contact Steam support regarding these issues (since you mentioned other games having the same problem).

Good luck.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Gr0undNP0Und:

I run rimworld on g2b of ram on a old think pad, i don tplay maps above medium size and no more then 2 colonies and have no issues(it hangs if i stream a movie sometimes as i have my pchooked to tv as well.)

Yea, I honestly think it runs fine. I pulled up the performance monitor while playing to be sure and it seemed like it wasn't overworking itself.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Agent Orange:

If you are certain that Rimworld crashes because Steam started to update a game, you could work around the problem by running Steam in Offline-mode and then starting up Rimworld.

I would assume that this problem is very hard to solve without more powerful hardware.

If however, your problem isn't related to Steam updating something, then obviously this workaround will not work for you.


Worth a shot though, right? Takes almost no effort and no risk.

Yea I may try this. I was actually poking around yesterday and it seemed like steam isn't doing a steam client update every time I reload the game, there is an update and verification of installation because steam was not properly exited (due to having to force shut down the computer). Apparently the update every time also happens if you shut your computer down and forget to close out of steam.

I'm still not completely convinced steam isn't the culprit though so I may try it in offline mode like you suggested.

[Matt]

Originally posted by Jack7T:

It might very well be that your Windows installation is causing these problems.
Have you checked the eventlog of your PC? Usually under the 'Application'-logs you'll find when a certain module crashes/doesn't respond and generally what causes this.

Maybe also a weird one to try is to create a new user account on your machine and try to start Steam/RimWorld on this account. See if the problem persists or not. If it doesn't then you can be sure that you local user profile is corrupt in which case you'll have to properly remove it.

If the problem still is not solved after trying a new useraccount then maybe contact Steam support regarding these issues (since you mentioned other games having the same problem).

Good luck.

I actually pulled this and sent it to Ludeon Studios support. I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at or looking for. I saw a bunch of errors and sent an event log to them, I just don't know enough about what I'm looking at to interpret it. I may try the account fix you mentioned as well since steam appears to work fine on my laptop.

[I Hate Trenches]

you can always disable steam updates for later scheduling i believe as well. To be honest if you havent yet, go through and get rid of all the win10 bloatwar and disable the autoupdates, windows defender, cortana etc win 10 eats up so much ram with so many dumbass extras its not even funny. hell the win10 verification can eat up like 25% on older cpus