How to prevent/reduce the chance of being crashed

Tired of Cancerous Crashing Avatars?

This guide should help you reduce the likelyhood that you'll be crashed by one, or possibly even prevent it altogether...
If you've ever been in public places like The Box for example, you'll know that people love to use overly heavy avatars. Some have custom animations that cause clients to crash.

What causes the Crashing?

The avatar in question, will overload your client/system by abusing shaders, lighting, and particle effects. Depending on the type of crasher, they can overload your CPU, GPU, or eat up as much RAM as possible. As a result, the game will either come to a screeching halt, or you will lag like hell. The result varies, depending on your system. Higher end systems will be more likely to withstand a crash attempt, but it may still happen.

Method 1 - Use your Safety Settings

Ideally, these should be set before joining a public game. I personally use the custom settings, and enable every switch for every category except for lighting, and shaders. In this configuration, lighting and shader effects are simply not rendered, even if the person activates his/her special animations. And as a bonus, it will prevent those annoying screen effects, like images popping over your screen, and spinning/warping your camera view. If someone has an effect they want to show you, and you know it won't crash you, you can fully show someone's avatar by opening the escape menu, and clicking on their avatar. In the menu, you can show, hide, or use your safety settings depending on your needs.

Method 2 - Particle Limiter

The VRChat client can be configured to limit the amount of particles displayed. This is useful to dampen the effect on particle based crashers. As a bonus, it can also reduce the performance hit from avatars that heavily rely on particles.

A detailed guide to using this particle limiting system can be found on the VRChat Docs page, HERE[docs.vrchat.com]

Method 3 - Safe Mode

Safe mode is a last ditch effort to possibly negate a crash. It's function is more or less a panic mode, and is activated by pressing SHIFT + ESC. I'm not sure if you can also activate it on any VR setups, but if you can, let me know so I can edit it in.

In the event that someone tries to crash your game, you may have a chance to hit this key combination. When you activate safety mode, all avatars in the room will be muted and hidden, except for friends. I have on occasion successfully prevented my client from crashing. It's effectiveness depends on your reaction time, and the intenstiy of the crasher's avatar. So be quick once you've identified that someone is crashing clients.

When you want to turn off safe mode, go to your safety settings and either edit your custom safety settings, or switch off to one of the other safety modes.

Method 4 [Can't do it now, thanks EAC] - Mods

This section no longer applies, thanks to the decision of the VRChat team to implement EAC. The following is just what you would've done before this update.

Using mods, you can further protect yourself from people's avatars while even having them still be almost completely visible. Install Melonloader, then in the mods folder, install Ui Expansion Kit and Advanced Safety. Ui Expansion Kit adds extra menu panels and will be used for changing, enabling, and disabling settings/features. Advanced Safety is used to scan and remove stuff from avatars, if certain limits are exceeded or potentially suspicious objects are detected.

Once installed, opening your full size menu and going to settings, you should see a mod settings button on the bottom right. Here is where you can change and adjust all of your settings for installed mods, but the main focus is Advanced Safety. Some settings of interest include disabling avatar spawn noises, global sound, removing screen shaders, and removing suspicious game objects. Note that avatars may look broken if they've been cleaned up. With this method though, crashes will become very rare and you're nowhere near as vulnerable to crashers even with some of the official methods. Another mod to consider is Network Sanity, which may catch some erratic network behavior and prevent a crash in that fashion. Network sanity is no longer being updated as some of the network related crashes should be patched. Note it's not completely bulletproof, as nothing is, but combining all of these things, you'll be very difficult to crash to most people.

There are also clients out there that have their own methods of preventing crashes, however I cannot speak for nor recommend these. Some may be malicious, or may cause bans. Use your head, basically.

Method 5 - Don't be an Ass

This one's simple. Don't be an ass. Most people aren't looking to crash for no reason, but the moment you start causing problems for others, don't be surprised if someone has enough and locks your game up.

Now of course there are people that will crash for no good reason, or perhaps you were just caught in the crossfire. if you're running into this then one of the above approaches will help.

Please leave feedback and suggestions

I appreciate you taking the time to read this guide, and I hope it helps with your troubles with nasty crashers.

If something is misspelled, wrong, or in need of additional clarification, you're free to leave feedback.

[Netro]

Most of the above doesn't work; they'll crash you for a laugh, just don't show any avatars, and your chances of being crashed are 96% gone~unless you're unlucky, and someone crashes you with in-game photon events.

[dandykong]

@DudeBot Or just reject all avatars with properties set in scientific notation, more than 50 audio sources and lights, or more than 200 MB of textures.

[paulbl0x]

thanks

[stupid fxxking bunny]

Don't use it i guess? If you're stuck in it you can reset to a default avatar on the vrc website

[paulbl0x]

what if an avatar that you tried to use crashes your game?

[Alex7000]

if you have a crasher avatar (even if you say you dont use it) you should touch some grass
theres literally no excuse

[theslayer2468]

there is one more way in addition to these ways that can work. instead of setting the max avatar download size to no limit actually give it a limit because the more of your resources an avatar takes, the more data that needs to be downloaded to make it show. vrchat allows this limit to be any multiple of 5 (be sure that your computer can handle what you set before you blame a crash on a crasher).

[stupid fxxking bunny]

FOR THOSE HERE USING MODS:
VRChat wants to push an update to add Easy Anti Cheat. Push back against the BS, give them a piece of your mind. Any and all anti crash mods will be blocked if this passes.

[god's chosen]

i love getting automatically banned for getting crashed 3 times!!! great solution!!!

[DudeBot]

The crasher problem can be shut down overnight if vrchat used proper log analytics. Everyone times out from an instance? Someone there must have used a crasher. Flag each account in the instance for being suspicious. Once this happens 3 times for an account, automatically ban them, anyone else using the same avatar, and blacklist the shaders used. No one would be able to report bomb either because doing so would automatically ban yourself in the process.