How to read (and understand) your game.log

This is a small(ish) tutorial on the (hopefully) burning question "How do I read (and understand) the contents of the game.log file?"

As everyone who helps in the ATS (and ETS2) community regarding (mostly) game crashes needs the game.log file (from the crash) in order to find the problem maybe you now want to know how to read (and understand) the content of that file yourself for quick trouble shooting. You will find in this guide where to find your game.log, where is what in your game.log and solutions for the most common crashes that came up so far but it will focus on problems on vanilla (that means no mods ever) profiles.

I will update this over time (as parts of the game.log can change with game updates) so this guide is focusing on the game.log layout of the current (non-beta) game version (which is 1.50).

Where is the game.log on my PC and what exactly is that file?

As for Windows: You can find your game.log in your documents in the ATS folder as a default install. (If it is not there check OneDrive.)

On MacOS: The ATS folder is in your Library and there in the Application Support.

On Linux: The ATS folder is in the .local and there in the share.

Now to the question as to what the game.log exactly is.
To put it very simple: The game.log logs stuff that happened during gameplay. It starts from the moment you start the game until the game either crashes or you quit the game. In that time it logs your hardware specs, the path of your save files, which mods you are using and if the game was closed via you quitting the game or if it crashed. It also logs errors and warnings and this guide will come later to some of them.

That's great and all but how do I read (and understand) it now?

Okay, time to go through it step-by-step (or by important lines in the game.log).
The very first line will tell you when the game.log was created. For example the game.log I used to make this guide says:

************ : log created on : Wednesday August 02 2023 @ 16:14:40

Which is important for when you want to get help. We need the most recent game.log you have.
(Yes, we had some who came with a 3 year old game.log and wanted help.)

A bit further down you will see the CPU your system has (and yes, yours will have something different in there):

00:00:00.000 : [cpu] CPU0: GenuineIntel [11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz] with 8 cores (16 threads) at ~2304MHz.

So that can tell us if your CPU is up for the task of running the game.

Again a bit further down you will find these two lines:

00:00:00.000 : [mem] physical total: 16273M
00:00:00.000 : [mem] physical avail: 11704M

This is your installed RAM and your available RAM when you start the game. That is also important as you really shouldn't run out of it.

Since 1.50 you can now find the game version 7 lines below the previous one:

00:00:00.050 : [ufs] Loaded pack set version 1.50.1.25 created at 1720446834

After that, 24 lines below the previous one, you will get the directory of your save files (and where your game.log is):

00:00:00.446 : [ufs] Home directory: 'C:/Users/<your name>/Documents/American Truck Simulator'.

Pretty much only important if you use Windows: Don't have your save files on OneDrive. There are known problems with OneDrive where it can just get rid of your save files entirely. It is always best to have your save files stored locally on your PC.

Then comes the DLCs (as since 1.41 you have all the DLCs at least in a "only see, not touch" version if you don't own it), which mods you have in the mod folder (if any) and then the game.log logs the whole config.cfg file. And then we get to the interesting parts which are very important.

00:00:01.004 : American Truck Simulator init ver.1.50.1.25s (rev. 9433751fb044)

This line shows which game version you are using. As there are different versions of the game (you might have downgraded the game or you have opted into beta) the solutions for problems can differ.
Now comes the rendering device:

00:00:01.005 : [gfx] Selected rendering device: dx11

There are multiple options for starting the game when done via the Steam Library. The important two options are "Launch with DX11" and "Launch with OpenGL". While DX11 is the go-to option on Windows and when the GPU supports DX11.1 (yes, the game uses DX11.1 and the feature level of your GPU must be at least 11_1 for it to work) OpenGL is used on MacOS, Linux and when your GPU doesn't support DX11.1 (but your GPU needs to support OpenGL 4.1). But we will get to that in a bit.
Now, a few lines further down, the GPU of your PC that the game uses:

00:00:02.029 : [dxgi] Using adapter: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU (31.0.15.3640) [8033 MB]

First comes the name of the GPU (with that you can look up the details of your GPU (support for DirectX aka DX and support for OpenGL)) then the driver version (for NVIDIA GPUs the driver version are the last 5 numbers, in this example the driver version is 536.40, as for AMD drivers you best look in the update notes of the driver) and last but not least how much VRAM the GPU has.

Need a bit of a break? Relax a bit because now you have to scroll down quite much for the next part.
Now we come to the profile. On a vanilla profie (or a profile without mods) it looks like that:

00:00:20.382 : New profile selected: ':steam/Wolfgang'
00:00:23.770 : [mods] Active 0 mods (local: 0, workshop: 0)
00:00:34.539 : game
00:00:34.715 : [bullet] Starting physics server: Bullet

If you have mods they will be listed here. As of version 1.40 you will also see how many mods are active in your profile and from where they are coming from.

And finally at the end of your game.log:

01:39:53.667 : quit

This is what you see when you quit the game normally.

But this doesn't apply to me! I don't even get to select my profile!

Let me guess. Are the last lines of your game.log looking like that?

00:00:04.332 : exit
00:00:04.514 : [bullet] Starting physics server: Bullet

(Maybe some additional line about Asus Aura.) I highly advice you to update your Asus Aura drivers. If you just updated them and the game still crashes at the exact same point or your Asus Aura drivers are already the most recent ones you should do this:
Change the following lines in the config (or config.cfg) file:

uset cf_asus_aura "1"
uset cf_razer_chroma "1"

Change the "1" to "0" and save it.

You can find the config (or config.cfg) file in the same folder you found the game.log in.

Though also that might not help you. So check the following:
If you are on Win7, upgrade your OS.
If you use the TAA plugin, delete it.
If you use DSR, deactivate it. Also try and deactivate the Nvidia overlay.
Make sure the game isn't running in compatibility mode and that your hardware is above minimum specs.

But what about the errors and warnings?

To put it simple: Warnings are mostly harmless while a lot of errors are not (though some are as will be shown soon).
A good example for a warning is this one:

01:07:32.074 : <WARNING> Driver job generation failed. Returning empty.

This just means that the game couldn't generate a job for one of your drivers to their home garage so he/she will return empty.
Now for a harmless error:

01:10:23.169 : <ERROR> Trailer position is occupied by player or trailer!

That means that the game tried to spawn a trailer but on that position was already a different trailer or you were standing there. So the game will try to spawn the trailer again on a different position.

And what about other errors?

Some errors can lead to a crash or are the reason for the crash.
Here some examples and how to fix them:

Let's start simple:
!!Important!! This section with the corrupted files might be outdated! Due to SCS splitting the main base.scs file into multiple files this issues seems to have largely vanished. I thus lack any game.log with that exact issue to rework this part so it stays here mostly for legacy reasons. It will be reworked if this changed once I have a game.log with that definitive issue.

<ERROR> The was an error while inflating (<SYSFS>../../dlc_kenworth_t680.scs)
<ERROR> [resource_task] Can not load '/vehicle/truck/kenworth_t680/truck.pmg'.
<ERROR> [model] Model geometry '/vehicle/truck/kenworth_t680/truck.pmg' is malformed.
<ERROR> The was an error while inflating (<SYSFS>../../dlc_kenworth_t680.scs)
<ERROR> [ld] Failed to read '/vehicle/truck/kenworth_t680/truck.pmg'.

Always when there is an error while inflating something it is due to corrupted files. The easy solution here is to verify your files. You can do this by doing a right-click on the game in your Steam Library and going to "Properties". There you go to "Local files" and there should be the option to verify your files. Steam will download the corrupted files again and you are good to go.
[End of possible outdated section]

Now for something more difficult:

<ERROR> [dx11] error creating render target view

This error (and crash) can have multiple potential causes.

• Your graphics driver is outdated
  
• Your GPU doesn't support DX11.1
  
• Your GPU is overclocked (either manually or already by factory)
  
• You might be out of RAM (check your game.crash file and my guide "[WIP] How to fix issues using the game.crash file")
  
• Previous GPU drivers are causing issues
  
• Your GPU (mostly integrated GPUs) is too far below minimum specs

Btw. there is a reason why I made the list in that order. The solution gets more difficult the further down the list you go. So time to work our way down:
1) Your graphics driver is outdated
Very simple to fix: Update them (no your OS is most likely NOT doing this for you). Download the current driver from the website of either NVIDIA or AMD (depending on which GPU you have) and make a clean install of them (i.e. uninstalling the previous graphic driver before installing the new one). The clean install prevents problems from installing driver update over driver update.

2) Your GPU doesn't support DX11.1
Search engines are your friend. Put in the name of your GPU and search. I usually refer to TechPowerup as they have pretty much every GPU covered with their specs.
If your GPU is e.g. marked as being a DX12 GPU but has only feature level 11_0 (I usually just say feature level DX11.0 as it means the exact same) it means that your GPU only supports DX11.0 but nothing above. As the game uses DX11.1 your GPU runs into an issue and causes the crash. The simple fix for this is to start the game in OpenGL. But that only works if your GPU supports OpenGL 4.1. If it doesn't you really need to get a new GPU.

3) Your GPU is overclocked (either manually or already by factory)
While some people have their GPU overclocked and have no problems with the game many get crashes. It is a consensus that ATS doesn't like overclocking of the GPU which it answers with a crash. (Don't ask me for the reason why, as your guess is as good as mine.)
To fix that you have to bring the clock of your GPU down to what it normally has (again, search engine, look at TechPowerup as they have the base clock of the GPUs listed). Programms like MSI Afterburner help with that.

4) You might be out of RAM
Now you have to check your game.crash file for that. And if you need help on knowing where to look I have a WIP guide for that on my profile called "[WIP] How to fix issues using the game.crash file". That should be a good resource for this.
The basic explaination for this is that apparently some manufacturers (or users) either use a fixed page file size or none at all. That causes everything to be dumped into your RAM which can cause issues. Just to be clear: The setting "system managed size" for the page file is active by default on a Windows installation so it shouldn't happen to most people.

5) Previous GPU drivers are causing issues
If you came down here, you will have to do some tedious work. To fix this you need DDU (use a search engine), the current driver for your GPU, and the password to your PC (no, the PIN is NOT enough). As for the whole "How do I do it?" you can watch videos on YouTube explaining how to use DDU and you should make notes and follow the steps carefully.
To safe yourself from having to do this ever (again), you should always make a clean install of your GPU drivers. As for NVIDIA you should choose the custom install. There you find the option for a clean install (tick that box) which will uninstall your previous GPU driver and then install the new one. For AMD drivers you should select "Factory Reset" on the installation page. If you have an existing GPU driver profile that you want to keep then you should also check the box "Keep user settings". Your system will then be restarted for this. However, since I don't have an AMD GPU I am not 100% sure if that information is fully correct but I am going off of the AMD support article for installing drivers. But if that information is not fully acurate then please let me know.

6) Your GPU (mostly integrated GPUs) is too far below minimum specs
This is really happening pretty much to those with integrated GPUs (mostly those with an Intel HD 4600 as their integrated GPU). Only solution here is to get a dedicated GPU. Though since that iGPU is already over a decade old, a full hardware upgrade wouldn't be bad either. But yeah, either get a cheap low end dedicated GPU that fits your system or downgrade to the last version you had no issues on. Not much that can be done here.

But I have other errors and a lot of them!

Well, if you have a modded profile the whole story is different. With a modded profile you will get, mostly depending on the amount of mods, quite a lot of errors and warnings in your game.log.
I won't cover any of them here as this would fill many, many pages and I would most likely still not have all of them listed here.
But there is still the community there to help you. Post your complete game.log file to https://pastebin.com (or https://rentry.co if pastebin is not available in your country) and then post the link to your game.log there in the new topic you made. Also point us which errors and/or warnings you mean and we will try to find the cause and/or explain the meaning of them to you.

Disclaimer

This guide is designed to help people to get into reading and understanding their game.log.
It is NOT designed to be thrown at people in the way of "Read this and figure it out yourself!".

I try to have the needed information in here as accurate as possible but even I don't know everything and this is, as the game itself, a WIP (work in progress).

[Wolfgang]

Stuff that has changed in the game.log file that is not mentioned in this guide (but I feel should be mentioned too somewhere):
- Win11 is now correctly displayed in the game.log file. Before Win11 was stated as Win10.
- Instead of the number of temporary loading buffers the game.log now shows the size of these buffers. That value will change if you use launch commands to change the size of the loading buffers.
- The display section (after the listing of the GPU) has been massively reduced.

[Wolfgang]

Guide finally updated for 1.50 thanks to Uni stuff slowing down. Quite som stuff has changed so here is sort of a "changelog" for it:

- The section of the corrupted files now has a notice that it might be outdated. I haven't found any game.log so far that has corrupted files as an issue that was fixed by verifying files so that section is left in as sort of "legacy" stuff. While I don't intend on having any legacy "How to read your game.log file" guide I feel that removing this part is worse than leaving it in.
- Added the earliest line that states the game version
- Added suggested fixes for the game crashing on startup of the game
- Added two DX11 error causes and their fix.

[Wolfgang]

Finally updated for 1.48. Nothing changed how the game.log is being read so that made it fairly easy.

[Wolfgang]

Just an FYI: Due to IRL stuff being currently much more important (I am working on my Bachelor thesis pretty soon) the guide likely isn't getting updated for quite some time.
However, the content of the guide is (from what I've seen so far in the game.log files of other people) still correct and doesn't need any updating for 1.47. So even with it saying that it is for 1.46 it also applies to 1.47 but I haven't gotten around to conduct proper testing as of the time of writing (as these testing sessions are usually at least 5 hours long and I need to drive through various states).

[MAT]

Great work...

[yerocpett25]

This was really helpful thank you

[Wolfgang]

Small update due to Steam messing up their url formatting and censoring parts of it so links wouldn't work.

[Wolfgang]

@LarryA: Thank you!

[LarryA]

Wolfgang Thank you for your Guide. Have read many post concerning warnings and errors. You typically respond to the post. Learned a lot reading your comments as well.

Have A Grate Day

[Wolfgang]

Updated to 1.45. So far nothing has changed to the game.log compared to the previous game version.