A crashing game - especially when modded - can mean all sorts of things and finding out the root-cause is paramount to fixing your game again. For some rough guideline on how to identify potential reasons for a crashing game - and some tips on how to fix it - you can consult this quick guide.

This will be the start of series of quick-guides and -references on common problems with Rimworld, be it technical in nature, related to modding, or else. Those guides will mostly be short excerpts of the guides hosted on Void Archives[sites.google.com] - the main source of information - which features a variety of guides on Rimworld with a focus on performance-optimization, troubleshooting as well as modlist-building and mod-recommendations.

UPDATE: A more specific version of this guide[sites.google.com] - focussed on oom-crashes - can be found on said Void Archives and also features more in-depth information and possible solutions all in one place.

The most common reasons for Rimworld crashing are as follows:

• General hardware or driver issues
  
• File-system or UAC-related restrictions
  
• Out-of-memory crashes
  
• Severe mod-errors
  
• System-limiting situations (like; pending Windows updates)

Especially hardware-related crashes and badly installed user-settings on your OS are usually hard to identify, since neither the Unity- nor the game-log gives clear indication about what is causing them. They are also especially hard to handle from afar, what makes troubleshoots over forums, Discord, etc. more random guessing than precise processes.

Because of that it's important to rule out some causes that are easily identifiable first, so you're not wasting too much time getting your game to work again.

In this first step you can already rule out some system-related causes by just doing some basic clean-up which should happen before starting any type of troubleshoot in the first place. While being sort of a meme in troubleshooter-circles; restarting your system should be the very first step here!

After restarting your system, make sure there are no important updates for your OS pending and check that all essentials (anit-virus, driver, etc) are running properly. Also keep unnecessary apps & tools closed - in this first step you want your system in the best-performing state as possible.

Now start your game in the same setup you previously encountered the crash. If it happens to load now, you might have fixed one category of causes already. Often crashed GPU-drivers or similar aren't detected by the user, restarting your system usually fixes them easily.

If the game still crashes though, the investigation for the cause starts now.

The first step of actually investigating the cause of your crashes should always be your log-file. The file is saved as Player.log in your user-folder[docs.google.com]. The location depends on your OS - as referenced in the former link - but for most users on Windows this will be;

• C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios

Open the file in any text-editor (ideally; Notepad++[notepad-plus-plus.org] - but any editor will do) and skip to the bottom of the file. While there might be important information shown, for the time being we're mostly interested in easily identifiable pointers.

If the game ran out of memory while loading, you might see a very specific block of error code in the bottom of your log.



While usually being a clear sign of a 'regular' out-of-memory situation, it's not 100% accurate though. Because of that, we're taking this piece of information to investigate further.

With the insights from above, you can now double-check the exact situation regarding your game's memory-utilization. For that open your Task Manager (for Windows of course, other OS' users might refer to their system's equivalent) and switch it to the Performance-tab. Ideally select your GPU there as well, what gives you the best overview of all relevant data.



Keep the Task Manager open and start your game once again until it crashes. When the crash happens, check your graphs in the Performance tab. If you find the graph from your memory-utilization capping/spiking at around 95% and more correlating with the time of the crash, it's a pretty clear sign that it is as simple as the game taking up more memory than your system can provide.

In case of a (highly) modded games this can have all sorts of reasons we will further cover later in the guide. If your game is unmodded though you should clearly check how much memory your system actually provides. Usually 8GB RAM are enough to run Rimworld [1.4] while having more than enough spare resources to run other apps in the background. But if all you have available are 4GB, you might want to consider upgrading at some point in time...

If you have a modded game you might also get some additional insights here. One of the core aspects for modded games utilizing large amounts of memory are mod-textures. I'll spare you the specifics here, but the way the game handles mod-textures includes loading ALL OF THEM into the vRAM of your GPU at game-start. If at one point it runs out of vRAM, all excess textures will be loaded into regular RAM. Highly modded games can therefore easily go into the tens of BG memory-utilization - and the lower your amount of vRAM from your graphics card, the more stress for your actual system memory.

Until now you basically just gathered info to assess your situation, but it is finally time to find solutions. The options highly depend on what you've found out of course, so lets get over the different scenarios...


If neither investigations produced any additional insight, it's safe to assume that the issue is either related to your system or - if applicable - caused by mod-errors. In both situations the possibilities are just too vast to cover them in this quick-guide. But if you're not in a position to find them yourself, your next step should be to request troubleshoot-support. It's up to you to decide where to ask for such, but my biased situation as troubleshooter on the Inofficial Rimworld Discord[discord.gg] clearly forces me to send you over there. We have a small army of experienced troubleshooter there and usually a 24/7 coverage with people being from different timezones.

If you decide to use that adress for your troubleshoot, make sure to read the instructions in the #troubleshooting channel (#READ BEFORE POSTING YOUR GAME ISSUES) and follow them through. At the very least you want to provide ideally a Hugslog[sites.google.com] - or if that's not possible (since we're talking about a crashing game here of course) a combination of your Player.log AND ModsConfig.xml.



As already stated, if your system has only little RAM (~4GB) to begin with, you might be at a technical limit to play Rimworld in the first place. One possible solution here would be to try and help getting Rimworld over the initial hump of loading into the game since usually it takes less memory running than starting. While the options are highly limited, increasing your virtual memory/page-file[www.thewindowsclub.com] might be a good idea to start with.

A good amount on low-end systems is usually considered to be twice the amount of your actual RAM - but at least 16GB is usually a good place to aim. Make sure to set the page-file on either your system-drive or at least your fastest drive (SSD!) if your system-drive doesn't already qualify as that. Afterwards restart your system and try again if that helps you loading into the game. If not, the only remaining options might be to further close down other apps running in the background and actually upgrading your memory. If you don't find a solution yourself at that point, consider seeking support - as described above.



This will probably be the most likely scenario for most people. Modded Rimworld can utilize amounts of memory not even modern & demanding games do - based on the fact how the game handles mod-textures. There are still limits here what you can do to improve your situation, but we have way more tools available here. You often might want to go over your options with a troubleshooter in this case as well, but there are quite a few things you can try on your own, so let's go over some...

It should be obvious; the solution to too many mods is to reduce them in number. Not each mod will have the same amount of impact towards memory-utilization though. Usually the worst offender are content-heavy mods but even there mods with unreasonable large texture-resolutions might cause the same stress with like 5 new buildings as mods with reasonable file-size and hundreds of animals do. Most RW troubleshooter will know the current worst offenders from the top of their heads - but some you might be able to find out yourself. A potential way here is to cut down your modlist vastly from content mods in the first step, so your game actually will start again. Then using Graphics Settings+ to calculate your mod's memory-utilization. While the numbers are not 1:1 representative to your actual memory-utilization, you still should be able to find mods that are eating vastly above average amounts of memory, that will help you to decide which ones to cut out first. Of course, some of the first things to go here would be retextures and other purely graphical stuff. In addition you can consult my mod-replacement-list[docs.google.com] to potentially slim down your modlist without actually losing out content.


UPDATE:
A more up-to-date and in-depth guide[sites.google.com] on texture-conversion can no also be found on Void Archives. The general information here still applies, but some new methods and caveats will only be covered there.

Converting mod-textures to a GPU-native format (.dds) can not only vastly speed up loading a heavily modded game, it can also reduce the vRAM utilization and often helps bringing a struggling game over the initial hump. There are many different ways to convert your textures, but the most accessible and simple methods are using integrated conversion-algorithms in the two popular mod-manger for Rimworld; RimPy and RimSort[github.com].

At the time of writing this guide, RimPy is still the most popular option here, while RimSort uses the vastly superior conversion-algorithm (TODDS[github.com] - faster, more options) - so pick your poison and convert your mod-textures, after the process the results ingame are roughly comparable anyways.

Some other methods of further improving the situation includes the use of some more technical mods like Taranchuk's Faster Game Loading and other performance-enhancing mods. Since their use comes with some necessary insights into the actual situation though, I'll not go over them or even link them, since they could as well cause further issues if not used properly. Ideally you want to get some first-hand information on it - either from the already mentioned adresses, your own source of tech-support for Rimworld or on Dub's Discord Server[http//url%3Dhttps] which is the #1 place for performance-related information around Rimworld.

An advanced method to get some mods working on lower-end machines despite their large texture-load is to just outright downscale them. While this can mean loss of fidelity, there are also many mods with vastly over-sized textures for Rimworld. Coincidentally they are also in the list of the worst offenders here, so instead of just outright ignoring their use, the user can just downscale their textures on their end. Since this is a bit more of an advanced process though, I'll leave this as a mere mention here, for a potential standalone-guide in the future. Shoutout to the user XxHyde840xX who is currently already downscaling some of the most pressing cases and is providing the results on their Github[github.com] - including modding-guides as well - for anyone interested in slimming down their own setup...

Most relevant external sources of information relevant to the topic are already covered in the guide above. Here just a compendium of them for quick access:

UPDATE: The old guide-spreadsheet is now fully migrated to an actual web-page called Void Archives[sites.google.com]!

LINK[discord.gg]

LINK[discord.gg]

LINK[github.com]

Performance Fish by Bradson[github.com] is not only one of the best ways to improve your (modded) Rimworld performance, it is also one way to actually make use of .dds textures in Rimworld. It's highly recommended but currently not released on the Steam Workshop. If you're unfamiliar with installing/using Github-mods, here's a short (low-effort) guide-video on how to install it in addition to the written instructions in my guide-collection: