Possible game stability improvement.

[timor1234]

Posting this in bug reports since it is a soultuion to a bug I was having.

On my recent playthrough I started having constant crashes after I had built a base. Sometimes they would occur soon after loading the game, other times I could play an hour before a crash. Often I found that I had to import the game and even reset squad positions or it would crash immediately upon trying to load after a crash. So I decided to see if I could come up with a fix until developers release a new update. I believe that steps that I have taken helped a lot, while not completely crashfree it has gotten very stable, with maybe a crash, if any, per 4-6 hours of playtime.

You might need some modding experience to follow these steps or at least know how to and be willing to open the editor. On top of that, backup your save files and game files, I don’t know whether everyone will have the same success or if this was something that only worked for me. Furthemore I do not take any responsibility if this will cause some unforeseen issues, this is only for people who want to test this method out.

First
I opened the editor and updated/slash cleaned my mods. To update them it is often enough to just open the mod in editor and resave it. If the mod is old enough and has completely wrong entries the game will tell you about some of the issues it has, which in most cases will be resolved upon saving. Some mods need much more work than this to work as intended, but even in those cases doing this will often resolve game crashing mistakes they have.

To clean the mods you press “cleanup” button on the toolbar. It will remove all the unnecessary entries that mod has, do not forget to save the mod after doing that. It might sometimes look that it also removes some entries you thought were necessary, but so far I haven’t once experienced that those entries were in fact needed.

To be honest I don’t think that this was the part that helped me since I keep my mods updated and clean at all times. I update them manually every time the game has been updated, or even when I download a new mod. I am still posting this part because not many people do and often even mods that have been updated by their creators will show mistakes or will have unnecessary entries.

Second
This is the part that I believe helped me. I decided to open the game files in editor and update/clean them (You will get a warning every time you do that). To open them you have to uncheck all the mods and leave only game files checked when opening a file in editor. Than make sure that one of them is active, that is the file that will be opened,the rest need to be checked since they all depend on each other. I opened and cleaned them from bottom to top and then again from top to bottom. Almost in every case when I opened a file for the first time I was presented with some sort of a mistake in the file, like files that are missing and so on. The first time I pressed “cleanup” button thousands of entries were removed in every file. And in one of the files I was presented with a mistake upon reopening it everytime. It told me that there was an entry it was looking for, which was deleted in a previous file. I had to manually go in, by double clicking it and remove that entry, (it was shown in red).

Third
Before quitting the game I always make a completely fresh save file and do not overwrite a previous one. For some reason a save file that has been overwritten several times might become corrupt and the game will crash immediately or very soon after loading it. The only way I have been able to fix a save file that has been corrupted like that, is by importing with “reset squad position box” ticked and making a new save (all other boxes can also be ticked if you want to keep your progress). Also I always make at least two save files.

Since following these steps my game has become much more stable and it also feels that my load times have somewhat shortened.

Things to lookout for and consider before trying this:

Opening and resaving a game file or a mod, I believe is completely safe and will only resolve some issues and not cause them. But you have to make sure that you open it with all the files or mods that it depends on checked, and also make sure that files it doesn’t depend on, are NOT checked.

Even if I haven’t encountered any issues after using “cleanup” button on game files, it doesn’t mean that there are none, someone who knows better about how this game works, would either have to verify this or say that doing this is wrong.

Changes you do to game files, will be reverted once the game is updated, they might also force you to have to verify integrity of game files after next update. But since the game files have so many missing and unnecessary entries I really do hope that developers do something similar (atleast open and resave every game file and not just the one they are working on) before releasing the next update, especially since it took me only about 10-15 minutes in total to do it on all my mods and game files.

Mods you have downloaded from workshop must be transferred to “mods” folder in game directory before you can edit them. This thread tells you how: https://steamcommunity.com/app/233860/d ... 585795729/
You can also unsubscribe from the mod after doing that. Just favourite it to be able to follow it’s updates.

I have also posted this on steam forums