Frequent, random crashes

SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
edited September 2017 in Subnautica Bug Reporting
As the title says, I experience very frequent crashes at very random intervals. There's no discernible pattern at all. Sometimes it crashes during the load screen, sometimes within seconds of loading into the game, sometimes after a few minutes of play, and (occasionally) sometimes after a few hours of play. It doesn't matter what we're doing in the game, what mode we're playing, or where we're located. It even crashes while we have the game paused. I've run out of ideas for fixing it myself and could really use some expert guidance. I don't think it's a problem with the game itself since others don't seem to be having as much trouble. And I don't think it's a hardware issue. I'm not sure what options that leaves.

Whatever we're doing, the game freezes, the screen goes blue, then we get either a black screen and have to open the task manager manually, a white screen and the task manager telling us the program has stopped working, or we end up on the desktop. We can almost always still hear the game, and the controls still work-- we can actually hear the guy walking/swimming while we're hitting the keys on the desktop.

Per the sticky, I've uploaded the relevant information to Pastebin;
Output Log
DxDiag
error.txt

I know the error file is not specifically requested. I just figured more information might be helpful.

As for what I've done to try and resolve the issue myself;
Used driver-remover software to completely eliminate old Radeon info.
Installed the latest drivers for the RX 460.
Replaced the stock cooler with a Hyper Evo 212 to see if thermals were an issue.
Overclocked the GPU.
Underclocked the GPU.
Overclocked the CPU.
Ran the game offline to see if it was a network issue.
Ran the game with "Above Normal" priority.
Upgraded the PSU to see if that fixed any instability.
Repeatedly defragged and "optimized" the drive.

Why I don't think it's a hardware issue;
I can run the Unigine Valley benchmark with no trouble.
I run the OCCT stress test with no problems.
The PassMark BurnIn Test also runs fine.
I also spend hours working with GIMP and Unreal Engine without issue.
The histogram from the Radeon software shows no obvious problems prior to any crash.

I realize that running other applications doesn't mean my rig is flawless. But surely that at least indicates it's capable of more than browsing ebay and sending mail.

What's most perplexing is that it hasn't always done this. The first few weeks we had the game there were no crashes at all. And even now it's not unheard of to go hours without a crash. But those stable periods are less frequent and shorter than they had been. I'm certain it's something that can be fixed either in the system settings or in the command line. It's just that diagnosing the problem is beyond my skill level. Whatever help y'all can offer would be greatly appreciated.

*EDIT*
Forgot to add, in case it makes a difference, our rig is a livingroom computer. It's hooked to a 42" 1080p TV via HDMI with the sound sent to a surround sound receiver via S/PDIF. Is that maybe more than it can handle?
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Comments

  • elfcrisiselfcrisis Join Date: 2017-05-13 Member: 230466Members
    You may have done this already, but I have to ask the obvious question: Did you uninstall/reinstall the game? Entirely? I've had to do that once or twice to fix crashing problems.

    You did a lot more troubleshooting and tweaking of hardware stuff than I would have, but at least you eliminated all that. I didn't see you mention testing the RAM, but I think if this were a memory problem, it would be freezing the entire computer. Sometimes a hard drive going bad can cause problems like this, but if everything else works then that's probably not it, either.

    My money is on a bad install of the game. Rip it out completely and put it back fresh.

    IMO.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    Actually, that never occurred to me. I'll try that right now. I can do that without actually removing it from my Steam library, right?

    All the troubleshooting is in my nature, I like tweaking things. I also don't want to be one of those guys who jumps on a forum the instant anything goes wrong without even making the slightest effort to fix it first.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    Well, add reinstalling to the list of things I've tried without success. Although I don't think Steam did the job as advertised since I still have my old saves and everything.
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    Well, add reinstalling to the list of things I've tried without success. Although I don't think Steam did the job as advertised since I still have my old saves and everything.

    Uninstall, then delete %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\steamapps\common\Subnautica
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    Well, add reinstalling to the list of things I've tried without success. Although I don't think Steam did the job as advertised since I still have my old saves and everything.

    Uninstall, then delete %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\steamapps\common\Subnautica
    Would that make a difference in performance? Could the old save data be causing problems?

  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    Deleted the folder. Holy crap was it huge! Over 22,000 items in it. One save slot alone was almost 8GB. I can easily see that cluster causing issues. Now I just have to wait a few hours for my crap DSL connection to download the game again at 2-300 kB/s... yes, kilobytes.
  • garathgarath Texas Join Date: 2017-02-08 Member: 227730Members
    edited September 2017
    Well, add reinstalling to the list of things I've tried without success. Although I don't think Steam did the job as advertised since I still have my old saves and everything.

    I have an even more extreme thing for you to try... Delete your entire profile in Windows to try and clear up the problem. Or, something that is a way to test it before you delete it... Create a new account (including profile) on your computer. Logon as this other user. Install Steam. Install Subnautica. Try playing the game. In some cases, I've seen this resolve some odd issues. Let me know if you'd like more detailed instructions for doing this for your O/S and such.

    Deleted the folder. Holy crap was it huge! Over 22,000 items in it. One save slot alone was almost 8GB. I can easily see that cluster causing issues. Now I just have to wait a few hours for my crap DSL connection to download the game again at 2-300 kB/s... yes, kilobytes.

    Kilobytes?? It might be faster to just drop me an e-mail with your snail mail address. I'll download the game for you and drop a floppy disk in the mail to ya. :)

  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    @garath Hah! Yeah, DSL is definitely suboptimal. But options were limited.

    Not sure I'm ready to try deleting the profile yet. We had one crash after deleting the game folder and reinstalling. But that may have been due to changing the graphics settings mid-game. We're testing now. Seems more stable. We'll see as more data comes in.
  • elfcrisiselfcrisis Join Date: 2017-05-13 Member: 230466Members
    Wow that is a lot of stuff. But yeah, that's what I meant by uninstalling it entirely. (Thanks to @0x6A7232 for providing that important detail.)

    Hopefully it keeps working...
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    elfcrisis wrote: »
    Hopefully it keeps working...
    I played almost an hour with no trouble. Then my wife took over and had two crashes within five minutes. I guess the only thing left to do is try under another account like @garath suggested.
  • elfcrisiselfcrisis Join Date: 2017-05-13 Member: 230466Members
    elfcrisis wrote: »
    Hopefully it keeps working...
    I played almost an hour with no trouble. Then my wife took over and had two crashes within five minutes. I guess the only thing left to do is try under another account like @garath suggested.

    Man, that is a bummer. Creating a new Windows profile is definitely a good troubleshooting step, though.

    Back in my desktop support days, we could just log in as another Admin user and rename the old profile, so that when you logged in again with your real account, it would just create a new one fresh with all your appropriate settings. Then you could manually copy just your data from the old profile folders. I don't know how that would work with Win10 these days, what with their integrating with your Microsoft account online and all.

    Good luck, though, and let us know how it goes.
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    elfcrisis wrote: »
    elfcrisis wrote: »
    Hopefully it keeps working...
    I played almost an hour with no trouble. Then my wife took over and had two crashes within five minutes. I guess the only thing left to do is try under another account like @garath suggested.

    Man, that is a bummer. Creating a new Windows profile is definitely a good troubleshooting step, though.

    Back in my desktop support days, we could just log in as another Admin user and rename the old profile, so that when you logged in again with your real account, it would just create a new one fresh with all your appropriate settings. Then you could manually copy just your data from the old profile folders. I don't know how that would work with Win10 these days, what with their integrating with your Microsoft account online and all.

    Good luck, though, and let us know how it goes.

    I believe that's called Reset this PC now (Re-installs / wipes Windows to factory condition, but it doesn't have to wipe everything, although it does have that option if you choose it)

  • LunaraiaLunaraia Join Date: 2017-09-04 Member: 232813Members
    I am having these crashes too, though strangely enough they are only occurring in the Lava Zone and Lost River Biomes, might happen in Ghost area too but then I never stay in that area for very long so I can't really say, anyone else having these crashes happening in those areas?
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    I opened the task manager the other day to shut down a stubborn program and noticed something odd. My disk usage was hovering in the 80-90% range even with nothing opened. It would settle back down to the 20% range or so, but then climb right back. I don't know if that's a sign of a failing drive or if it means there's a bottleneck in the signal path somehow. But it seems likely that if the game can't communicate with the drive I'm going to get a crash. So I guess the next step is going to be to upgrade to an SSD.
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    I opened the task manager the other day to shut down a stubborn program and noticed something odd. My disk usage was hovering in the 80-90% range even with nothing opened. It would settle back down to the 20% range or so, but then climb right back. I don't know if that's a sign of a failing drive or if it means there's a bottleneck in the signal path somehow. But it seems likely that if the game can't communicate with the drive I'm going to get a crash. So I guess the next step is going to be to upgrade to an SSD.

    @SouthernGorilla Have a look through these: http://carlcheo.com/best-smart-monitoring-tools

    I've used CrystalDiskInfo and HDD Health before, and Acronis is good. Anyways, get a SMART tool, and see if it says your drive has issues.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    @SouthernGorilla Have a look through these: http://carlcheo.com/best-smart-monitoring-tools

    I've used CrystalDiskInfo and HDD Health before, and Acronis is good. Anyways, get a SMART tool, and see if it says your drive has issues.
    According to CrystalDiskInfo the drive is fine. But I don't understand most of the info it prints out.

    I was going to post a screenshot but it isn't giving me the option to upload a photo. Don't feel like putting it up somewhere else just so I can link to it.
  • garathgarath Texas Join Date: 2017-02-08 Member: 227730Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    @SouthernGorilla Have a look through these: http://carlcheo.com/best-smart-monitoring-tools

    I've used CrystalDiskInfo and HDD Health before, and Acronis is good. Anyways, get a SMART tool, and see if it says your drive has issues.
    According to CrystalDiskInfo the drive is fine. But I don't understand most of the info it prints out.

    I was going to post a screenshot but it isn't giving me the option to upload a photo. Don't feel like putting it up somewhere else just so I can link to it.

    I frequently have trouble uploading images. Some days, it seems to let me while other days it does not. It's maddening!
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    @SouthernGorilla Have a look through these: http://carlcheo.com/best-smart-monitoring-tools

    I've used CrystalDiskInfo and HDD Health before, and Acronis is good. Anyways, get a SMART tool, and see if it says your drive has issues.
    According to CrystalDiskInfo the drive is fine. But I don't understand most of the info it prints out.

    I was going to post a screenshot but it isn't giving me the option to upload a photo. Don't feel like putting it up somewhere else just so I can link to it.

    Hmm. Could be bad cable or something? Possible bad BIOS setting? (Like legacy compatibility or something?) Bleh, enough guessing, have a look here (there's 10 to pick from) and see what the drive's performance is: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/measure-actual-hard-disk-perfomance-under-windows/
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    Bleh, enough guessing, have a look here (there's 10 to pick from) and see what the drive's performance is: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/measure-actual-hard-disk-perfomance-under-windows/
    I definitely agree abot the guessing. That's all I've been doing up to this point since none of the tests have indicated an obvious problem. Computers are worse than cars when it comes to tracking down the source of trouble. Literally anything could be the problem.

    Used CrystalDiskMark with 5 passes on a 1GiB test.
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	159.1/149.5
    4K Q3T1		0.642/1.273
    Seq		159.2/141.8
    4K		0.368/1.310
    
    That doesn't tell me anything. The numbers don't look goofy as far as I know.
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    Bleh, enough guessing, have a look here (there's 10 to pick from) and see what the drive's performance is: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/measure-actual-hard-disk-perfomance-under-windows/
    I definitely agree abot the guessing. That's all I've been doing up to this point since none of the tests have indicated an obvious problem. Computers are worse than cars when it comes to tracking down the source of trouble. Literally anything could be the problem.

    Used CrystalDiskMark with 5 passes on a 1GiB test.
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	159.1/149.5
    4K Q3T1		0.642/1.273
    Seq		159.2/141.8
    4K		0.368/1.310
    
    That doesn't tell me anything. The numbers don't look goofy as far as I know.

    Here's what I got on my 5400 RPM WD Green spinny drive for comparison:
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	82.63/87.46
    4K Q3T1		0.660/0.922
    Seq		83.04/85.15
    4K		0.297/0.941
    

    For another comparison, I run Subnautica from my 850 EVO SSD:
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	2,918/3,654
    4K Q3T1		349.8/239.9
    Seq		1,228/3,268
    4K		88.23/254.6
    

    Anyways, the point being with the spinny disk results: your drive appears fine. So we need something to show you what's using your hard disk. May I present the Swiss Army knife of computer tools suites, so good at its job that M$ bought the company: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite <- Download the suite, then use the tool Process Explorer (procexp64.exe once you've unzipped the tools to a folder of your choice), and sort by "I/O Read Delta" or "I/O Write Delta" to see what process is doing this, and then you can click on that process to find more info on it.
  • InsolentfoolInsolentfool Brisbane, Australia Join Date: 2017-09-13 Member: 232977Members
    Hi, I've had exactly the same issue here. I played for 2 hours then went AFK paused. Came back to computer rebooted and all progress lost.
    I almost had to start from scratch, this time I made manual saves as I went just incase.
    Went AFK for 5 minutes paused and came back to PC completely frozen.
    Since then it's crashed a couple of times while playing but because i've been manually saving constantly it's been no big deal.
    Every time I've loaded the game up it's said my save is corrupted but still works, but now im getting a error loading build 18 message while loading my game and it never loads.
    I'll have to start all over again.

    Been monitoring temps, haven't noticed anything untoward so far and my rig is more than enough to handle the game.
    i7 930 @4ghtz
    12G ram
    1080TI
    SSD Samsung Evo 840
    latest Nvidia drivers.

    All modern games run great without issue.
  • elfcrisiselfcrisis Join Date: 2017-05-13 Member: 230466Members
    @SouthernGorilla High disk usage like that out of nowhere can sometimes be the OS indexing changes to the data on that drive. If there have been a lot of changes, or if there's a lot of fragmentation, it can take a long time to finish. I've seen it be unable to finish sometimes, too, and start over, leading to the same problem again.

    I didn't read your diagnostic results in detail, but I was reminded of that issue so I figured I'd throw it in the thread, just in case.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    Bleh, enough guessing, have a look here (there's 10 to pick from) and see what the drive's performance is: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/measure-actual-hard-disk-perfomance-under-windows/
    I definitely agree abot the guessing. That's all I've been doing up to this point since none of the tests have indicated an obvious problem. Computers are worse than cars when it comes to tracking down the source of trouble. Literally anything could be the problem.

    Used CrystalDiskMark with 5 passes on a 1GiB test.
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	159.1/149.5
    4K Q3T1		0.642/1.273
    Seq		159.2/141.8
    4K		0.368/1.310
    
    That doesn't tell me anything. The numbers don't look goofy as far as I know.

    Here's what I got on my 5400 RPM WD Green spinny drive for comparison:
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	82.63/87.46
    4K Q3T1		0.660/0.922
    Seq		83.04/85.15
    4K		0.297/0.941
    

    For another comparison, I run Subnautica from my 850 EVO SSD:
    Test		R/W
    Seq Q3T1	2,918/3,654
    4K Q3T1		349.8/239.9
    Seq		1,228/3,268
    4K		88.23/254.6
    

    Anyways, the point being with the spinny disk results: your drive appears fine. So we need something to show you what's using your hard disk. May I present the Swiss Army knife of computer tools suites, so good at its job that M$ bought the company: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite <- Download the suite, then use the tool Process Explorer (procexp64.exe once you've unzipped the tools to a folder of your choice), and sort by "I/O Read Delta" or "I/O Write Delta" to see what process is doing this, and then you can click on that process to find more info on it.

    I'll try that when I get home in the morning.
  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    elfcrisis wrote: »
    @SouthernGorilla High disk usage like that out of nowhere can sometimes be the OS indexing changes to the data on that drive. If there have been a lot of changes, or if there's a lot of fragmentation, it can take a long time to finish. I've seen it be unable to finish sometimes, too, and start over, leading to the same problem again.

    I didn't read your diagnostic results in detail, but I was reminded of that issue so I figured I'd throw it in the thread, just in case.

    You can disable Indexing service (but it should do that on idle, I thought?). Anyway, it's there to make the useless (IMHO) Windows Search function work. You could try disabling Indexing Service, and installing voidtool's Everything (choose Installer 64-bit, or if you don't want it installed or want a copy for say, a work computer on a USB thumb drive, the Portable 64-bit).

    Everything search is near-instant (seriously, by the time you finish typing a file name, the results are loaded), and they just updated it to include searching file contents as well (like if you're looking for a text file containing a certain phrase or something; I haven't tested this functionality myself, though, so I'm not sure how well it works).

    Now, Everything Indexes the drive as well, but apparently, is about 10x better at it than Windows, and, doesn't do it all the time. So, there you have it, if you want, give it a shot, I've used it for years.
  • orobourosorobouros US Join Date: 2016-04-01 Member: 215163Members
    This is happening to me, except I NEVER get more than 90 seconds or so of play - new or old save, brand new game, doesn't matter - before it locks up and crashes to desktop.

    I've reinstalled from scratch (not making a new Windows profile, especially when Subnautica is the ONLY thing having a problem, and ONLY since the Cuddlefish Update).

    It's really disheartening that this game just stops working entirely right before launch, and no Dev can even pop in here to give us a direction to look at, much less "we know about it and will eventually fix it". As far as I can tell, they just made SN incompatible with my hardware without changing the minimum specs officially. 'Cause I'm just plain stuck, can't play whatsoever.
  • BelgarelBelgarel Join Date: 2017-07-03 Member: 231570Members, Subnautica Developer
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    You can disable Indexing service (but it should do that on idle, I thought?).

    It can kick in when not really idle. The one that more often burns people though is MS's anti-virus/malware thing that likes eating a minute of CPU time right after you start a program - it's extremely and unexpectedly heavy and fights with legit software. I just disable all of it. Virus scanners are the new viruses.
  • garathgarath Texas Join Date: 2017-02-08 Member: 227730Members
    edited September 2017
    Belgarel wrote: »
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    You can disable Indexing service (but it should do that on idle, I thought?).

    It can kick in when not really idle. The one that more often burns people though is MS's anti-virus/malware thing that likes eating a minute of CPU time right after you start a program - it's extremely and unexpectedly heavy and fights with legit software. I just disable all of it. Virus scanners are the new viruses.

    So true! I used to always disable my antivirus before I played some resource intensive games back in the single core, single thread days. These days, with quad core processors, it doesn't seem to be as much an issue. But I'm mostly playing low CPU INDY games of late so maybe it's still an issue and I just don't know it.

  • 0x6A72320x6A7232 US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
    Belgarel wrote: »
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    You can disable Indexing service (but it should do that on idle, I thought?).

    It can kick in when not really idle. The one that more often burns people though is MS's anti-virus/malware thing that likes eating a minute of CPU time right after you start a program - it's extremely and unexpectedly heavy and fights with legit software. I just disable all of it. Virus scanners are the new viruses.
    garath wrote: »
    Belgarel wrote: »
    0x6A7232 wrote: »
    You can disable Indexing service (but it should do that on idle, I thought?).

    It can kick in when not really idle. The one that more often burns people though is MS's anti-virus/malware thing that likes eating a minute of CPU time right after you start a program - it's extremely and unexpectedly heavy and fights with legit software. I just disable all of it. Virus scanners are the new viruses.

    So true! I used to always disable my antivirus before I played some resource intensive games back in the single core, single thread days. These days, with quad core processors, it doesn't seem to be as much an issue. But I'm mostly playing low CPU INDY games of late so maybe it's still an issue and I just don't know it.

    You'd think the OS would be smart enough by now to load-balance the AV software and other system tasks to other CPU cores if an old or simple game is asking for all of CPU0.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    @0x6A7232 I finally got around to trying out the SysExp software you linked. Lots of numbers and pretty colors. The only process that had anything at all under the I/O Delta categories was the software for my keyboard. Interestingly, even with no games running the Steam client was top of the list under "Private Bytes", whatever that means.
  • SouthernGorillaSouthernGorilla United States Join Date: 2017-07-26 Member: 232057Members
    @0x6A7232 Tried that tool again after a crash. As usual, I lost the video, but the game was still running. It's funny listening to a Cyclops sailing along while looking at my desktop. Anyhow, the "I/O Delta Writes" was hovering around 1,400 before the game completely quit. There's a column "private bytes" or something that was around 4.5 Gb and another "bytes" column that was around 2 Gb. I have no idea what any of that means. But the overall disk usage was at 99% for a while. I can easily see the disk being a bottleneck. But the question is whether that's a problem with the disk or an optimization issue. It's also possible the disk is fine and it's just an old SATA connection that can't keep up. Maybe we got by for a while because the game wasn't quite complicated enough to stress the system but after a couple updates there's more data than it can move? Or maybe I have some malware stressing the system? I'm still no closer to figuring it out and I'm months away from being able to rebuild the box.
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