Looking forward to playing Starfield again.(Can't)

[dfonda]

When I mean again , I mean after 90 hours and working fine late into Sunday (16th) night. Monday it opened any of the many many save files I have and either immediately or after 5 seconds closed to desktop.

Posting this as I have only one thing left that I can think of to try. Swap my RTX 3080 for a 4070 Ti which are currently running fah on another PC.

1)The last 3 Nvidia drivers all worked. I went from the newest .34 back to the 2 previous drivers , no change.

2) Checked Win Defender history , nothing even flagged since last Oct , nothing on Starfield.

3) Used Steam to check and fix game files. No change.

4) Uninstalled than installed the game again. No change.

5) I can get to the menu screen fine , so I went in settings to turn things like fsr 2 off...All the stuff that might cause a malfunction I already had off...including
FSR 2...Maybe I should try turning it on ?

6) I have no Mods installed because every time they update Starfield they break the game. dlss is on its way along with FOV slider (In a future update). I did have a custom ini file for 100% FOV (Not a Mod) but removed it. No change.

7) Game has played fine with whatever is running in back ground but I tried turning things like my Plex server off. No change.

I have tried pretty much everything I found on the web/Youtube. Kinda stumped.

Any one have any theories ? The last update came through days ago and it has run fine. Drivers do not make any difference and I had only 2 crashes prior (Both in UC Pilot simulator not related to this)

I read that someone disconnected their wifi. So I'll try pulling the cat plug and see if that does anything. Not willing to install windows again.

Thanks for any suggestions

Oh I forgot something...The problem might have coincided with my using photo mode to take screenshots that run during load screens. (It runs you own screenshots) I couldn't find anything in Windows Defender showing that excess to that folder is being denied tho.

 

[EarthDog]

Have you checked why it's failing in the Windows error log(s)? That's where I'd look first...see if it has any errors at the time of the crash and see what they are.

Oh I forgot something...The problem might have coincided with my using photo mode to take screenshots that run during load screens. (It runs you own screenshots) I couldn't find anything in Windows Defender showing that excess to that folder is being denied tho.

Disable it? What is it? LOL! What is there an excess of from that functionality? I'm confused. Is that a 3rd party app? Can you disable it?

PS - I deleted your dupe thread.

 

[dfonda]

So I made some progress. I googled and investigated errors....The Starfield root drive has its own error folder but I have not figured out how to read it. The error's I got I saved and can post them but I couldn't make heads or tails of them as they do not refer to Starfield. I did read what was said of them but that did not lead me anywhere.

Although I had more than a TB of free space on my C: M.2 drive. I moved it to another empty 2 TB M.2. No help.

I then remembered I wanted to play another Steam game to isolate it from Starfield and also check temps...EA PGA played fine and it is more taxing on the GPU then Starfield. I had temps up to 71 C on my hybrid (No heat issues anything below 80 C is cool). Without gaming it sits at 31 C. I was glad it wasn't the GPU.

I went back thru my save files more than a day and opened one from 2 days before the 17th backing myself up from level 33 to level 30 ...Previously I had not wanted to go back that far...Not the end of the world as I wished I had played the "Scow" mission differently or maybe not at all...saving it for later.

Success my save called Grandma worked fine. I saved it to put it at the top and it still played fine...The other recent saves still failed.

Leading me to check if my over 400 saves were an issue...finding this.

Starfield Manual Save Freeze & Crash Guide: How to Fix it

Looking to fix a Starfield manual save crash or freeze issue? Here's our guide to getting your Starfield game running in tip top shape!

hard-drive.net

So I will delete (After backing up the folder which I already do twice a week) a couple hundred saves and see what happens. In fact it might be a good idea to use one of my backup's tho again I would like to fix my mistakes.

ED that questioned you asked...I was wondering if the saved photo folder was blocked by defender causing the crashes as they no longer showed up when I loaded the bad saves. I wasn't sure if they saved to a folder in the Starship root or to the screenshot folder...

 

[Sologuy]

OP, that's interesting what you found. I've got this game but haven't started it yet. The fact that you mentioned 400 saves might be an issue & then you found that guide to help sort it out reminds me of the days when the original Skyrim (Creation engine) had this issue as well - that is a long list of saves causing CTD. But you'll have to isolate that potential problem from using the saved photo folder thing & see if that's causing the problem first.

 

[dfonda]

This is wacky...I save and then reload that save to see that it still loads and play...Doing the same after each save...Today I go to load the last save that I checked that it worked...It loads allows me to move and a second later crashes...Same for the other saves that worked the day before...

I can still go back a day to the "Grandma" save that works losing hours of play time.

Sadly I am having so much fun with both the missions and the space battles it is really disappointing.

All I can hope for is a fix in either Bethesda's next update or Nvidia's next driver.

 

[dfonda]

I have continued researching my save problem...No solution yet. If I do not exit the game the recent saves (Of any kind ) will load. Once I quit to desktop the saves will not open for more then a second or 4...and crash to desktop , older save continue to work 1 and a half steps forward 2 steps back.

Reported my Ms and DXDiag files to Bethesda waiting on an answer. I think it started with the games last update.

Still loving the game...but hating Bethesda QC...

 

[dfonda]

I seem to be locked at level 30...I'll try to up my level thru console to get past it...Otherwise I'll have to keep the game open till I finish...Still waiting on Bethesda , not holding my breath. They said they were escalating it.

 

[dfonda]

Had fun playing from an old save for a few hours, I do diferent things each time so it is not repetitive. The new saves load fine after I make them and as long as I do not exit. If I exit and come back later , they load as if they work then back to the desktop...

Spent a hour trying anything I hadn't tried to fix it , no dice..

I tried playing offline via the Steam setting, I'll try unplugging the cat cable next...Something is weird. No word from Bethesda.

 

[Janus67]

I see an absolute ton of posts on the starfield subreddit saying the same. And that's across PC and XBOX.

May have missed this, if you backup/move all your existing saves away and start from scratch. Does it still happen? And then issues crop up on new load?

I'm playing with pc gamepass so not 1:1 with steam version but close enough I imagine.

 

[dfonda]

I see an absolute ton of posts on the starfield subreddit saying the same. And that's across PC and XBOX.

May have missed this, if you backup/move all your existing saves away and start from scratch. Does it still happen? And then issues crop up on new load?

I'm playing with pc gamepass so not 1:1 with steam version but close enough I imagine.

Do you mean start a new game and then put all the saves back and then see if they work? If so no that doesn't work this is a different thing.

If you mean start and play for hours and see if it repeats, I am sure it will work but I need these 100 hour saves fixed...I won't risk having this happen again. I know the save files are not corrupt otherwise they wouldn't work when I first make them. It is some kind of synch issue. (I think )

I haven't seen a number of things that work in different situations for different people depending on the system and depending on what the problem is.

This is an issue where the game runs fine and did for a hundred hours and more.
I can still pull up all my old saves and they work fine and I can play for hours and hours making saves quick saves exit saves doesn't matter and as long as I've got the game still running I can go ahead and load those saves and they work fine.

If I get killed the game will load my last save so I know the saves are okay. The issue is when I exit the game the saves stopped working.

They load up and you can play for a second or two and then the game just closes. My level 30 save which is usually my starting point ....actually it's always my starting point, loads and I can play for hours on end and again all the saves will work in other words I can hit escape and load any of the saves that I've made and they all work.

When I come back to the game the next day they don't work anymore.

 

[dfonda]

I installed the game on Steam Deck to try out the saves. The only saves available were the new saves maybe 10 and they started and locked up then crashed just as the PC.

I then streamed the PC to the Deck to play and all the saves appeared the 10 new ones still started then failed. The older level 30 save worked fine.

Definitely a cloud syncing issue. I will try to play offline and see if new saves that are completely local work. These files that are not working are still in the local save folder, so that is what I find confusing...They should work when I go offline.