Messages

Many people post their support issues here, and a number of them do so because they'd specifically like a reply from the forum staff regarding their issue, and not just replies from "some random people on the internet". And even though at the end of the day the forum staff themselves are just "random people on the internet", for the person seeking help the fact that they are forum staff enables them to put greater trust in their answers. So a member of forum staff posting to confirm (or reiterate) an answer that someone else has already provided is a common place on any game's official support forum. And which is an important aspect for some people when seeking help, and irrespective of whether or not it's important to you.

So even if you found my confirmation of Canute's answer unhelpful, other people who have been in your positon in the past, and will be again in the future, do find staff confirmation of answers helpful. And it should not be considered unexpected for forum staff to do this in relation to those seeking help with their problems on a game's official support forum. Not least because that is what often distinguishes official support forums/channels from other places the game is discussed, and where help and support can just as likely be sought (but just not official support).


And I'm happy for you that this was the first time you lost a perma-death save in several hundred hours. But don't mistake good fortune for good judgement. You could sit in a lion enclosure for a week and survive without a scratch. Doesn't mean it was a good idea though. Neither does the favourable outcome change the inherent risk involved, nor the 100% one sided risk:reward ratio connected to it. You just got lucky. Simple as that. And if you've dealt with the same number of "Help I've lost my perma-death save" posts that I have, then you might have more realisation regarding just how lucky you have been. Or have been until now.

Playing RimWorld is fun. Perma-death doesn't affect the storyteller, or map/resource generation, or the pawn/animal AI, or anything. Perma-death literally does nothing to the game, it does not enhance the game, and it certainly doesn't add to the fun. And besides, if you want the perma-death playing experience then that can easily be obtained by playing a normal game with auto save enabled, and only manually loading and saving when you start and end a playing session respectively. So the perma-death experience at a greatly reduced risk.

And I said perma-death does nothing, but actually it does do something. Which is to create pointless extra work for the forum staff (and those who generously help us) due to people creating "Help I've lost my perma-death save game." threads like yours, and asking what they can do to recover their one and only save file. With the answer usually being "nothing unfortunately", but what you can do is avoid losing your save again in the future by not playing perma-death. And I will continue to offer this advice, and explain the needless risks being taken by playing perma-death, every time such threads appear. Because it is undertaking a needless risk in exchange for no benefits.


But everyone has to make their own decisions, I can only offer my advice. If people decide to continue playing perma-death after being made aware of the needless risk involved then I can only wish them well and that Lady Luck views their decision favourably going forward.

Great to hear everything is working again. The split installation locations was the most likely cause (as I said maybe Steam changed something that now causes problems or such setups), although those viruses / malware certainly weren't helping in general.

And many apologies for almost costing you your hard earned collection of save games. Your shooting skill just increase by +2 due to you keen sense perception to danger. I thought (quite mistakenly it seems) that save data from SuchAndSuch game would always be stored in their own LocalLow folders (like RimWorld's), and that Steam's footprint wouldn't be tagged as having association with the folders for individual games, and so removing all traces of Steam wouldn't also mean all traces of every game installed via Steam. My lack of knowledge and experience with Steam was certainly on full display for this one

Glad to hear you managed to sort the problem out. And thanks for letting us know.

Can't say I can recall this happening to anyone else (or at least not reported here), but according to that thread at least one other user had the same issue, so thanks for linking to it. Should prove useful in future if anyone else reports the same issue.

Sorry to hear you are having some problems with the Creative Rewards website. I can't do anything myself as the CR site is totally separate to these forums. But if you contact ItchyFlea either by email care of Ludeon support [email protected] , or via a forum PM (here's his profile page) https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?action=profile;u=959, and explain the problem to him, then I'm sure he'll be able to help you sort it out.

This topic has been moved to Creative Rewards.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=40923.0

A (well) known issue that is already fixed for v.1.0.

But thank you for reporting it though all the same. (I'll close this since it's already been fixed by the devs).

[Program Files]

Does that mean programfilesx86 should be put in Steam and only Steamin C:?

Not entirely sure what you mean here (have you written these two folders the wrong way around? Since you can't put the Program Files (x86) folder in the Steam folder, but you can put the Steam folder inside Program Files (x86) fodler).

The Program Files and/or Program Files (x86) folder(s) is always located at the base/root of the c:drive. ie. c:\Program Files. I don't know if Win7 has one or both of these folders. Win8 and Win10 have both, but I don't know if Win7 does.

But the installation directory that Steam defaults to should be one of these folders, so just install it to whatever the default installation path is. Note, this is assuming it defaults to the c:drive (since I do not know if you have altered your Windows setting and selected another default path for programs or not).

Because for as long as I can remember, Steam and program files have been two seperate folders.

They are separate folders, with the Steam folder usually being located inside the Program Files folder. So for example C:\Program Files\Steam .

Ah, just seen your post (the one above my lengthy one). I hadn't ruled out this being caused by a virus, but I had pushed it down the list because you said you were running Malwarebytes, which I assume meant you were using Malwarebytes active protection, and so in theory couldn't or shouldn't, have picked any unwanted crap.

So before anything else, and if Microsoft Security Essentials doesn't fix it, then I'd recommend downloading and running Rogue Killer https://www.adlice.com/download/roguekiller/ . I've been using this together with Malwarebytes for several years and as yet I haven't come across anything that they haven't been able to detect and remove.

Okay...

Firstly, your log file does contain some info about the crash. Which is a good thing since at least it's something to go on, and confirms the game is crashing (rather than the O/S or AV or something else randomly shutting it down). Unfortunately the errors are not ones I've seen before, and Googling them brings up a handful of results, but not one of the people encountering this error got any sort of reply.

0x0533EB48 ((<unknown>))
ERROR: SymGetSymFromAddr64, GetLastError: 'The specified module could not be found.' (Address: 0533EA39)
ERROR: SymGetModuleInfo64, GetLastError: 'A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed.' (Address: 0533EA39)

The error suggests that the game is failing to find a dll, which could be consistent with you having two install locations for Steam.

So my advice would be to tidy up your Steam installation and put everything on the c:drive. I don't know if having them split is causing problems, but right now it's by far the #1 most likely cause IMO. Even if you've had them split before, and it always worked fine, don't rule out a Steam update suddenly deciding it's no longer fine. If you don't have the space on your c:drive to install all your games then personally I'd say worry about that later, since that's less of a concern than getting to the bottom of what's causing these crashes. RimWorld needs very little space (not sure how much the Steam client uses though, and I don't have it installed to check).

I'd also advise using Revo Uninstaller to uninstall Steam (if you don't use it already) https://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html. Since if I were experiencing this problem I'd be trying to clean up every trace of Steam I could before reinstalling, since otherwise some residual reference to the e:drive paths could mess everything up after the reinstall and negate the point of the whole endeavour.


Secondly, something I just noticed is that there are two references to your GPU(s) in the log. I have never seen this before and I can't see how it's a good thing. My immediate thinking is that Steam is launching two instances of RimWorld and these two instances are both writing to the same log file. Which doesn't make any sense at all, but I can't think of any other way for there to be two GPU references. Plus two instances could explain the crashing, since perhaps the game is trying to use a dll that is being used by the other instance. I don't know to be honest, since two GPU references just doesn't make any sense.

Plus it appears you have a dual GPU laptop with a Nvidia GPU. You didn't mention this when I asked for your system specs. I don't think this crash is related to that, but it does provide another troubleshooting option.


Thirdly, the event viewer is registering the crash (for HomeWorld at least). The crash info doesn't contain any useful info (for me at least), but I wouldn't rule out you wanting to contact Microsoft support about this issue if it can't be figured out (and Microsoft support might well be able to use such crash info).


So, to summarise the plan:

1 - Uninstall Steam completely. Use Revo (and maybe CCleaner) to remove as many Steam references as possible.
1a - Once that is done install Steam to the c:drive.
1b - Then install RimWorld to the c:drive. Don't put anything on the e:drive (or any other drive) at all. Only use the c:drive.
1c - Exit Steam, goto the RimWorld installation directory and copy the entire RimWorld folder to somewhere else on your harddrive. But not to a Windows controlled folder (so not documents or downloads etc). So just copy the folder to the root drive or something.
1d - Launch Steam and then launch RimWorld and play it until it crashes (or hopefully not).

2 - If it crashes then exit Steam completely and check to see if the RimWorldWin.exe has been deleted again or not. No action is required either way, but make sure to make a note of whether the .exe is still there or not.
2a - Go to wherever you copied the RimWorld installation to in 1c and launch the RimWorldWin.exe from there (remember not to have Steam running).
2b - If it crashes again then check the copy of the installation folder to see if the RimWorldWin.exe has been deleted or not. Again no action required, but it's important to know if the .exe is still there or not.


If the .exe is being deleted in both cases, then it must be getting deleted by either Windows itself, Windows Defender, or by a virus. The game wouldn't delete it's own .exe (for any reason at all), and 2b should rule out any Steam involvement. You still have Windows Defender activated, so AV can't be ruled out yet.

One test you can to rule that out is:

3 - Reinstall RimWorld again (you must be sick of doing this by now but troubleshooting mysterious problems is rarely quick, and always involves laborious repetition),
3a - Exit Steam and copy the RimWorld installation directory somewhere else again (same place as last time should be fine).
3b - Disconnect from the internet completely (make sure you disable auto-connect).
3c- Disable Windows Defender (Win7 should allow you to disable it, as it's nanny bot settings aren't as nannying as Win10)
3d- Run RimWorldWin.exe from the copy of the installation directory again.

If Steam isn't running, and if you have no AV running, and the .exe still gets deleted, then... ?!? it's either Windows itself, a virus, or a total mystery.


I'll leave it there for now and wait for you to report back. There's another test you can try involving disabling your Nvidia GPU, and with the aim of trying to get rid of those two GPU references in the log file (which as I said can't be a good thing). But better to rule out other stuff first (as I don't know your computer know-how, so I'm not sure how comfortable you are with disabling devices).

Thanks for the info. It's certainly sounding a lot more like a purely Steam based issue (to me) now than it was before.

If you haven't tried installing Steam and/or Steam games on your c:drive (boot/system) drive yet then I'd certainly try that, since not everything is happy to work from locations away from the c:drive. I know a lot of people do install Steam and run Steam games on non c:drives, but perhaps Steam changed *something* recently while fiddling with their client (as they regularly do), and this has caused (I assume unintentionally) a problem for non c:drive installation.


And did RimWorld work when run outside of Steam? (test #3). I can't see where you answered that (apologies for my blindness if you did).


But if this is a Steam issue them I'm afraid you'll have to rely on Steam support to sort it out, not least because I don't have to know how to help with a purely Steam technical issue (others here might, but I can only speak for myself in this regard).

Only other things I can think of:

1 - You're using a laptop, so have you altered your power management settings at all recently? And/or check your power management options to make sure everything is set to max power / max performance (note I'm assuming your laptop is plugged in).

This would more likely apply if you had a dedicated GPU, since they have idling options that can cause issues. AFAIK there are no such options with the Intel HD4000 GPU

1a - Maybe there's a faulty (or genuine) low power report being flagged due to a failing laptop battery, and this is causing a partial system shutdown to save power. Which can happen even if it's plugged in (ie. faulty). So try shutting your computer down, removing the battery, plugging in the power lead and trying again. Most (all?) laptops don't actually require the battery to work, and will function as normal when directly plugged in (but obviously without the failsafe in the event of a power cut).

But this is a long long long shot, and tbh I can't see how it's the cause of the issue based on the info you've provided (and I'm only mentioning it in relation to "list all non-Steam causes that could, in theory, even if it's a wild theory, be causing this problem")


2 - Check the Windows Event Viewer and see what's being reported at the time the game crashes. It should be accessible via Control Panel>Administrative Tools, but my Windows history skipped 7, so the former is based on how to access it in Win8 (but of course Google will be able to tell you if you can't access it this way).

If you haven't used Event Viewer before then FYI it can take quite a while to populate the list after you click on an entry under Windows Logs. It doesn't always tell you it's populating the list either, so at first it might seem like there are no logs at all. But they are there, but you might have to wait several minutes for them to appear.

[How to Perform a Clean Reinstall]

Have you tried / are you able to, just (re)subscribe to the mods you were using? (or the mods on that list when you try to load your save).

If the above doesn't work (for some reason) then deleting your config folder (see #1 below) should reset your mod info, and in so doing allow to you subscribe to your mods again.

If that fails then a clean reinstall should reset everything to square one. And if that fails then I'm afraid I've run out of pages in my "How to solve Steam issues" book (I don't use Steam myself if I can help it, so have little knowledge of its various quirks). Although other users here have more extensive books on this than I do.

Only other thing that makes sense is that all of those mods were simultaneously removed from the Workshop. Which is highly unlikely to say the least (unless they're all by the same creator, when it becomes far less unlikely).


How to Perform a Clean Reinstall

1. Reset RimWorld's configuration data by deleting all the RimWorld configuration files. You'll find them in one of the following folders (depending on your operation system):

Windows	C:/Users/[username]/AppData/LocalLow/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld/Config C:/Users/[username]/AppData/LocalLow/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld by Ludeon Studios/Config Note 1: the AppData folder may be hidden. Note 2: the RimWorld folder within LocalLow may differ for various users, see this thread
Mac	Users/[username]/library/Application Support/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld/Config Users/[username]/library/Caches/RimWorld/Config
Linux	/home/[username]/.config/unity3d/Ludeon Studios/RimWorld/Config

2. Uninstall the game and delete the game files.
-If you ARE on Steam:
  A: Unsubscribe from all mods in the Workshop.
  B: In Steam library, right-click RimWorld and select Uninstall.
  C: Shut down Steam.
  D: Delete this folder (if it's there): Steam\SteamApps\common\RimWorld
  E: Delete this folder (if it's there): Steam\SteamApps\workshop\content\294100
  F: Restart your PC.

3. [Windows only] Download and run Delete_RimWorld_Registry_entries.reg (right click the link and use Save Target As) and double-click it to delete all registry entries related to RimWorld.

5. Open Steam, install RimWorld and play.

If the game still doesn't work then please repeat the above, inserting the following two steps.

4. Disable virus protection programs (they occasionally flag RimWorld as a virus and kill it, since it was downloaded from the Internet).

6. Remember to re-enable your virus protection.

[reward 0%:100% risk]

Checking RimWorld's file integrity through Steam should repair the game files (if needed). And Canute's above advice about running a disk check on your drives should sort out any file system issues (computers usually don't like sudden and instant shutdowns).

As for your save game, I'm afraid that could well be lost. All depends whether or not the save file was being written to when you lost power. If it wasn't then in theory the save should be fine and the errors you are getting are not related to the state of the save file itself, although obviously you will have lost all your progress from when you last saved.

If it was in the middle of writing then your save is almost certainly lost because the game wasn't able to write all the data to the save file, and there's no way to recover this lost data (a small and select number of issues can be fixed by editing the save file data with a text editor, but you can't edit the data if the data simply doesn't exist).

And once again unfortunate incidents such as this make me scratch my head in bewilderment as to why anyone would ever play perma-death. It's a reward 0%:100% risk based decision, since there are no benefits to be had from playing perma-death only risk, so you are taking on a huge risk for literally nothing. And perma-death + using mods is even riskier again and is just asking to lose your save file.

Okay we're going to need some more info and test info here I think to help determine what's causing the issue. So firstly what are your system specs? CPU, RAM, GPU, O/S, laptop or desktop?

Then some test data is needed:

1 - Have you tried uninstalling your AV completely? If you haven't tried it yet then please do (if you are using Windows 10 then it won't allow you to remove AV protection from your system completely, and will revert to using Defender if it can't detect any other active protection. But that's fine for the purposes of this test).
1a - If you have tried it then was the problem still the same? Or were there some differences you could detect? (see next)
1b - Related to 1a, what nature are these crashes taking? Is an error message popping up when a game crashes? Or are you just being thrown back to the desktop with no message at all? Or is the computer shutting down? Or... ?? And is the nature consistent? (ie. Do you always get an error message? Or do you get one sometimes, but other times not).
1c - If any sort of error message appears then please post a screenshot of it.


Tbh I'm not sure this is AV related because you say your games (or RimWorld at least) are running for a few minutes before crashing (still do test 1 though). And any AV (worth anything) wouldn't allow a suspect executable to launch in the first place (since your system would be compromised the moment it was). It's possible that *something* is happening after a few minutes into a game with Steam and in relation to its internet connection, and the AV is detecting this *something* and shutting down Steam and the game. So...


2 - Try launching any non-Steam game. If you have no GoG games (or the like), then try a free game or a demo. I spent some time playing BoW (Battle of Wesnoth) years ago so try downloading, installing, and playing that game for an hour to see if it crashes or not.  https://www.wesnoth.org/

It's vital from a troubleshooting PoV to establish if these crashes are Steam related or not, as otherwise it's going to be impossible to determine what's causing the problem. Maybe you have already confirmed that Steam is the cause (just not sure why), but if you have then you haven't relayed that information here yet, so I am assuming Steam is just a suspect right now (and not confirmed as the cause)

2a - If BoW* crashes then try again but make sure you are disconnected from the internet this time (and make sure to turn off auto-connect).

Whether or not BoW* works or not should help narrow down the cause, and likewise should help determine how to proceed with pinpointing it.
(*or whatever non-Steam, non-internet dependent game your tried)

Although you can still try #3 in relation to (at least) RimWorld.


3 - Make sure RimWorld is properly installed (either by checking file integrity or performing another clean reinstall), exit Steam completely, then navigate to the RimWorld install directory and then run the RimWorldWin.exe directly from the install folder. You will get a "Steam is not running" error when the main menu loads, but you can just click ignore (or close, can't remember which) and access the main menu as usual (but Steam related services and mods etc won't work for obvious reasons).

3a - If it crashes then as with 2a, disconnect from the internet and try again.

If RimWorld still crashes when launched this way then I can't see how it's a Steam problem. And if an AV issue is ruled out as well then I'm afraid it's starting to look like a hardware issue (I think defective RAM can cause random crashes, but other things can as well).


But lets try to rule out software related possibilities before assuming it's hardware related.

(moved to mod bugs).

Please can you post your mod list and full log file as an attachment. Details on how and where to find both these things can be found in the "How to Report a Mod Bug" that is pinned to the top of the mod bugs forum.

Have you ever had to type in a password on an AZERTY keyboard, when you can't even see what you type???

From having had to use AZERTY keyboards many times before (as a QWERTY guy), I can certainly understand how that can make things a lot more annoying. Some forum software allows you the option to see the characters you've inputted instead of hiding them with ***. SMF doesn't allow that though, so in that regard that is certainly a suggestion that could / would improve the registration aspect of their forum software.

But then it's almost certain that idea has been suggested to Simple Machines already, since that sort of suggestion is comparable to Z-levels or Multiplayer suggestions for RimWorld (ie. It's simply bound to have been suggested already given how long SMF software has been around). So if they haven't implemented it by now then it's likely not on their list of plans.