Regular Blue Screens of Death for no apparent reason?

[State]

I recently bought RimWorld on Steam and have been enjoying it immensely. However, I've been having regular blue screens of death with the game that are really souring my experience.
I'm afraid I have very little info on why these are occurring. I play a lot of games, yet the BSODs only happen when I'm playing RimWorld. As far as I can tell, they don't seem to be connected to anything specific happening in the game. (The first three BSODs happened during dry thunderstorms, so I thought that might be the cause. But then the next several BSODs took place when there was no thunderstorm/fire.)

My computer specs:
Win7 Home Premium 64bit Service Pack 1
AMD Phenom II X4 840 / 3.2GHz
8 GB RAM
Nvidia 970GTX
Driver version: 347.52


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[Zhentar]

It's most likely a hardware failure. In the modern Windows architectures, it's effectively impossible for a user space program (which RimWorld is) to directly cause a BSOD. It is also possible to be caused by a video driver bug, but that is fairly unlikely.

Last time I had BSODs with one game but not any other games, it was a bad PCIe slot. What makes one game encounter a hardware issue consistently when others don't? Who knows.

[nccvoyager]

Ah, a Phenom II processor. Cool.
I run an X3 with an NVidia GTX 680 Ti myself.
Little older and less powerful than yours, but it has served me well for quite a while now.

On topic, this could be a fault in the processor.
Several batches of X4 processors were modified and marketed as X3 processors due to faulty manufacturing of the fourth core.
So, could be a CPU that fell through and still got sold as an X4.
That all being said, it is very unlikely that this is the problem though, since this is only happening with RimWorld.

Now, that's a fairly old CPU, so I assume (though I shouldn't) that the mainboard and RAM are also from that era.
Now, being as versed as I am with stop errors on this system I have, I would posit that it may be a faulty RAM bank.
Running a memory diagnostic may be pertinent.
You can use the built-in memory diagnostic tools in Windows, or something like Memtest86+ as an alternative.
It takes a while, but it will tell you whether you need a replacement piece of RAM or not.
I had similar issues; there would be random stop (blue screen) errors while playing one game alone (Skyrim actually) and this was resolved after I ran a memory diagnostic, and it turned out that one of my RAM banks had a failure.
Removing the fault bank resulted in the game running fine without causing any stop errors, and I got a replacement RAM bank for $8 at the local repair shop.
Was actually an upgrade; a 4GB bank instead of 2GB like the one it replaced.

Other than that, I have also had stop errors caused indirectly by Steam in the past.
Steam caused stop errors due to a corrupted registry entry whenever I tried to play certain games, but not others.
Unfortunately, I had to reinstall the entire OS because the corrupted registry entries were not removed when I reinstalled Steam that time.

I also have had a few peripheral devices cause stop errors on this system due to incompatibilities between specific programs and the device drivers.
I had to replace an optical mouse because running Diablo 3 with it plugged in would cause a stop error.

As Zhentar said; why a specific program causes stop errors and another one doesn't is weird, and makes no sense.
Yet, that's the way it is sometimes.

[State]

Thanks for the fast replies. I suppose running a memory diagnostic couldn't hurt.

One more question though, can a BSOD actually harm my computer/OS in any way? Because I'm inclined to keep playing, despite having to reboot every couple of hours. I'd say that's testament to how much I'm enjoying the game.

[Jimyoda]

No, a BSOD is just an indication of a problem and won't hurt the system.
I think something not mentioned yet is a possibly bad hard drive. A drive may be overall starting to go bad or could have a bad sector. Many computers include diagnostics you can at bootup by pressing one of the F function keys, like F2 or F12, before booting Windows. Diagnostics usually include a memory test and a HDD test.

[nccvoyager]

Another possibility is simply an Out Of Memory error.
If you run out of "free" RAM, a stop error will occur due to an inability of the system to allocate more memory to running programs.
Less likely because you have a 64-bit system with 8GB of RAM, but it is still possible.
I actually just ran into one last week after having an unstable program with a memory leak running.

True, an HDD malfunction, loss of cohesion (for disk drives), damaged sector, or other issue could be the problem as well.

As Jimyoda mentioned, a stop error doesn't cause any damage to the system.

Well, at least not usually.
I found, with an old system I had, that if there is an error with a corrupt Windows system file, and an extended system dump is allowed to complete, it will often lead to a stop error loop (BSOD) on the next bootup, and could only be repaired by a full operating system reinstall.
But, it is only likely to happen with much older magnetic disk based drives, which are already losing stability.
Haven't had the issue with any HDD newer than 2009, myself.
So, you're probably safe from that.
Plus, since it is happening with RimWorld only, probably not an issue.