Troubleshooting

Many of the crashes reported to us come from the PC, not the game. Four fixes end most of them: verify the game files in Steam, update the graphics driver, and start the game without mods and without overlays. If that does not help, find your symptom below. If it still crashes, the last section tells you how to report it so we can fix it.

💥 The whole PC reboots or blue-screens

A game cannot crash Windows. A blue screen or a sudden reboot comes from hardware, drivers or an overclock. Captain of Industry uses every CPU core at once, especially while loading a map, so it can expose a fault that other games never touch. If only the game freezes or closes, skip to the next section.

  • Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU? (Settings > System > About: a Core i5, i7 or i9 whose number starts with 13 or 14.) Update the BIOS and pick the Intel default power profile (the name varies by board: "Intel Default Settings", "Intel Baseline" or similar). This stops further damage but cannot repair a chip that is already degraded. Intel's support article explains the fault and the five-year warranty for desktop chips, and one of our developers wrote up the stress test that catches it and how he got his replaced.
  • Turn off overclocking as a test. Overclocked RAM is a frequent cause of instability that shows only under full load: switch off the XMP or EXPO profile in the BIOS, and vendor "performance modes" such as Alienware Command Center or a motherboard's AI tuning. Test the RAM if crashes continue.
  • Check temperatures and dust. An overheating CPU or a weak power supply gives up under full load first. Capping the frame rate in the game's settings and avoiding the fastest game speed lowers the load.
  • Ask Windows what happened. Open Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System and look just before the restart: a WHEA-Logger entry means the hardware reported a fault, a BugCheck entry holds the blue screen's stop code (Kernel-Power 41 just says the PC restarted, it names no cause). Search the web for the code or the driver named; it points at the faulty part.

🖥️ The game crashes to desktop or the screen goes black

  • Mods installed? Move the contents of %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Captain of Industry\Mods to another folder and try again. See Mods not working.
  • Update the graphics driver (NVIDIA, AMD or Intel) with a clean installation and restart the PC. A screen that stays black until reboot, or 887a0005 in the log, usually means the driver crashed; if a fresh driver does not help, the card may be overheating or failing.
  • Close overlays and monitoring tools: Discord (the overlay and "overlay detection"), Steam, NVIDIA App or GeForce Experience, AMD Adrenalin, MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner, Overwolf.
  • Crashes on Alt+Tab, the Windows key, clicking a second monitor or changing the display mode? In Steam: Manage > Browse local files, right-click the game's exe > Properties > Compatibility > tick "Disable fullscreen optimizations".
  • Black or brown screen after the logo, or the window opens off-screen? Add --reset-all-settings to the game's launch options (right-click the game in Steam > Properties > General), start the game once, then remove it: while it is there, your settings are wiped on every launch.
  • Verify the game files in Steam: Properties > Installed Files > Verify integrity of game files. A crash can damage the installed files.
  • The game never starts at all? An out-of-date Windows 10 or a graphics card below the minimum requirements cannot run it. Update Windows first.

🛡️ Antivirus blocks or deletes the game

Steam reports the game's exe missing or "access denied" right after an update, the game vanishes after downloading, or saves disappear. Some antivirus products only trust files they have already seen on many computers, and every update ships new game files that nobody has run yet, so they quarantine them on sight until enough players have installed it. This is a false alarm, not a problem with the game.

  1. Open your antivirus's quarantine and restore the game's files, then verify the game files in Steam.
  2. Add an exclusion for the game's folder (Steam: Manage > Browse local files) and for %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Captain of Industry, where saves live. Excluding single files is not enough: every autosave is a new file.
  3. Windows Security has the same switch under Controlled Folder Access: Virus & threat protection > Ransomware protection > Allow an app.
  4. Report the false positive to the antivirus vendor. It speeds up the fix for everyone.

⏳ A new game or a load never finishes

Map generation is the heaviest moment in the game. When it fails, the game retries on a single core, which is slow but works: if the bar is still moving, let it run.

  • An Intel 13th or 14th gen CPU is the usual reason: start with the first section. Mods installed? Try without them first.
  • Add --terrain-gen-threads 4 to the game's launch options (right-click the game in Steam > Properties > General > Launch Options) to generate the map on fewer cores; 1 is one core, the slowest and the lightest. If this helps, the CPU is unstable: it is a workaround, not a fix. Details in our Steam post.
  • If the game crashed while saving earlier, delete the contents of %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Captain of Industry\TerrainDataCache and check the drive: right-click it in File Explorer > Properties > Tools > Check.

💾 "Failed to save", "Out of memory", "Access denied"

  • Out of memory, or error 0x5af: Windows ran out of memory space. Search Start for "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" > Advanced > Virtual memory > Change > tick "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives". Memory also grows each time you load a save within one session, so quit and restart the game instead of reloading.
  • Win32 IO code 112: your Windows drive (C:, where saves live even if the game is installed elsewhere) is full. Keep 10 to 15 GB free; a save written to a full disk is lost for good.
  • "Access denied" or saves vanishing: antivirus or Controlled Folder Access, see the section above.
  • "Corrupted data" on one save while others load fine usually means the file was damaged on its way to disk: a power loss, a failing drive, unstable RAM or an unstable CPU (first section). With mods installed, check Mods not working first. Load an earlier autosave.
  • "This save file is from a newer game version... Are you on an old Steam branch?" Steam is still on a legacy branch: right-click the game > Properties > Betas and set it back to None.

🐧 Linux and Steam Deck

Try another Proton version (Proton-GE or the previous stable release). On desktop Linux run without gamescope; on a Steam Deck try Desktop Mode.

🐛 Still crashing? Report it

Post in Bugs with your save file and the logs, and say what the crash looked like: an error box, a black screen, or the whole PC rebooting.