Game crashes when moving large ghosted blueprints since last update

Issue description

As title.

While game is paused and i am working on a ghosted setup etc. I go to cut the setup to move it and it crashes.

Reproduction steps

develop large ghosted setup and then cut it. Game freezes.

Game version and build number

V0.8.5 (b598)

Operating system

Windows

Attachments

26-06-19_11-11-37_1321.log

Have you checked with disabled mods?

I dont have any mods activated

Attach log files from these folders:
%AppData%\Captain of Industry\Logs
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Mafi Games\Captain of Industry
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\Mafi Games\Captain of Industry\Crashes

26-06-19_11-11-37_1321.log

Player-prev.log

What's the amount of RAM? What kind of CPU? Does this happen in any year of the game, or only in the later one? How big is the blueprint? Take a screenshot. Try not to cut, but to copy.

32gb RAM
AMD 5 5600X
Nvidia RTX 2060

crashed again but this time was when clicking on notification in messages.

26-06-19_21-28-08_1520.log

Player.log

In Unity-based games (like Captain of Industry), a "silent" crash without any entries in the game log happens when Windows forcefully terminates a frozen process to protect the GPU or RAM. Clicking a notification forces the game to instantly move the camera to another part of the island and abruptly redraw all geometry. For the GPU and CPU, this causes a split-second spike in workload (a micro-boost), which triggers the instability. Disable the XMP RAM Profile (The Main Suspect).
The Captain of Industry game engine is extremely sensitive to memory timings and minor RAM instability. On the Ryzen 5000 platform, XMP/DOCP profiles often run right on the edge of stability. What to do: Enter your PC's BIOS and temporarily disable the XMP / DOCP / EXPO memory profile, reverting it to base frequency (e.g., 2133–2666 MHz). Play a session. If the crashes stop, your RAM overclock is unstable. You will need to slightly lower the frequency manually (e.g., from 3600 to 3200 MHz) or slightly increase the DRAM Voltage.
Enable V-Sync and Set a Hard FPS Limit.
If your graphics card generates too many frames, the NVIDIA driver can stutter and reset during sudden camera jumps (like clicking a notification). In the game's graphics settings, make sure to enable V-Sync. If you have a high-refresh-rate monitor (144 Hz+), limit the FPS to 60 in the NVIDIA Control Panel. This will eliminate peak workload spikes on your RTX 2060.
Find the Real Error Logs (Windows Event Viewer)
Since the game's own log (Documents/Captain of Industry/Logs) is empty, you need to look for the error inside the OS: Right after the next crash, open Windows search and type Event Viewer. Go to Windows Logs -> Application or System. Look for a red error icon that matches the exact time of the crash. If you see a mention of nvlddmkm (NVIDIA driver crash) or error code 0xc0000005 (Memory Access Violation), this confirms hardware frequency instability.
Clean Reinstall the Video Driver via DDU.
Sometimes NVIDIA drivers leave "ghost" files after updates, which conflict with Unity games. Download DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller). Remove the old video driver in Windows Safe Mode. Install the latest official driver for the RTX 2060 from the NVIDIA website.

Seen similar crash as described, when moving a blueprint game may freeze, if I wait some time it crashes.

Happened to me almost every day this week:

• happens more often when moving larger blueprints (smallest blueprint that froze the game for me has 16 buildings, 8 belts and 9 pipes)
• happens when moving copied with ctrl+c/c buildings and not blueprints (I rarely use blueprints, but suppose it's the same issue?)
• happens more often when moving blueprint to a distant area
• couple times it happened when I moved camera, so more entities were in view

System parameters:

• 32gb Ram
• Intel Core i7-11800H
• RTX 3060
• OS: Windows
• game version: V0.8.5 (b598)

Don't know yet what happens during this issue, but on my save all three CPU/GPU/RAM are not nearly maxed out.

In game I have year 501, ~4400 pops.

Here are the most recent logs:

%AppData%\Captain of Industry\Logs
26-07-20_00-16-20_0658.log

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Mafi Games\Captain of Industry
Player-prev.log
(I assume Player-prev.log is from last session, because I relaunched the game, and current Player.log does not have error logs)

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\Mafi Games\Captain of Industry\Crashes
crash.dmp
Player-prev.log

I usually close the game when it freezes before crash report is generated, so I do not have any logs from previous crashes, but can gather some more if it helps.

Also worth noting that large blueprints/copied build consistently cause a big FPS drop, which I can expect, but the freeze and crash happens only occasionally.

Apply the Registry Windows Fix
The default Windows crash limit is only 2 seconds. Because your RTX 3060 is capable but getting blocked by Unity's pipeline queue limits, widening the window gives the game engine time to clear the buffer queue without dropping the driver connection.

1. Press Windows Key + R, type regedit, and press Enter.
2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers
3. Right-click the empty space in the right-hand panel -> New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value.
4. Name the key exactly TdrDelay
5. Open it, check the Decimal option, change the value to 10, and press OK.
6. Restart your computer.

That consistent FPS drop confirms that your RTX 3060 is struggling under a massive CPU-to-GPU rendering bottleneck every time a blueprint is selected.
When you pick up a blueprint, the game creates thousands of "ghost" preview meshes, bounding boxes, and alignment lines. In Unity, uploading this massive burst of new geometry from your RAM/CPU to your GPU's VRAM causes a massive spike in frame time (rendering lag). If the game manages to upload the data across a few frames, you just see a heavy FPS drop. However, if the rendering thread hitches for too long or if you move the camera and suddenly force thousands of existing factory buildings into the same view as the ghost blueprint - the rendering queue completely stalls. If that stall lasts longer than 2 seconds, Windows steps in and cuts the driver connection, changing a temporary freeze into a hard crash.
Because this is a known limitation with how Captain of Industry handles massive ghost layouts, you can apply these specific graphics tweaks to lessen the performance impact:

• Disable Anti-Aliasing (AA): High anti-aliasing multiplies the rendering load for every single edge line in a ghost blueprint. Turn AA off or lower it to FXAA to drastically cut down the geometry buffer size.
• Lower Shadow Quality: Ghost blueprints still calculate shadow casting matrices in Unity. Dropping shadow resolution frees up massive amounts of VRAM throughput.
• Limit Max FPS: If your game runs at an uncapped framerate, your GPU is already running at 100% capacity just pushing frames. Capping your FPS to 60 (or matching your monitor's refresh rate) leaves a buffer of GPU headroom to handle the sudden blueprint spike.

If you want to actively prevent the crash when you feel a heavy freeze starting:

• Don't Click or Move the Mouse: If the game hitches, take your hands off the mouse. Moving the camera or clicking forces Windows to think the application is completely unresponsive, which accelerates the driver reset process.
• Watch the TdrDelay Window: If you have applied the TdrDelay registry fix (setting it to 10), the game is allowed to freeze for up to 10 seconds while it processes the layout. In most cases, the FPS will drop to zero, look like a crash, but then successfully recover and let you place the building.

I would love this to be a joke from my side, but I just faced with another freeze unrelated to blueprints at all.
Freeze happened while I was changing a designation area for a forestry tower, same save as I mentioned before.

Was waiting for the crash report for around 10 minutes, but no luck, closed a game without it.
Here are logs, but I personally don't see anything related around the time feeze occurred:

%AppData%\Captain of Industry\Logs
26-07-20_01-09-18_4657.log

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Mafi Games\Captain of Industry
Player.log

Thanks for registry fix and settings tips!
Will try the fix tomorrow and report back if it helped

This new context directly confirms that the underlying issue is a Unity UI and overlay rendering loop freeze rather than a hardware problem. In Captain of Industry, clicking to edit a tower's boundary box or dragging designation areas causes a known interaction bug.
When you activate the designation tool on your year 501 save, the game is forced to compute and draw a massive grid overlay over 4,400 pops, thousands of dynamic trees, and countless tracking paths simultaneously. Moving or scaling that UI box stalls Unity's master rendering thread. Because your previous error log showed DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED, the 2-second Windows safety window times out during this overlay freeze, causing the graphics driver to crash outright.
You can prevent and mitigate these specific tower designation locks through the following steps.
Avoid Moving the Box with Open Toolbars
A common trigger for this specific lockup is clicking a tower, dragging the UI pop-up box out of the way, and then immediately clicking the designation overlay tool.

The Safe Method: Click the forestry tower, let the UI fully initialize, click the Edit Area button first, and do not drag or move the floating user interface windows while the colored polygon overlay is active on your screen.

Use the Global Designation Menu Tool
Instead of interacting directly with the forestry tower's bounding UI box to adjust your tree placement, paint your changes globally:

1. Close all active building menus.
2. Press M on your keyboard (or click the Terraforming icon on the bottom hotbar).
3. Choose the Tree Planting / Harvesting Designation directly from the global construction menu.
4. Hold right-click and drag to wipe clean problematic overlays, or left-click to paint new ones. The forestry tower will automatically pick up any painted changes inside its proximity without needing to trigger the tower's bugged UI scaling script.

Lower the Overlay Calculation Load
Because the overlay geometry scales relative to your game settings, you can minimize the rendering spikes during adjustments by reducing specific options:

Turn off the "Tree Growth" Display Overlays before editing zones.
Lower the Terrain Decoration Settings to the absolute minimum. This reduces the number of individual, high-fidelity tree models the engine is forced to update and redraw when you scale or alter a forestry box boundary tile.

These new logs confirm that the graphics engine is completely collapsing in a cascading failure loop. The specific error failed to create staging 2D texture mixed with d3dfmt (Direct3D formats) means your graphics card driver (887a0005 / Device Removed) crashed first, and the Unity engine tried to keep running anyway.
Because the driver was gone, the game couldn't allocate memory to create basic UI textures, leading to the spam of attempt to lock null buffer errors. In Captain of Industry, "staging 2D textures" of small sizes (like 64x64 or 128x2) are almost exclusively used for dynamic UI elements, mini-maps, vehicle icons, product icons on belts, and UI overlay lines.
To stop this cascading crash loop from triggering on your large save, apply these highly specific engine overrides:

1. Disable Steam and Discord Overlays
   The log explicitly mentions failures to create small, staging 2D textures. External overlays inject their own 2D textures directly into the game's DirectX 11 swapchain. When the game undergoes a heavy rendering spike, these conflicting overlays can destabilize the driver.

Steam: Open Steam -> Settings -> In-Game -> Toggle off Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game.
Discord: Open Discord -> User Settings -> Game Overlay -> Toggle off Enable in-game overlay.

2. Force Unity to rebuild its buffer pipeline using modern DirectX 12. DX12 handles buffer allocations and multi-threading much better than DX11 on an RTX 3060, avoiding the "null buffer" lockups.

1. Right-click Captain of Industry in your Steam Library and select Properties.
2. In the General tab, look for the Launch Options box.
3. Replace any text there with exactly: -force-d3d12

3. Clear the Unity Shader Cache
   Because the game crashed mid-render, corrupt or broken staging textures might be stuck in your DirectX cache, causing immediate crashes when the game tries to re-load those UI assets.

   1. Open your Windows Start Menu, type Disk Cleanup, and open it.
   2. Select your main OS drive (usually C:).
   3. Scroll down the list and check the box for DirectX Shader Cache (you can uncheck everything else).
   4. Click OK to delete the cached files, then restart your PC.

Hi everyone,

Seems like this bug is still persistent in the latest version. Attached logs. I run an AMD GPU so it's not Nvidia related issues. I've used this blueprint over the last couple of versions and it's always been fine. It doesn't utilise any modded parts, all vanilla. I've tried force capping the fps at 60 because I was getting a lot of stuttering when uncapped or v-sync was on. It's improved performance greatly but might be causing a problem?

I've checked the windows logs and it's not giving me much info. If you need that I can provide it. I have also tried forcing the game to use all cores and DX12 (even though the logs still say DX11 for some reason). The current size of my factory is very small, I only just started this new save.

Specs: CPU: Ryzen 5900x, GPU: 6900xt, RAM: 32gb, nothing overclocked. Latest drivers for everything. As I said, it's been working fine right up to the last update.

Any advice you can provide would be great. Thank you.

soylent wrote:

Hi everyone,

Seems like this bug is still persistent in the latest version. Attached logs. I run an AMD GPU so it's not Nvidia related issues. I've used this blueprint over the last couple of versions and it's always been fine. It doesn't utilise any modded parts, all vanilla. I've tried force capping the fps at 60 because I was getting a lot of stuttering when uncapped or v-sync was on. It's improved performance greatly but might be causing a problem?

I've checked the windows logs and it's not giving me much info. If you need that I can provide it. I have also tried forcing the game to use all cores and DX12 (even though the logs still say DX11 for some reason). The current size of my factory is very small, I only just started this new save.

Specs: CPU: Ryzen 5900x, GPU: 6900xt, RAM: 32gb, nothing overclocked. Latest drivers for everything. As I said, it's been working fine right up to the last update.

Any advice you can provide would be great. Thank you.

Based on the logs you provided, the game isn't actually crashing because of the blueprints - your game is failing to load because your game files were downgraded to an older version while your save file remains on a newer version.

Here is exactly what is happening:

• Log 1 (Successful Launch): You were running game build 619, v0.8.7d (Update 4). Your game saved successfully in this version.
• Log 2 & 3 (The Crash/Fail): Your game is now running an older build 559, v0.8.2c (Update 4). Because of this, the game throws a critical error and shuts down with the message: "This save file is from a newer game version (333) than what is currently supported (287). Are you on an old Steam branch?".

How to Fix It

1. Open your Steam Library.
2. Right-click on Captain of Industry and select Properties.
3. Go to the Betas tab.
4. Ensure your Beta Participation dropdown menu is set to None (or whichever specific branch you were previously playing on to get back to version 0.8.7d).
5. Let Steam download the update, then relaunch the game.

Once you are back on version 0.8.7d or newer, your save files will load normally. If you still experience performance drops or crashes when moving massive blueprints after the update, it is highly likely a conflict with one of your 21 active mods (most notably map/infrastructure mods like UndergroundTransportMod or PipeTerrainIgnoreMod which heavily hook into blueprint systems).

poltime wrote:

soylent wrote:

Hi everyone,

Seems like this bug is still persistent in the latest version. Attached logs. I run an AMD GPU so it's not Nvidia related issues. I've used this blueprint over the last couple of versions and it's always been fine. It doesn't utilise any modded parts, all vanilla. I've tried force capping the fps at 60 because I was getting a lot of stuttering when uncapped or v-sync was on. It's improved performance greatly but might be causing a problem?

I've checked the windows logs and it's not giving me much info. If you need that I can provide it. I have also tried forcing the game to use all cores and DX12 (even though the logs still say DX11 for some reason). The current size of my factory is very small, I only just started this new save.

Specs: CPU: Ryzen 5900x, GPU: 6900xt, RAM: 32gb, nothing overclocked. Latest drivers for everything. As I said, it's been working fine right up to the last update.

Any advice you can provide would be great. Thank you.

Based on the logs you provided, the game isn't actually crashing because of the blueprints - your game is failing to load because your game files were downgraded to an older version while your save file remains on a newer version.

Here is exactly what is happening:

• Log 1 (Successful Launch): You were running game build 619, v0.8.7d (Update 4). Your game saved successfully in this version.
• Log 2 & 3 (The Crash/Fail): Your game is now running an older build 559, v0.8.2c (Update 4). Because of this, the game throws a critical error and shuts down with the message: "This save file is from a newer game version (333) than what is currently supported (287). Are you on an old Steam branch?". **How to Fix It

1. Open your Steam Library.
2. Right-click on Captain of Industry and select Properties.
3. Go to the Betas tab.
4. Ensure your Beta Participation dropdown menu is set to None (or whichever specific branch you were previously playing on to get back to version 0.8.7d).
5. Let Steam download the update, then relaunch the game.

Once you are back on version 0.8.7d or newer, your save files will load normally. If you still experience performance drops or crashes when moving massive blueprints after the update, it is highly likely a conflict with one of your 21 active mods (most notably map/infrastructure mods like UndergroundTransportMod or PipeTerrainIgnoreMod which heavily hook into blueprint systems).

Thank you for the help. I did attempt to roll back to a previous version, but encountered the error you've explained. So I moved back to the current branch. That all seems to be working fine now.

Ah, I didn't realise the mods for the transports would hook in unless they were being actively used in the blueprint (because it's an older bp it doesn't have any underground pipes or belts etc). I'll try removing those and see how it goes in a fresh save. Thank you again for the help, much appreciated.

~Soylent.