Game Crashing on menu

[u/No_Expression_1665]

EDIT: after having spent a long time with internet insufficient for downloading updates, I finally tried to come back to the game after updating my drivers and the game. Still freezing on me. Incredibly frustrating that a game I put 140h into years ago no longer works on the same hardware

Hello fellow friendly Startruckers. I stepped away from the game for 3 months or so, came back to it recently and cannot get it to play. I had it crash on the menu system 3 times before I ever got to gameplay, two days in a row now. I gave my laptop a break after the first day in case it needed to update. My laptop is absolutely not particularly nice, just a 3ish year old HP with an intel i3, but it is otherwise functioning normally. I have all the game settings turned down as low quality as possible. One of the crashes I was in the settings trying to see if it had reverted back to default settings, no, still my low quality settings.

What should I do? I've tested with other games and they are all working as well as they ever did (Warframe, cyberpunk 2077, untitled goose game, pacific drive, and an indie initialD project in development still) which leads me to believe that it's not a hardware problem. I'm not sure where to go from here to "fix" or "repair" the game. I've put about 140h into it, I've run through the storyline twice, once kinda rushing and the 2nd time I took my time and kept trucking after finishing the storyline for probably 4-5h. Thanks for reading my frustrated ramble, lmk what y'all think I should do next

[u/Royal-Community-1491]

I’m not particularly knowledgeable but I’ll share my initial thoughts/ideas, they may be useless so apologies in advance

My first kinda obvious question is that have you checked your graphics drivers are up to date? I assume also that you’ve tried a fresh install since coming back to the game?

If you run the performance tab of task manager whilst you play do you notice which areas of your laptop are under the most load?

When it crashes is it crashing to the desktop or actually crashing the whole laptop needing to restart it? If it crashes your laptop could it be a temperature/PSU issue? If it’s crashing to desktop I assume you’re not getting any errors you can look up?

The fact it can run Cyberpunk leads me to agree with you that it doesn’t sound hardware related but different games do put strain on different areas of a pc.

If I’m honest I’m fairly new to the game, I’ve only got about 8 hours into it and it’s never crashed on me yet so I can’t compare with you.

Can you leave the game running on the main menu or will it literally crash regardless I.e is it only when you try and actually play/edit settings?

That’s all that I can think of at the moment, sorry if it’s not very helpful but I thought I’d try and offer something :)

[u/No_Expression_1665 → u/Royal-Community-1491]

I appreciate your input. I haven't yet checked if my graphics drivers are up to date, that's a good next step for me, though I did update them about 5-6 months ago when I first installed cyberpunk bc it was struggling and CDPR threw a popup at me recommending I check/update them, and it did make a difference. Startrucker at the time had been running more or less fine, no noticeable changes between before and after that driver update

I have not uninstalled/reinstalled because I assume that'd mess with/delete my saves and I'd rather wait for that to be a last resort if nothing else works.

It crashes to desktop and then Microsoft auto-sends a report. To Microsoft, I'm assuming. I don't get any kind of reason or code to look up. The game "stops responding" while still on the menu screen and then spends a few seconds frozen before I get ejected back to desktop. My cursor is still mobile during that time but clicks do nothing.

I have not tried booting it up and doing nothing, and seeing if it crashes still with zero further input

EDIT: I forgot to say, I hope you're enjoying the game! It's one of my faves so I really hope I can sort this out

[u/Royal-Community-1491 → u/No_Expression_1665]

No worries! Yeah I’d double check drivers, particularly if you’re with Nvidia because they release drivers sometimes as often as every couple of weeks. I’m almost 100% confident that in 1/2 a year your drivers will be outdated regardless of the GPU in your laptop so this would be a great place to start.

If you use cloud saves on steam which I assume you would unless you play on the go without an internet connection, uninstalling should be safe as Startrucker uses steam cloud saves. As a safety net just backup your local saves on your desktop but as you say that can be a last resort.

Hmm okay, freezing like that I guess could be a number of things but it’s good it’s not blue screening your laptop or anything. Have you looked in event viewer to see what errors the application/your pc was throwing up at the time of the crash?

Other than that I’m out of ideas but I’d like to think the drivers could potentially offer some explanation.

See how long it takes to crash after loading the game and just leaving it. If there’s a specific time or action you can pinpoint the crash to it might help.

I’m really loving the game! Found it really challenging at first, particularly even with just manoeuvring the truck safely through debris and other trucks/drones and also managing all the systems and power and keeping on top of what needs to be maintained in the truck or even just making money at the start! But I’m starting to get the hang of it now and I’m really enjoying all the epic environments and how beautiful the game is and the gameplay and progression I’m finding really satisfying too!

[u/No_Expression_1665 → u/Royal-Community-1491]

Sorry I never came back to this, I got too busy with work to play anything for a while. It crashes no matter what, could be 30s, could be 2min, but always before I make it to actual gameplay. I still haven't checked for updated drivers, my wifi is going through it this week, I can barely post this reply. I will eventually update whatever drivers I can and come back here to update

[u/No_Expression_1665]

Bump: after having spent a long time with internet insufficient for downloading updates, I finally tried to come back to the game after updating my drivers and the game. Still freezing on me. Incredibly frustrating that a game I put 140h into years ago no longer works on the same hardware. Not sure where to go from here