Alpha 18.4 crashing during/after bloodmoon

O

Osvaldon

New member
Hello, I am playing this game with my friends on Navezgane, but it crashes shortly after all bloodmoon zombies are killed (rarely during the bloodmoon), otherwise the game works fine without any issues.

I have managed to progress in the world by disabling enemy spawning after each crash, but it is not an ideal solution and these crashes are ruining our game experience. It does not matter which week it is, the game will always crash shortly after all zombies are killed. In case our world got corrupted, we have even created a new world and started from scratch again, however, the same problem occured on day 7.

It is always the host's game that crashes (or their dedicated server freezes), the other players are fine, but timeout due to loss of connection.

Any help to resolve this issue would be very appreciated!

 
One common circumstance on both worlds is that our base is located at the exact same location, because it's very convenient. It's a tunnel dug into a mountain side right in front of a trader base door (it's the mountain that separates the temperate region from the snowy one). Are there any known issues where the game crashes if your base is near a trader or deep under a mountain?

 
Need the whole log, not just a section of it.
Click to expand...
This is the whole log and it's always like this, the last message is about a bloodmoon zombie being spawned and the game/server just freezes.

 
A typical logfile starts with stuff similar to

Code: 
Mono path[0] = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/7daystodie_Data/Managed'
Mono config path = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/MonoBleedingEdge/etc'
Initialize engine version: 2019.1.0f2 (292b93d75a2c)
 
Ok, so you're on a laptop.

Step 1. Ensure that you're fully configured for "Maximum performance". You'll need to check this in the Windows power settings, in the Nvidia Settings, and your laptop likely came with separate power management software installed as well.

Step 2. Ensure that you have proper cooling, and there isn't any dust in your fans. That bugger is going to overheat fast with a demanding game like 7 Days. (Especially if you've set your power profiles correctly so it's not getting under-clocked.)

Step 3. If you're on the latest Nvidia driver, roll back one version. Some folks have been having issues with the latest driver package. (I haven't personally, but not every system is the same.)

Step 4. Ensure that texture streaming and Occulsion are turned on. Your GPU can't handle having those turned off. You can't handle shadows reflections, or any other premium features either. No offense, but your system was slightly below "entry-level" when it released. It's not really there now.

Step 5. If we aren't seeing improvements by now, reduce the resolution to 720p.

Best guess based on what I'm seeing though is that your system is overheating due to the heavy number of calculations, and then code gets broken and it falls over. 5th and 6th gen Intel chipsets were rather underwhelming, and their AMD counterparts weren't any better at the time. The fact that you have a laptop just makes it all even worse. You can counter it to some extent with my recommendations above. That should at least get you into a more stable state.

If you have a second monitor, I recommend using speedfan and GPU-Z to monitor load and temps. That can start to give you an idea on what's going belly up first. (There's another program I would use, but for the live of me I cannot find it now. Stupid Windows update probably un-installed it.)

 
Step 1: it's always set to maximum performance and plugged in, I know that all is fine, since it's easy to notice a sudden drop in FPS if it gets unplugged.

Step 2: I've actually replaced the cooling fan very recently, it's clean and heat is not the issue, my computer doesn't release a large amount of heat when playing 7DTD (but does so while playing GTA V for example).

Step 3, 4, 5: we have experienced an identical issue on 3 different laptops and a PC and I don't generally have issues running the game on medium quality settings, not even during bloodmoon.

In some recent topics about game freezes and crashes, I have noticed a disagreeable tendency to put all the blame on hardware, but I believe this to be purely a software issue with 7DTD. The game doesn't freeze if we test the bloodmoon horde in other parts of the map and the game doesn't freeze if enemy spawning is disabled. There is an issue with the bloodmoon horde spawns in that particular location or because of the specifics of our horde base.

Our base is right next to a trader and the only entrance is a long tunnel beneath a very tall and steep mountain and we are able to reproduce this freezing issue rather consistently.

 
Based on your log file I think you should turn down your video settings. While your cpu and memory are enough to handle the game, your video card is

not great. It is really struggling to keep up. I see only 20 fps (ish) with only 7 zombies alive. That, to me is unplayable.

So turn off Bloom, Motion Blur, SSAO, SSReflections, and Sun Shafts. Turn off Shadows and Reflections. Turn down some of your other settings as well

and as Sylen suggested, I think you should be playing at 720p not 1080p. You should have Texture Streaming on and Occlusion enabled. The game still

looks good with all the effects turned off and I think you need the fps. And the gpu will run cooler.

Don't guess that your temperatures are ok, install CPUID HwMonitor and check them yourself. It's easy. Laptop GPUs are notoriously hot, especially a

stressed out one.

I think that your game crashed because of your gpu, and that the world may now be corrupted from that crash. So, not sure how to fix the world, but I think

with lower settings you should be able to play without crashing.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
FPS is usually about 30, but I like to play on medium graphics. It does go lower during bloodmoons, but I lower the graphics to the bare minimum so it's easier to defend the base. I can also disable the post processing effects with gfx pp enable 0 which increases my FPS to 40-50 on medium graphics. But this is all off-topic...

I think there's an issue with that particular location and AI pathfinding. I believe that if zombies spawn behind the mountain, it becomes very complicated for the game to calculate the path towards the player and it bottlenecks the entire program. I think the game should detect such occurrences and respawn the zombies in a more suitable area. A few times the game did freeze due to a screamer calling out a small horde of zombies too, but it only happened in that particular location as well and only when the zombies had a distant pathfinding target over or behind that enormous mountain.

Because this happened on multiple machines and multiple worlds, we've moved to a very nearby area and instead of building our base inside the mountain side, we've built it in a field and we've managed to survive all screamer hordes and bloodmoons without freezing.

It could be said that it's a hardware issue, because with a powerful enough CPU it's possible to bruteforce the pathfinding algorithm no matter how difficult the path is, unless it becomes looped for some reason, however, we can survive large bloodmoon hordes (16 zombies x 4 players) without freezing in another area, but the server will freeze when there's a small screamer horde of a couple of zombies when we're near the mountain.

 
I ran into this problem too.  Built a base in the tunnel, across from the trader, and as soon as a bloodmoon night started, game completely crashed.  I'm on a pretty beefy laptop, have all the settings turned down to lowest, and am running under 720p.

It consistently crashed when I tried to load, after about 3 seconds.  Only when I changed it so the blood moon was every 8 days instead of 7 (effectively eliminating the blood moon) did the game not crash.

My laptop isn't even being throttled; it feels like there is just a bug in the code that's causing the game to crash.

An easy way to duplicate this is to start on navezgame, around 955N 1054W... and build a horde base as a tunnel leading into the side of a mountain directly across from the trader entrance.

My tunnel is about 10 tiles deep, 3 tiles wide, and 2 tiles tall.  It opens up into a small 5x5x5 room with 2 forges, a chem station, a workbench, a sleeping bag, and a campfire.  The tunnel is lined with iron spike traps (This was my day 7 horde base).  I was in the room when the game crashed, awaiting the horde.

Not sure what's causing the game to crash.

1.  Zombies spawning inside the traders and can't get to me?

2.  Zombies spawning on the other side of the mountain and going through a ridiculous algorithm to get to me?

3.  Some weird thing?

Here's a couple output logs.
 

View attachment output_log__2020-06-20__16-05-37.txt
View attachment output_log__2020-06-20__16-12-23.txt

 
Purpendicular said:
I ran into this problem too.  Built a base in the tunnel, across from the trader, and as soon as a bloodmoon night started, game completely crashed.  I'm on a pretty beefy laptop, have all the settings turned down to lowest, and am running under 720p.

It consistently crashed when I tried to load, after about 3 seconds.  Only when I changed it so the blood moon was every 8 days instead of 7 (effectively eliminating the blood moon) did the game not crash.

My laptop isn't even being throttled; it feels like there is just a bug in the code that's causing the game to crash.

An easy way to duplicate this is to start on navezgame, around 955N 1054W... and build a horde base as a tunnel leading into the side of a mountain directly across from the trader entrance.

My tunnel is about 10 tiles deep, 3 tiles wide, and 2 tiles tall.  It opens up into a small 5x5x5 room with 2 forges, a chem station, a workbench, a sleeping bag, and a campfire.  The tunnel is lined with iron spike traps (This was my day 7 horde base).  I was in the room when the game crashed, awaiting the horde.

Not sure what's causing the game to crash.

1.  Zombies spawning inside the traders and can't get to me?

2.  Zombies spawning on the other side of the mountain and going through a ridiculous algorithm to get to me?

3.  Some weird thing?

Here's a couple output logs.
 

View attachment 10434 View attachment 10435
Click to expand...
Oh, well for starters it's a laptop.  That alone is going to kick you in the @%$*#! more than anything.

Sure it's an i7-9750 hex-core CPU. The real problem you're going to run into though is due to the fact it's a laptop chip. You're starting out with an abysmally low clock speed of 2.6GHz, which is only just barely above minimum required spec. Then on the rare occasion when it jumps to turbo speeds, you're going to get that 4.5GHz boost on only one core. The performance of the other cores will be reduced.  (4GHz with 6 cores, but again, it's only for a brief moment.) Boost only lasts for a few seconds too, so it's not like it's a great help anyway. (Theoretically, you could run boost for as long as a minute, maybe two, but that's assuming that you have pretty good cooling on a desktop build.)

Another limitation of that chip is the RAM speeds. It's early-gen DDR4 that won't clock much faster than good DDR3. The 2060 will never really get to see full performance because of the bottleneck in the rest of the system. It really is a pretty sad offering by Intel, and only clocks better than the previous generation in tests because of the two additional cores.

Most of the laptop configurations with that chipset ship with an SSD for Windows, and a HDD for storage.  If you are running the game from the HDD, that is yet another nail in the coffin.

While that may have been sold as a beefy laptop, I'm sorry to say that it isn't quite so much. Most of the components would be considered on the low end of "entry level", with the GPU teetering on the edge of mid-range. It's been increasingly frustrating what they will put into a laptop and then slap the "gaming" label on it.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that's just how your hardware is.

Now for the rest of your logs. The neither of them go very far. If you're crashing that soon, you have some issues. Bad client files, CPU/GPU overheating, bad drivers something like that.

Also will note that if you don't have both the GPU and Windows power profiles set to maximum performance, your system will under-clock even further and will go below the min specs.

 
SylenThunder said:
Oh, well for starters it's a laptop.  That alone is going to kick you in the @%$*#! more than anything.

Sure it's an i7-9750 hex-core CPU. The real problem you're going to run into though is due to the fact it's a laptop chip. You're starting out with an abysmally low clock speed of 2.6GHz, which is only just barely above minimum required spec. Then on the rare occasion when it jumps to turbo speeds, you're going to get that 4.5GHz boost on only one core. The performance of the other cores will be reduced.  (4GHz with 6 cores, but again, it's only for a brief moment.) Boost only lasts for a few seconds too, so it's not like it's a great help anyway. (Theoretically, you could run boost for as long as a minute, maybe two, but that's assuming that you have pretty good cooling on a desktop build.)

Another limitation of that chip is the RAM speeds. It's early-gen DDR4 that won't clock much faster than good DDR3. The 2060 will never really get to see full performance because of the bottleneck in the rest of the system. It really is a pretty sad offering by Intel, and only clocks better than the previous generation in tests because of the two additional cores.

Most of the laptop configurations with that chipset ship with an SSD for Windows, and a HDD for storage.  If you are running the game from the HDD, that is yet another nail in the coffin.

While that may have been sold as a beefy laptop, I'm sorry to say that it isn't quite so much. Most of the components would be considered on the low end of "entry level", with the GPU teetering on the edge of mid-range. It's been increasingly frustrating what they will put into a laptop and then slap the "gaming" label on it.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that's just how your hardware is.

Now for the rest of your logs. The neither of them go very far. If you're crashing that soon, you have some issues. Bad client files, CPU/GPU overheating, bad drivers something like that.

Also will note that if you don't have both the GPU and Windows power profiles set to maximum performance, your system will under-clock even further and will go below the min specs.
Click to expand...
Like I said, my laptop isn't even throttling.  The game just crashes.  Looking at my task manager, nothing is being throttled.

I moved to another location and built a base with a similar concept, and didn't have any problems.  The game runs 100% fine on medium settings otherwise.  It isn't overheating at all.

I'm willing to bet money I could move to my PC and get the same results.  I believe this is a bug in the game and isn't due to me 'being on a laptop'.

 
I already tried to recreate the issue once and the horde base at the trader worked fine. If you want to find out, try to recreate it on the PC, either with a new game or by copying yours over.

 
Purpendicular said:
I'm willing to bet money I could move to my PC and get the same results.  I believe this is a bug in the game and isn't due to me 'being on a laptop'.
Click to expand...
You should do that and post the logs. If you want to upload your game and mods somewhere, I'll try to reproduce on a pc. I find it hard to believe the assertion that a nearly new, fairly high end gaming laptop can't handle the game. You're running at 30 FPS so your machine shouldn't be breaking a sweat. I've run the game on 10 year old garbage computers without it crashing, so I suspect it is a software or driver issue.

 
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