[#5843] 9.0 Loading old Save cause Blue Screen Death - unable to reproduce

[shealladh]

I just tried to load an old save from Sept 2025: Game Save: Eighteen Billion - 2025-09-10 (Version 7.60)

X4ReportsShealladh.zip ~ included the save and 3 crash reports in the zip

Do I need to start with a New Game?

I got three BlueScreen death when loading it, 95-97% loaded each time

[CBJ]

A blue screen error can only be caused by a hardware fault or a low level driver problem. The game is just the thing that happens to trigger it. The error message on the blue screen should give you some clue as to which it is. Without a DXDiag, vulkaninfo, or any of your Windows error logs, that's about as much as we can help.

Also, your file won't download for me. Clicking the link does nothing, and if I open it in another tab, the tab just closes immediately.

[shealladh]

A blue screen error can only be caused by a hardware fault or a low level driver problem. The game is just the thing that happens to trigger it. The error message on the blue screen should give you some clue as to which it is. Without a DXDiag, vulkaninfo, or any of your Windows error logs, that's about as much as we can help.

Also, your file won't download for me. Clicking the link does nothing, and if I open it in another tab, the tab just closes immediately.

Hmmm, link is being weird

Second file Test: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RxRz0x ... drive_link

[CBJ]

That might work but you've not made it public, so we can't access it.

[shealladh]

That might work but you've not made it public, so we can't access it.

Oops, totally forgot to make link Public, should work now .

[Imperial Good]

Again, please provide your dxdiag listing. This contains information about your system that is not present in the save file or crash dumps. This helps let us figure out what might have caused the BSoD. Without it, we can only provide you with general BSoD advice.

• If using an Intel 13th or 14th generation core I processor then you might have been a victim of the premature silicon aging problem those CPUs had. In this case you need to update BIOS/UEFI and potentially RMA the CPU. You can try disabling precision boost 2 as well as lowering the maximum single core boost frequencies but this is a work around that only sometimes works.
• Make sure your memory frequency is supported by your CPU. If it exceeds the CPU specifications then it might be subtly unstable, causing corruptions when the CPU is under high load. This includes if an XMP/DCOP profile pushes it into such frequencies. If it is above the maximum supported frequency, you will need to turn it down and verify if your system is more stable.

Why might an old save be triggering this? : I am guessing at the 95%+ range is when all the migration handlers are run to upgrade the old game state to function with the newer version. This likely involves a lot of CPU time usage and memory bandwidth usage. This is based on my personal experience loading saves from older versions, where they take significantly longer to load than saves made with the same version as being used.

[shealladh]

Again, please provide your dxdiag listing. This contains information about your system that is not present in the save file or crash dumps. This helps let us figure out what might have caused the BSoD. Without it, we can only provide you with general BSoD advice.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16YjiXh ... sp=sharing

I might try a fresh reboot, then try a new Start game and see what happens.
Working atm, so soon. Thanks for checking this all, I am curious to issue or cause

[Alan Phipps]

From the DxDiag, things that might be relevant:

1. You have a 2019 version of Win10 OS.
2. Your Nvidia driver and hence Vulkan is from 2024 and you have 3 different Nvidia display formats set up.
3. Your Intel UHD graphics driver and hence Vulkan is from 2024.
4. You have SoundBlaster sound device drivers from 2018 and several different sound devices and drivers on the go at the same time.
5. Besides your multiple BlueScreen crashes, your have a few MsMpEng.exe crashes (Windows Defender) and some IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) issues. The former one might indicate telling Windows Defender to ignore the X4 gamefiles and documents folders night help, and since the latter one messes with hard drives and SSDs, it could well be a suspect and should possibly be avoided when playing X4.

Good luck.

[Imperial Good]

You are using a i9-14900K, which is one of the CPUs affected by the rapid silicon aging. Make sure your BIOS/UEFI is up to date. Disable turbo boost/precision boost 2 and see if that helps.

Honestly if your OS is from 2019 it is amazing that your system even works given your CPU is a lot more recent.

[shealladh]

You are using a i9-14900K, which is one of the CPUs affected by the rapid silicon aging. Make sure your BIOS/UEFI is up to date. Disable turbo boost/precision boost 2 and see if that helps.

Honestly if your OS is from 2019 it is amazing that your system even works given your CPU is a lot more recent.

Given that it's all up to date, and the issues with windows 11, I am surprised that still works too.

I shall look into those other issues as now know what to look at, i'll be doing more checks, updates and find the source of the issue causing this all.

Thanks for the help

[shealladh]

Okay I have mostly gone through the list of things suggested, and can at least get to 99% of the file load before the game crashes, with a rarer bluescreen at this time.

More work continues, so chipping way here.

I had been advised to use;

add ""-logfile debug.txt"" to your Launch Options and review it after the next attempted launch.

But have not got a written logfile txt file in the game folder ?

[shealladh]

After a lot of the listed fixes, I have done most at this point. Removed the old hard drive stuff. Vulkan was already up to date after reinstalling, same version still: Vulkan Instance Version: 1.4.350

The sound drivers are the main thing remaining to try a resolution

I was able to get rid of the blue screens 99.9 % of the time.

I also tried another approach, rolling back to 7.6 and can load the save with a random crash here and there.

The one thing I noticed on the roll back, was weird graphical glitches from time to time with models being weird polygons shapes around a station.

More testing to come, not giving up on this....

[CBJ]

The graphical issues, even in an old version, are a fairly sure sign of an issue with the graphics drivers and/or hardware. Whether the blue screen errors are related is less certain, but they could be.

[Imperial Good]

Also just because it is graphical in nature it could still be CPU/RAM related since all instructions for the GPU have to come from the CPU and involve RAM. As a reminder, the i9-14900K is known to suffer from rapid silicon aging issues making it prone to becoming unstable in demanding, largely single threaded, workloads. An unstable CPU or RAM might not always or immediately crash if the errors introduced do not cause unrecoverable exceptions to be thrown and instead can cause all manner of weird behaviour such as graphic artefacts or impossible states.