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ARK Crashes, requiring hard restart - PC - Randomly Consistent


Cailean556

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I've had ARK since it was released in Early Access back in 2015. It's never been the most reliable game in terms of stability but crashes that required a hard restart of my PC were few and far between. Until this year, especially.

My system is more than capable of playing ARK, I have more than sufficient space, I have a GTX 1080 which, while it is older hardware, still does the job. I have 32GB of RAM (used to run a server off my machine while also playing) and I have a 64GB page file (I was testing to see if my page file was too low and effectively doubled what I had it set at).

It's not a bug, as this crash happens randomly, at random times, while doing different things - but it's consistent. It happens almost every time I play ARK, at least once. Which suggests it could be a hardware issue but I'm at a loss to explain what it could be.

I'll be playing ARK, I'll be doing something (sometimes I'm flying my Wyvern, sometimes I'm in my base, sometimes I'm in a cave, sometimes I'm underwater - I can't pinpoint an exact *thing* that's causing the crash) and the screen will lock up. Sometimes it's just the screen locking up. I can't alt-tab, I can't bring up Task Manager, I can't bring up the start menu with the Windows key. I don't get an error message - if I do, I can't see it because the PC has frozen and I can't exit ARK or alt-tab to see the crash log window.

Other times, when the game crashes the computer emits a constant sound that is hard to describe (as in through speakers/headphones - not the computer itself). The sound continues until I hard restart the PC.

These crashes happen seemingly randomly, but they are consistent in that it only happens when I'm playing ARK.

Today, after having a crash where the sound was emitting constantly, when I restarted my PC and went to play ARK again, ARK had reset itself to windowed mode. My Single Player presets (I was playing on an unmodded, unofficial server when the crash occurred, however after noticing the Windowed mode I checked my Single Player settings) had been reset also - which is extremely annoying. As had my graphics settings - Custom, with my settings I get between 40-80 FPS which I'm okay with.

I have also noticed that my character in Single Player has lost several of the skins I have earned from achievements and the game is acting as if I've never found any of the explorer notes - but when I activate an explorer note instead of saying '???' it tells me what the note is and I don't receive any XP buff. My map has also reverted as if I've never explored the Island. I've been through every map, found every Explorer Note (on the Island at least, until these new ones for Genesis Part 2 showed up). I've had the same character through all my single player saves. I'm not as attached to my multiplayer character as I am to my Single Player one - we've done a lot together. Spent well over 3,000 hours in Single Player.

I'm not convinced it's not a hardware issue, however ARK is the only game I play that this happens in (I have Empyrion: Galactic Survival, Satisfactory, Subnautica, Stellaris, Farming Simulator 19, American Truck Simulator, Transport Fever 2, Battlestar Galactica Deadlock - none of these games have ever crashed on me like ARK has) and it has been happening a lot in recent memory. A lot more than I've noticed it doing so, if it ever did, in the past.

Has anyone else had an issue that sounds similar to this? Does anyone know what could be the cause? Is it hardware? Is it just ARK being ARK?

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