Factorio Forums

When clicking the seed generation refresh button with previews on (after 1-10 refreshes) the game will crash with the expectation being a repeatable refresh of the seed.
This is a repeatable crash that happens 100% of the time.
The exact steps that lead to the crash:

• 1.On startup of the game clicking single player
• 2.New game
• 3.Freeplay
• 4.preview
• 5.Random seed

You say it happens 100% of the time but it takes up to 10 refreshes to actually crash, so in reality it just crashes randomly?

Well to be fair I meant that it happens every time I try to generate world seeds.
I suppose it could be called random however.

I suspect that this is caused by unstable hardware. If you are overclocking your CPU or ram including xmp you can try if removing all overclocks has an effect.

The issue still happens even with XMP off. Otherwise I'm not OCing in any way.

Based off the crash log I'm also thinking unstable hardware. The map preview code is highly multi-threaded and utilizes the CPU to the maximum it can. In your case that seems to mean it's too much and it starts executing incorrectly. Has this ever worked on your computer? Are you having any other crashes/instability in other areas on the computer?

The same code that the preview uses is also used when you click "generate map" so if it was broken, we would be getting reports about it from a lot of players (which we aren't).

No I haven't had any issues on any game besides this one. No other CPU dependent processes have caused any issues while playing other games.

Could you try running some CPU stress-test software like prime95?

As a workaround for faulty hardware that doesn't like multithreading, you can reduce the number of threads that the game uses to generate the map preview. In the main menu do Ctrl + Alt + Left Click on setttings, then go to "The rest", search for max-map-preview-threads and lower the value, for example by halving it.

I found that the issue for me was due to an unstable BIOS. I believe you are on the new Intel CPU, I was running Ryzen 7000 series, so might just be worth updating your BIOS and seeing if the instability is with the processor.