Factorio Forums

What did you do?

Using a massive 1000 artillery train to clear biters while using a custom binding of "ctrl + scroll up" for "use item" and the G502 logitech mouse that allows the scroll wheel to spin freely. I then paint biters nest good side to side and either going slowly up or down using said command.

What happened?

During the clearing of these nests sometimes the game hard crashes, causing chrome to freeze up, windows file explorer to restart and both my screens to go dark for a few seconds

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

I expect the game to not crash when using tons of artillery because megabaseing is a large part of the experience

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

I dont recall it happening within the first few reloads of the train, I'd say these last two reloads of the train its happen at least once each reload or within a hour of constant active use of firing artillery

Mods
-Base 2.0.72
-Elevated Rails 2.0.72
-Quality 2.0.72
-Space Age 2.0.72
-Factorio Library 0.15.0
-Only Nauvis Redux 1.0.3
-Rate Calculator 3.3.2

Save

The replay feature is enabled if that helps https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q1Wzd1 ... hHJ8X/view

Thanks for the report however the log does not show anything useful about the crash. That combined with it “happening within an hour” of re-trying points at unstable hardware. If it was an engine bug you should be able to reproduce it reliably with the exact same steps each time.

If you can reproduce it, also please provide those log files (as this one is useless and says it crashed while not executing Factorio code).

I'll try to reproduce it, and maybe I'll record it, if OBS doesnt crash too. o7

link7011 wrote: Thu Jan 01, 2026 3:24 am During the clearing of these nests sometimes the game hard crashes, causing chrome to freeze up, windows file explorer to restart and both my screens to go dark for a few seconds

This sounds just like a Nvidia GPU driver crashing and recovering. Check Windows Event Viewer, System tab.

I realized this could be due having my PC on for approximately 33:21:00:00~ at the time of posting. Because another game crashed in a similar manner afterwards, and trying to played bejeweled on chrome crashing in a similar way too.

Though it was the third time factorio had crashed on me while I was firing artillery that it seemed like I should post.
So since I'm free this week I'll restart my computer and see if I can still get it to happen.

System uptime itself should not cause instability. However, based on your description, I can imagine that users of MS Windows often expect this.

Please test the RAM with Memtest86+ and the CPU with Prime95; the source of the instability may be elsewhere.

Writing before playing but I did both tests, memory seemed fine, I did the ten tests and got a pass with no errors, but idk if that is something I start before going to bed and let it loop for awhile to see if any errors can happen at all.

Did the prime95 torture test and almost instantly my CPU is thermal throttling, I found this thread https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads ... .3528810/ saying that at idle that your PC should be between 30~40C and doing X test with Y and Z settings it should hover around 80C for 15 mins. The strange thing is with all my standard programs open (chrome, discord, steam, opera, proton vpn), but not actually doing anything my CPU usage hovers around 10% with either one or of the core at full throttle, or two cores with very spikey usage graphs, and sometimes jumps to 20% which overall gives me temps at 50~60C (when it was actually idle it was at the 30~40C). And doing those tests at those settings that thread recommended my CPU thermal throttles within a min or two.

And after playing for about 7hrs today i and starting with this many artillery fired and at the end of the day having this many fired
So it does seem like the extended uptime of the CPU did seemed to be the main cause of stability issues, and now I'm aware that there does seem to be a thermal problem with my CPU, it is a 12900k, but I did pair it with a Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black, Dual-Tower CPU Cooler which is the beefiest aircooler I'm aware of. So hopefully its only old thermal paste or something simple like that.

A properly cooled and not overclocked CPU doesn't age, extended uptime under high load doesn't matter for stability issues.
The thermal paste also doesn't really age. Some gamer website info suggest it could be changed after 2-3 years, but as far as my research and my experience goes, this is not general consensus and the result is negligible (0-2°C difference, this is so small it might also result from a better paste or from better cleaning before applying the paste).
However, once you take off the cooler for whatever reason, you have to thoroughly clean the cooler and the CPU and apply fresh thermal paste. You must never reassemble with the old paste. The paste changes and becomes less fluid if heated up for the first time, so it cannot be reused ever.