Fix: crashes and out-of-memory

Crashes fall into two groups with very different fixes: crashing on startup or right after, which is almost always a bad plugin or mod, and crashing on a heavy scene, which is almost always memory. Work out which one you have first.

Crash on startup, or right after loading in

Something loaded that the game couldn’t handle, usually a broken, outdated or conflicting plugin or mod.

1. Read the log. Open BepInEx/LogOutput.log and look at the very end, the last thing it managed before dying often names the culprit. (enable logging)
2. Bisect the plugins. Move everything out of BepInEx/plugins into a temporary folder, confirm the game starts, then add plugins back in halves until it breaks again. The half that breaks it holds the bad one.
3. Update or remove the offender. Once you’ve found it, update it to the current version or take it out.
4. A bad mod can do it too. If plugins aren’t the cause, a corrupt or incompatible zipmod can crash a load. Updating your modpack usually clears these.

Crash or freeze on a big scene

This is memory. A scene with many high-detail characters, dense hair, big maps and heavy effects piles up textures until the game runs out of room, even on a strong PC.

• Trim the scene. Fewer characters, lower-poly hair, a lighter map, and turning off effects you’re not using all buy back a lot of headroom.
• Give Windows more virtual memory. Raise your page file size. When physical RAM fills, this is what stops a hard crash, and it’s the single most effective fix for out-of-memory in HS2.
• Close everything else. Browsers with many tabs and other games eat the RAM and VRAM the scene needs.
• Drop resolution and anti-aliasing while you build, then raise them only for the final render. High output resolution multiplies memory use.
• Load big scenes from a fresh start. Memory fragments over a long session; if a heavy scene won’t load, restart the game and load it first.

Still crashing

• Update your graphics drivers, a genuinely out-of-date GPU driver causes hard-to-explain crashes.
• If it started right after installing one specific plugin or mod, remove that one first, the timing is usually the answer.