Fix: first launch looks frozen

You launch the game or Studio for the first time, or right after a big modpack update, and you get a white or black window with “Not Responding” in the title bar. It looks like a crash. Almost every time, it is not.

Is this normal?

Run through this before you assume anything is broken:

• Is this the first launch after a fresh install, a Windows reinstall, or a move to a new PC or drive?
• Did you just install or update a large batch of mods (a BetterRepack update counts)?
• Is the window title showing “Not Responding” rather than an actual error dialog?
• Has it been less than 30 minutes?

If you answered yes to all four, you are almost certainly looking at a normal cache build, not a crash. Keep reading before you touch anything.

1. Just wait it out

On first launch, and again after any large mod update, the game builds its sideloader mod cache plus its shader and asset caches. With a big modpack this can take anywhere from 10 to 30 or more minutes, and it happens before the window has anything to draw, which is why it sits white or black the whole time.

Do not click on the window. Clicking or dragging it tells Windows the app isn’t responding to input, which flips the title bar to “Not Responding” and makes it look more dead than it actually is. The process underneath is still working. Leave it alone and let it finish.

The same rebuild happens, and can take even longer than the original install, if you move your HS2 folder to a different drive or restore it from a backup on a new machine.

2. Watch it work with Activate Console

If you want visual confirmation that something is actually happening, enable “Activate Console” in the game launcher before you start it. This opens a separate console window that scrolls through Sideloader and BepInEx log lines as mods get processed, so you can watch progress instead of staring at a blank window. See enable logging for more on reading that output and redirecting it to a log file.

3. Check your install path

If the freeze genuinely never resolves, a long or deeply nested install path can cause a real hang rather than just a slow one. Install HS2 close to the drive root, for example C:\HS2, rather than several folders deep or inside a synced cloud folder. See installing HS2 for the recommended layout.

4. Rule out a corrupt or conflicting mod

If it is still stuck after 30+ minutes and you’ve confirmed the install path is short, the next most likely cause is a corrupt cache file or a conflicting mod, not a cache that’s still building.

Try these in order:

• Force a clean cache rebuild. Close the game, delete or move BepInEx/cache/sideloader_zipmod_cache.bin out of the game folder, then relaunch. This makes Sideloader rebuild its cache from scratch instead of reading a possibly corrupted one.
• Bisect the mods folder. Move roughly half your mods out to a folder outside the game directory and relaunch. If it loads quickly, the conflict is in the half you moved out; move half of those back in and repeat until you isolate the specific mod. If it’s still stuck, the conflict is in the half still installed.
• Check for a known troublemaker. A lipsync plugin sitting in BepInEx/plugins has been confirmed to block startup entirely on some installs, leaving a permanent white screen with menu music playing but no UI. If you have one installed, move that plugin folder out and try again.

If a plugin turns out to be the cause rather than a zipmod, a plugin that won’t load covers isolating and updating individual BepInEx plugins. For freezes and instability once you’re past the loading screen, see crashes and out-of-memory.

Quick reference

Once you’re past first launch reliably, Studio basics is the natural next stop for getting oriented in Studio itself.