Always crashing after building shader cache & displaying game window

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Technical Support
1

Issue Type (Required):

Crash - After Building Shader Cache

Issue Description (Required):

Ever since December 12’s Steam hotfix, I have been unable to launch and get in game as the game always immediately crashes after building shader cache and opening the game window.
I have been able to launch and play the game perfectly without any issues whatsoever prior to this hotfix.

I have tried all the most common fixes, including Steam file verification, deleting the Fatshark folder in %appdata%, GPU driver (re)installation and shader cache wiping, but nothing has fixed it, the game will always immediately crash on startup.

[PC] Do You Use Mods? (Optional):

No, I don’t use mods

Reproduction Rate (Required):

Constant (100%)

Platform (Required):

PC - Steam

[PC] Upload Console Log & darktide_launcher.log (Optional):

console-2024-12-19-14.07.36-d8f77532-984d-410b-a36d-12f4b8079d3f.log (13.4 KB)
darktide_launcher.log (17.2 KB)

2

It looks like this issue pertains to Direct Storage. You may be able to work around this by:

  1. Navigate to your Darktide AppData by:
  • Press the Windows key + R
  • Enter %appdata% within the search input and select ‘OK’
  • Navigate to AppData\Roaming\Fatshark\Darktide
  1. Open the user_settings.config
  2. At the VERY TOP of the user_settings.config, enter the lines below:
direct_storage = {
    enabled = false
}
  1. Save your changes
  2. Play!
1 Like
3

Can confirm the game now boots and runs fine after adding that, thank you very much for the assistance!

4

Did a little bit more digging around off the back of this. I assume last week’s hotfix enabled DirectStorage by default, however my version of Windows 10 does not support DirectStorage, which may be what was causing this crash.

5

from the log it sounds like you should be able to run direct storage.

we did change some stuff regarding direct storage but it should been enabled by default for a long time before this. However we might have tweaked the default settings a bit which maybe your PC didnt like of some reason.

from the log the difference I can see is that we most likely disabled bypassio which is only somethign that works on Windows 11.

I think we print the settings so will check when this is done