Lag spikes after Apex update

Anne Newmouse shared this bug 21 days ago
Investigating

I'm experiencing intermittent freezing every few minutes or so.

Physics movement pauses, keyboard and mouse are unresponsive, but animations like grass moving or windmills spinning keep playing during the freeze.

This started happening on a modded local singleplayer survival save, which I started after the Apex update/DLC came out. I don't recall having this issue before the update, and my hardware hasn't changed recently either.

I tried verifying game files via Steam, updating graphics drivers and starting a fresh world with default settings and without any mods. The problem persists.

I managed to take a screenshot as the spike was happening:

0aa260d874adb60de1ff651294f6bac2

And two more, once the game resumed normal operation:

32ff5725cb6c65a817750519a6177c209bbf998d6e95cce297017d6400a56255

Windows Task Manager performance graphs doesn't show any spikes when the game freezes. Doesn't happen in other games.


System specs:

OS: Windows 11 x64 24H2

CPU: i5-10600K, 64GB RAM

GPU: RTX 4060 Ti, 16GB

Storage: SSD with 120GB of space left

Replies (8)

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1

Hello Anne,

Thank you for reaching out to us on the forum.

Could you kindly share some additional details about the issue?

Do you have any plugins or custom launch options active for the game? To check launch options, in your Steam Library, right-click Space Engineers → select Properties → under the General tab, look at the Launch Options field. If you have any set there, please remove them and Plugins as well.

After that, please try starting the game and creating a fresh, unmodded/vanilla world to see if the issue still occurs.

If it does, are there any specific steps after which the lag always happens consistently? If so, please share those steps with us.

Additionally, please provide the log files from the time the issue occurred. And a screen recording/video showing the issue (please press Shift+F11 to enable Performance Statistics while recording). This will help us investigate further.

  • You can access log files by typing %appdata% into the Windows search bar → navigate to Roaming\SpaceEngineers.

Kind regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Hi!


I'm not using any launch options or plugins.

I still have the log files associated with the screenshots I posted previously. You'll find them attached.

Made an interesting observation comparing the log timestamps to the screenshot timestamps;

The first screenshot (timestamp: 2025-09-14 20:09:09) was taken right after SE became frozen. Here are the surrounding log lines:

2025-09-14 20:08:56.578 - Thread:   1 ->  GC Memory: 1404.748 / 1404.748 MB
2025-09-14 20:09:02.161 - Thread:   1 ->  GUI Stats: Update 0.180932, Draw 0.154059944444445
2025-09-14 20:09:05.744 - Thread:   1 ->  Sending event to ElasticSearch: Heartbeat
2025-09-14 20:09:16.844 - Thread:   1 ->  Elastic http response error 0: 
2025-09-14 20:09:23.628 - Thread:   1 ->  Updating stopped.
2025-09-14 20:09:23.644 - Thread:   1 ->  MyGuiScreenMainMenu MyGuiScreenBase.LoadContent
2025-09-14 20:09:23.944 - Thread:   1 ->  MyConfig.Save() - START
2025-09-14 20:09:23.944 - Thread:   1 ->     Path: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\SpaceEngineers\SpaceEngineers.cfg

The last log item *before* the game froze seems to indicate that the game is making an analytics API request. The game resumes at the same moment as the request fails.

Coincidence, or are you making network requests in the main thread? 😅

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Here's a screen recording of the issue, along with the related log files. This time the freeze was relatively short.

As for the ElasticSearch log line.. Whenever there's a freeze, it always happens the same time as the "Sending event to ElasticSearch: Heartbeat" appears in the logs. Even if it's not the cause, I'd be surprised if it didn't have any relation.

My Internet connection can be a bit flakey at times. The DSL modem usually has some uncorrectables, due to bad cabling in an old apartment. Perhaps it could be a factor in this issue?

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I tried blocking all outbound connections which could relate to analytics. It was a game of whack-a-mole, but I eventually found all the different IPs the game would try to connect to...


Blocked hosts (using Acrylic DNS):

127.0.0.1 *.compute-1.amazonaws.com

127.0.0.1 *.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com

127.0.0.1 exchange.test2.goodai.com

127.0.0.1 api.epicgames.dev

Blocked outbound connection IPs (via Windows Defender firewall):


45.138.107.47

54.92.195.103

45.138.107.48

3.123.161.150

54.92.195.103

44.198.46.159

3.127.228.159

34.237.25.229

23.21.154.91

18.233.239.27

52.206.224.114

54.162.40.122

3.209.145.65

35.174.96.40

98.88.2.107

52.3.10.205

3.125.130.49

54.211.222.65

44.198.46.159

54.92.134.240

54.167.199.230

52.54.145.109

44.220.122.245

98.83.87.114

3.229.236.8

3.218.43.149

44.206.80.145


With all of these blocked, it appears that the game cannot send any analytics requests - and because of this, it doesn't freeze when a request takes long to finish. Yesterday, with this blocking enabled, I played for a good 6 hours without experiencing the freezing issue.


Of course, blocking isn't a viable long-term solution. The list of IPs may change, and I can't be sure whether all these blocked hostnames/IPs relate to analytics. It's possible that blocking them has other consequences - although I personally didn't experience any new gameplay issues.


With analytics blocked, the game will cache unsent analytics event to disk. These event files seem to contain quite a lot of PII (including geographical coordinates), which is a bit disturbing, considering I have answered "No" to the game's GDPR consent popup. But that's a whole different issue...


Bottom line is: No analytics blocking → game freezes every ~4 minutes even in an offline single player game. But with analytics blocking game doesn't freeze at all.

Keen's developers may want to use network throttling to recreate the issue. With a fast internet connection, the freezing might not be as evident.

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Hey,


I made another topic with a similar issue. I tried to block the IPs you gave in the firewall and blocked the domains in my host file.


I can confirm that I have a new file in my ElasticAnalyticsEvents folder 4 time per minute. I can also confirm that there is in those files a concerning amount of data that can be used as fingerprint (system info, system language, game language, game settings, resolution), as well as some personal data, such as region, language and gender, even tho I disabled my GDPR consent.


However, I still had freezes when playing. Maybe I don't send my analytics to the same IP's as Anne, maybe I messed up when I created my blocking rules...

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Another video of the problem of the game's physics freezing or crashing.


https://youtu.be/UqiDksp-2Qc


It also randomly occurs when pressing Escape, accessing the inventory, or in the main menu right at the start, as in the following video.


https://youtu.be/3hzJe048WJ8

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I disconnected the network cable after the game was ready to play and NOT freeze all.


After an hour, I reconnect the cable and the freeze comeback on the same inervals.

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