Space Engineers: Main Menu Crash & System Freeze - Troubleshooting Report

Dear Keen Software House Team,

First and foremost, please accept my deepest respect and gratitude for your incredible work on Space Engineers. I am a huge fan of this game and have spent countless hours enjoying the creative freedom it provides. It is truly a masterpiece in the sandbox genre.

I am writing to you today because I have encountered a highly frustrating issue that has been causing me a lot of headaches. While the game runs flawlessly during actual gameplay, returning to the Main Menu consistently causes the game to crash and completely freezes my entire computer (with audio stuttering before going silent).

I have attached my latest game logs to this email for your review. To help narrow down the cause, I want to assure you that I have already exhausted all standard troubleshooting methods. I have verified game files, modified the .cfg files to force safe graphics/VRAM limits, adjusted Windows DPI scaling and fullscreen optimizations, and ensured my RTX 5070 Ti drivers are up to date. My hardware temperatures and loads are perfectly normal, which leads me to believe this is an underlying engine/UI compatibility issue with newer RTX 50-series GPUs when handling the Main Menu transition.

I sincerely hope your development team can look into this specific log data. I would be incredibly grateful if this critical stability bug could be addressed in a future hotfix or update, allowing players with modern hardware to fully enjoy the game again.

Thank you so much for your time, dedication, and continued support of the Space Engineers community. I look forward to hearing from you.

This is reporting:

1. Issue Summary:

The game runs smoothly during active gameplay sessions. However, upon returning to the Main Menu, the game consistently crashes and causes a complete system-level freeze (including audio stuttering), requiring a hard reboot.

2. Hardware Environment:

GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti (16GB VRAM)

OS: Windows 11

Thermals & Load: Normal. GPU load is low, and temperatures are well within safe limits during the crash.

3. Symptom Details:

Entering a save file works perfectly with no performance issues.

Exiting the save back to the Main Menu instantly triggers a system-wide freeze.

The issue appears to be tied to the Main Menu's resource management or UI rendering logic on newer generation GPUs.

4. Troubleshooting Steps Attempted (All Failed):

To rule out local software/hardware conflicts, I have extensively tested the following solutions without success:

Verified game file integrity via Steam.

Tested multiple launch options (-window, -nologo, -skipintro, -noNews, -resetsettings).

Manually modified SpaceEngineers.cfg to force windowed mode, lower texture quality, and restrict VRAM usage (<AdapterMemoryLimit>).

Disabled Fullscreen Optimizations in Windows compatibility settings.

Overrode High DPI Scaling behavior to "Application".

Updated to the latest NVIDIA Studio drivers.

Completely reinstalled the game and cleared local AppData configurations.

Conclusion:

Given that the hardware is operating normally and all standard troubleshooting methods have failed, this strongly indicates an engine-level incompatibility between the legacy VRage DirectX 11 renderer/UI framework and modern RTX 50-series architecture specifically during the Main Menu transition phase.

Additional Notes:

Due to the fact that my computer crashes before I can even stay on the Main Menu, I am unable to provide any save files. The system freeze occurs prior to creating a new save, so no save data exists for this issue.

Additionally, please note that I am a player from China and my English is not very fluent. This crash report was translated with the assistance of AI. If there are any wording differences or translation errors that cause misunderstandings, please accept my sincere apologies. Thank you very much for your understanding!