I have 170 hours on LE, never have I had an issue like this until today: Twice since the latest update my Online Last Epoch sessions have completely BRICKED my video card and forced a hard PC restart. This happened both during gameplay and during log in, about an hour apart from each other.
To be more specific, the entire screen goes black except for the remains of few graphical elements - like you took a screenshot and set ‘threshold’ to 1% in photoshop. Once this happens the PC is completely unresponsive. There’s no way to bring it back other than pressing the Power button.
Log file and Crash Dump have been provided. I’m not risking my PC until I know for a fact that LE is a safe program to run.
Doesnt sound like my understanding of the word Bricked (i.e. totally dead, never to be used again, get a new device). Typically you cannot Brick a device multiple times.
Semantics aside (and I apologise for being pedantic about it) but it sounds like it crashed to a hardware level - which usually means whatever problem the game had caused the GPU or other hardware drivers to crash and thereby crashed the OS and required a hard reboot after which the GPU worked again.
Your logfile is showing a repeated error - tens of thousands of it - about TextMeshProUGUI which is what the game is using to render text on screen. It may be that this flood of errors eventually causes the game to crash as its unable to process them. I have seen this error before but its impossible as a non dev to know if this is the primary cause and others with the issue just did maintenance and the problem resolved.
It may be something else but its hard to say without more info. Considering that you have successfully played before for 100+hours its possible that something else on your machine may have changed that is now also involved.
As a player, I can say that its unlikely you are “risking” your PC by playing LE - its possible that LE may be highlighting something else going on but there would be 1000’s of people at risk if the game was causing physical issues with peoples machines (unlikely imho).
I would recommend:
Making sure that you know what could have changed on your machine recently - updates, new software etc. Its is very possible that something new could have changed or be causing an issue with LE or its game engine (*Unity).
Make sure your machine is fully patched and that there are no OS updates that failed.
Make sure your GPU drivers are no older than 3 months and installed using a CLEAN installation - not upgrade as this doesnt always replace problem driver files.
Make sure to do a Steam Game File Verification to ensure your LE install is actually ok - sometimes problems can happen and an individual file is messed up causing more issues.
Is this issue only happening when you play online or offline?
Is it only happening with one specific char or any of them?
Are you running the game at max settings - is your system maxed out in any way - high average CPU/GPU or memory usage? High temperatures? Reducing settings may help the game be more stable by allowing the game more resources to handle any issues. Its a well known fact that some issues only really appear when running higher in-game settings. Things like high temperatures could indicate a failed fan or blocked case airflow - things that happen over time and which are unlikely to be noticed by most PC users.
View your system Event log and see if your system is warning about something else that is happening on your machine OR if its logging potential issues that preceed LE crashing. Sometimes the Windows logs can give an answer in things like this - where something worked file until recently. There could be a failed driver update or something logged and ever since then you have had problems.
Thank you for your reply. You helped me narrow it down to a Hardware, not Software issue. I noticed something was severely wrong when opening a text file in safe mode would sometimes cause the crash.
After extensive testing in Memtest86 I discovered that one of my RAM sticks was dead. Best case scenario for hardware failure if you ask me. $25 fix and easy to swap.
