Permafrost entered Early Access on 9 October 2026, and crash reports arrived with it. Some of the problem is already fixed by official patches, some has official workarounds, and some is standard Unreal Engine PC troubleshooting. This page separates the three, in the order you should actually try them.
Step 1 — try the studio’s own workarounds
The developer’s published known-issues list includes three concrete workarounds for crash-on-startup and in-session crashes. These are the only ones backed by the people who can actually fix the game, so they go first:
| Official workaround | How | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Turn off frame generation and upscaling | Settings → graphics; disable frame generation and the upscaling feature (DLSS/FSR-style) | Crashes during storms, dense areas, or fast camera movement |
| Lower graphics settings | Preset to medium or low, then restart the session | Crash repeats in the same heavy scene |
Force DirectX 11 with -dx11 | Steam → right-click Permafrost → Properties → General → Launch Options → type -dx11 | Game dies before or at the main menu, or black-screens with audio. The studio notes DX11 being slower than DX12 is expected — treat it as a stability fallback, not a performance upgrade |
If your game runs fine in DX12, the studio’s own guidance is not to switch “just in case”. DX11 is the fallback for people who crash, not a general optimisation.
Step 2 — the standard Unreal Engine fixes, in order
If the official workarounds did not help, the remaining causes are the usual suspects for an Unreal Engine title. Try them in this order — most startup crashes are solved by the first two:
- Verify game files. Steam: right-click the game → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files. Epic: Library → three-dot menu → Manage → Verify. This replaces a corrupted install, the single most common cause of crash-immediately-after-Play.
- Clean-install your GPU driver. Get the latest driver directly from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel — not through Windows Device Manager — and choose the clean-install option if the installer offers one. Restart Windows before testing.
- Repair Visual C++ Redistributables. A missing or damaged runtime shows up as a startup error or failed initialisation rather than an in-game crash. Repair both x64 and x86 redistributables from Microsoft’s site.
- Check your antivirus. Security software silently closing the executable is a known pattern for new releases. Add the game’s install folder to exclusions and test again.
- Force the dedicated GPU on laptops. If the game launches through integrated graphics, you get crashes or absurdly poor performance at startup. Windows Settings → Display → Graphics → set Permafrost to high performance.
- Increase virtual memory (pagefile). Out-of-video-memory and out-of-RAM crashes during heavy weather can be a memory-management problem, not a hardware problem. Setting a 16 GB custom pagefile on the game’s drive is the common fix.
Step 3 — is it a bug, not your PC?
One launch-week pattern is worth knowing before you spend an evening re-installing drivers: the technical reports are contradictory. Some players crash on world creation three or four times in a row; others play 4K at high frame rates without a single incident. When the same build is flawless for one machine and broken for the next, the cause is usually configuration-side and often patch-side.
Two specific cases to check against: if your save became stuck after picking up a recording mid-quest, that is a known, officially acknowledged bug — the studio has said a fix is coming in the next patch, and it had not shipped as of 14 October 2026. And if quest items vanished when picked up, that was fixed in the 10 October patch. Our known issues tracker lists what is confirmed versus player-reported.
Protecting your progress while it’s unstable
Community reports during launch week describe hard crashes rolling progress back to the last autosave. Until the stuck-save fix lands, the practical habit is simple: save manually at shelters whenever you finish a long run, and keep a periodic backup of your save folder. We’ve written exactly how to do that in the save file location and backup guide.
Data version 2026.10.12 · reviewed 12 October 2026. Compiled 14 October 2026, five days after Early Access opened. Exact crash causes are acknowledged by the studio only where the official known-issues list names them; everything else is community-reported.