Cities: Skylines II – Game Crashing? Find Out Why!

Its a pain when you get a crash. More so when it doesn’t tell you why. CS2 does have a crash log facility and this guide could help you troubleshoot it – or at least google something with a bit more teeth!

Getting Details for the CS2 Crash

So a crash can be the game or, it could be something in your config/settings/lack of right hardware. Who knows, until you do.

You can raise a ticket for a crash, give a spec, yet the devs will still not know if you have another program causing an issue with the particular game. Sometimes a crash error can let you ‘fix it yourself’. This is what happened to me, not sure if I fixed it but the crashes seem to have gone for now, they were fine at first, but all of a sudden I would get some crashes with no reason and I hadn’t updated anything (nor had the game).

First, where are the crash logs:

• C:/Users/[your PC name]/AppData/Local/Temp/Colossal Order/Cities Skylines II/Crashes

In there are folders with a date for each crash event. Its the crash.dmp file you need.

In W11 (I assume 10 as well) you can open the dump files by typing ‘WinDBG’ in the search field. Open as administrator.

Click file menu and find the open crash dump file option.

Once the dump is loaded, on the screen you will see ‘analyze -v’ near the bottom of the text in the window. Click that and wait a while for the program to run.

For me, the offending issue that caused the crash was:

SYMBOL_NAME: UnityPlayer+a2cbb2

MODULE_NAME: UnityPlayer

IMAGE_NAME: UnityPlayer.dll

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: INVALID_POINTER_WRITE_c0000005_UnityPlayer.dll!Unknown

Now, after a lot of google work, unityplayer.dll can cause a lot of issuesd on ‘some’ games. Some programs interfere with it anmd also, setting the RAM to uttilise XMP can also be an issue. I didn’t have any of that. I tried to verify the Steam files and everything came back good, but crashes persisted. So I found the unityplayer.dll file in my CS2 folder in Steam, deleted and re-verified. It found it missing and re-added the file. I went in game for quite a few hours and no crash.

Has it fixed it? Time will tell. At least I know now what the issue was and its pretty well known. It could be a game thing too and I was just lucky I didnt crash. But at least it felt good to do a little digging myself and find the cause