Why does using mods make the game crash?

[Unknow0059]

No, i'm not having problems with my game. It's just something that came up in my mind, and i wanted to know why.

Of course, some things simply don't have answers, i wish this isn't the case.

[mike9606]

Sometimes certain mods conflict with each other, and other times the mods use up too much memory.

[Jim Kernan]

In my experience it's mainly hitting the 32 bit memory limit. Mods are addictive and it always seems I can never have just one.

[Starman4308]

Either botched mod installations, conflicting mods, or you ran into the 3.5 GB limit imposed by 32-bit KSP. The last can be ameliorated by using OpenGL or a texture management mod. 64-bit solves the memory issue completely (assuming your computer has enough RAM installed), but you either have to install Linux, or deal with the instability of the Windows version, and the number of mods which are disabled for Windows x64.

[kaboom1212]

as other have already said.. it's mostly just running out of RAM. Whenever I check my crash logs it's always usually the case

[Levelord]

Memory limit.

[Francois424]

Memory limit made me stop playing my main career game 3 weeks ago or so.

Then tried playing RSS and I can't crashes right away from out of memory

O yeah... We need 64 bits asap (imho). Unless you play stock in which case no issues whatsoever.

[Higgs]

32 bit support memory limits stink, but unity is not very friendly <by and large, yes i know SOME seems to run 64 bit on windows just fine, i for one, am not one of those lucky folk> with 64 bit windows. Until Unity devs make a stable supported 64 bit unity engine, we are by and large <see prior sentence> stuck in 32 bit, which, has that fun 4 gig limit. i know, other stated it too, but, i wanted to chime in too lol

[Van Disaster]

Forcing DX11 or OpenGL helps a lot, but with some graphical issues ( minor, in DX11's case ). Ditching parts you don't use no matter where they come from also helps considerably...

[The Destroyer]

Memory limit made me stop playing my main career game 3 weeks ago or so.

Then tried playing RSS and I can't crashes right away from out of memory

O yeah... We need 64 bits asap (imho). Unless you play stock in which case no issues whatsoever.

There's already 64 bit, just buggy.

[ferram4]

Conflicting mods don't cause crashes; mods themselves can cause crashes through their code, but even that is incredibly rare, since the things that cause crashes (unhandled exceptions) almost never happen because they are handled by the game engine rather than crashing out. It takes serious talent to break the game enough that it actually crashes rather than lagging or ending up with a bad state that requires a restart.

Most common cause is hitting the memory limit in 32-bit KSP, or running into funky pointer (memory addressing) issues with 64-bit KSP.

[InterCity]

From my numerous crash logs (I love tinkering with my installation, modding it and I'm on linux) I can say that the causes are the following:

1) Out of memory - either the 32 bit limit or the hardware limit. Mods (especially those like B9, KW Rocketry , MKS...) tend to shred through the available memory.

2) Mod conflicts - Sometimes, the mods use the same thing in the same time, which is not allowed. We have ModuleManager for this, luckily.

3) Sloppy programming - This is the reason the game crashes 50 times before I successfully mod it myself and the reason why I haven't published any mods so far (My warp drive has probably more bugs than an ant hill combined with windows vista )

The solutions?

1) Less mods/texture manager/Delete parts what you don't need. By reducing the number of features, you also reduce the memory needed.

2) ModuleManager. Solves 99% of mod conflict problems.

3) RTFM. Or go to stackoverflow.net. Or wiki. That usually helps if the mod is yours. Google is your friend as well. If it's not yours... contact the modder and pray to the entity above that the modder is reasonable (most of them are, so there's no need to pray too hard).

Edited December 3, 2014 by InterCity