Of Ash and Steel: Troubleshooting Game Issues

Unlike many other projects, Of Ash and Steel was released in a raw technical state. Currently, bugs and errors in the game are divided into two types. The first are non-critical but annoying: crooked interface, strange animations, design roughness. The latter break the progress, lead to loss of progress, or generate situations where the player has to look for workarounds instead of enjoying the gameplay. In this guide, we have collected all known errors and problems of the Of Ash and Steel game.

Before dealing with specific bugs and broken mechanics, it is recommended to first bring the system to a stable state. In the case of Of Ash and Steel, the game really depends on the stability of the system at the engine and resource loading level. If you ignore basic fixes, any other problems will simply start to pile up on each other.

Of Ash and Steel is sensitive to the state of the video driver, especially during transitions from cutscenes to gameplay or when loading new locations. Outdated versions can lead to crashes without errors, black screen, or freezes immediately after the videos.

We recommend not just updating the driver, but using official versions, and if necessary, performing a clean driver installation, which will allow old files to avoid conflict with new ones. At the same time, we also do not advise chasing after fresh releases, as sometimes it is better to choose a version that has already been tested.

Despite the fact that Windows 10 and 11 come with DirectX by default, this does not mean that the system guarantees the presence of all components that the game accesses. Some libraries may be missing, damaged, or conflicting with other programs.

• Save

Problems with DirectX in Of Ash and Steel are often not obvious: the game crashes in exactly the same place, freezes when loading a scene, or closes without an error message. Reinstalling DirectX allows you to exclude a whole layer of failures with one simple action.

The game uses several versions of Visual C++ packages, and the absence of the required version or its damage can lead to a variety of problems: from inability to launch to crashes when saving or loading. The peculiarity of these libraries is that Windows can consider them installed, even if they are working incorrectly. Updating or reinstalling Visual C++ Redistributable is a real way to eliminate strange, hard-to-reproduce errors that often look like random ones.

Here is a list of necessary packages that we recommend downloading to your PC:

Like many new games, Of Ash and Steel relies on modern system components and mechanisms for working with memory and graphics. If Windows has not been updated for a long time or an outdated version is used, the game may work unstably, even if the hardware meets the requirements. It is recommended to go to Windows Update Center, check for and download all updates, even optional ones.

• Save

Any overlays, screen capture, monitoring the video card, or interference with rendering may not cause failures in other games, but in Of Ash and Steel they often become the cause of crashes and freezes, especially at startup or when loading engine videos. If the game behaves unstably, we first recommend launching it in the most “clean” environment, without third-party programs and background overlays. This way, you can exclude one of the causes of trouble.

Even on powerful systems with a large amount of RAM, Of Ash and Steel can run into limitations due to RAM leaks, which has already been confirmed by the developers on the Steam community page. Increasing the Windows paging file helps reduce the likelihood of freezes and crashes during loading, although in many cases it is not a complete solution. It is also worth considering that overclocking the processor, video card, or memory can increase instability precisely during the loading of cutscenes, locations, and even saves. If serious problems occur, temporarily rolling back to standard frequencies will help exclude an additional source of failures.

One of the most common technical problems is the game crashing immediately after the opening video, when it should transition to the gameplay. At this moment, Of Ash and Steel simultaneously completes the video playback, switches the graphical context, loads the first scene, initializes shaders, sound, and lighting. If an error occurs somewhere at this stage – driver, codec, corrupted file, or incompatible scaling technology – the process simply terminates.

• Save

In practice, this is most often associated with video drivers, enabled DLSS or FSR, conflicting codec packages, or corrupted files of the first scene. That’s why many people are helped by updating drivers with a “clean installation”, which we advised to perform earlier, disabling image scaling, or checking file integrity through Steam.