This Outriders Bug Could Stop Your PC In Its Tracks

Outriders is an ambitious sci-fi co-op shooter RPG that was highly anticipated in the PC community. Unfortunately, it's release has been marred by server issues that prohibited multiplayer and a series of bugs (including one that wipes out your entire inventory for no apparent reason), but now players who have the game on PC have another thing to worry about: Outriders' crash report files may be filling up your SSD.

A Reddit user named Toasteroven46 was curious as to why their hard drive was suddenly out of space. They used a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool called WinDirStat and found the problem after searching through the game's save directory and discovering that 22.8GB of space on their 102.7GB SSD was being taken up by Outriders' crash reports.

Toasteroven47 was far from alone too. Their post prompted others to check their own drives.

"21GBs here ... amazing," replied Reddit user Elyssae. "Wow, also 15gb on my side...this is madness," replied user Hoolsten, referencing the "Madness" title of the folder containing the crash reports. Another user named Lonailan found even worse results: "32GB here. WTF."

There are three major components to this problem. The first is just how often Outriders crashes. Another Reddit thread is full to the brim with frustrated players complaining that the game crashes without warning several times per session and seemingly without reason. The second component is the sheer size of the crash reports. Even for a new game and even accounting for the high number of crashes, it's still strange for crash reports to take up the sort of data space usually reserved for an entire season of high definition television. The third and most important factor is where the data is being stored.

According to CNET, it's common practice for PC's to have a smaller, but faster boot drive, usually an SSD, and a larger storage drive for keeping game files. Outriders saves its crash reports to your C drive, which is generally your smaller boot drive, even if you install the game on your larger storage drive. This means it can fill up and become a problem very quickly. Luckily, Reddit users have provided tips for how to dump these massive crash reports, freeing up much-needed space.

Reviews for the game are still positive in spite of its glaring flaws. To be fair, this issue doesn't actually affect the way the game plays and the data can be removed without harming the game or your computer. It's just another frustrating thing on the list of problems Outriders fans are already tolerating.