Large-Sized Player.log

If your hard disk is suddenly running out of space for no apparent reason, it could be that RimWorld erroring is the cause for it. Those cases are unfortunately somewhat common - especially when mods are being used - and can cause at least temporary troubles for the user. Here's all you need to know about this issue and how to deal with it.

There are mostly two reasons for a bloated log-file to happen. One is the game spamming errors while running for a long time - those cases are quite rare and usually have to do with the user keeping the game open in the background for more than a day. Many types of error-spam in RimWorld are triggering some sort of log-spam protection, but the Player.log-file keeps logging the whole session from start to finish, so errors bypassing the spam protection sooner or later can blow up the log to ridiculous sizes. In some instances that can mean hundreds of GBs or even until the space on your C: drive runs out completely.

The other - more common reason - for a bloated log-file is a bug in RimWorld's sound engine (FMOD) itself though. This variant is more common and can easily happen in just the basegame - it is more common when using mods though. In this case exiting the game results in an invisible crash while the FMOD-error keeps spamming the log. The game seems to be closed, but the process is still running in the background and can only be terminated by killing the task directly.

In that state, the error-logging simply continues hidden from the user until the task is killed by hand or the system is rebooted. Since that can go on for a long time depending on how someone uses their PC, the log obviously manages to eat up the whole hard drive sooner or later.

WIP - Add Screenshot of the FMOD-error!

In general it is safe to just delete the Player.log-file whenever this happens, they game will generate a new one the next time it is started anyways. But if it happens consistently - or if you want to check out the the reason for the error - you might want to look into the log first to figure out which error is spammed. Depending on the actual size of your log-file that might be problematic though, since not every text-editor will be automatically able to load a file that size.

A better approach is to just delete the file and then run the game to check if it starts spamming errors again - that way you get a fresh log that can be handled way easier and if it really turns out to be a one-off case, you don't have to waste time with hunting down a fringe issue.

If it keeps happening though, you either want to start a troubleshoot or find workarounds if it turns out to be a case of the FMOD error when closing the game. Especially if you're running the game on non-Windows platforms (Linux, MacOS, etc.) there seems to be a higher chance of triggering the issue. While the exact reasons are quite nebular, there's a good chance that audio hardware & drivers play a role in it and non-Windows systems seem to be more affected on average.

One way to bypass the silent crashing is to exit the game via Alt+F4 or by using 'end task' in your task manager. Optionally you can of course just check your task manager after closing the game normally and then kill the task if it still remains running. Besides that though, this issue seems to be directly tied to how RimWorld is using FMOD and can only be fully fixed on Ludeon's side. Since the bug is known for years though, it would be rather surprising to finally see a fix deployed.

One common (and mostly idiotic) recommendation you can find online to prevent the issue from happening is to set your Player.log-file to be read-only. While this does in fact work to prevent it from ever blowing up again, this also ruins the only way you have to keep track about issues with your game. If you're really desperate and have to go that route, it's just as simple as that - just keep in mind that if you ever run into an issue you want to share with someone, you first have to disable the write-protection of the file again and then reproduce the error to get an actual log from it. Wouldn't be the first time a troubleshooter gets presented a log from the game that was actually generated three years ago and the user completely forgot that they protected the file back then.

All things considered we highly recommend actually investigating the errors you're getting and fixing the root-cause when possible. So this really should be the last-resort-option for you!