V Rising – Troubleshooting Server Crash Immediately on Startup

Server Crash: Known Issues and How to Fix Them

Symptoms:

1. Your server is crashing unexpectedly at startup
2. There is no Crash! observed in the VRisingServer.log file.
3. If you check your Windows Event Viewer, if you see something like Faulting module path:

C:\Users\USERNAME\VRising\VRisingServer_Data\Plugins\x86_64\lib_burst_generated.dll

If you experience all 3 of these symptoms, you are affected by this issue.

Root Cause:

The CPU does not support AVX2 and/or SSE 4.2

Validation:

According to the steam page, V Rising minimum requirements list the Intel 6th generation CPUs (Microarchitecture Skylake, circa 2015) or the AMD Ryzen 5 (Microarchitecture Zen circa 2017) and newer CPUs, which all support both AVX2 and SSE 4.2 instruction sets.

You can use something like CPU-Z to verify which instructions your CPU supports. Look in the “Instructions” box, you should see SSE 4.2 and AVX2 listed there.

Resolution:

Please use a CPU that supports AVX2 and SSE 4.2.

If you are running in a virtualized environment, and you know the CPU supports AVX (Haswell [Q2 2013] or AMD Zen or newer), you will need to modify the hypervisor to pass these CPU flags into the VM. (In Proxmox hardware -> Processors -> type from kvm64 to Host).

Workaround

If your CPU does not support AVX2/SSE 4.2 for whatever reason, then as an unsupported work around you can rename the lib_burst_generated.dll file to old_lib_burst_generated.dll. Do note that you will need to do this on each update until (and if!) the studio allows that instruction set to be optional, like it was pre-update.

If you are running in an unsupported configuration with Wine/Linux and/or Docker:

Docker

So for those interesting in the Docker containers breaking as well: it is the same issue as the Windows servers have (described earlier in regards to the lib_burst_generated.dll because of the avx requirement). That being said, the solution would be to deploy your own Docker and remember that there is no official support for Docker (or Linux in general) and I am in no way 100% sure as to how and why it crashes — but below is what worked for me and I am willing to run the risk it breaks again soon.

So, like the Windows server, Wine in the Docker containers I used (e.g. TrueOsiris) also breaks because of the lack of AVX support. I spun up a docker container by myself and before launching wine VRisingServer.exe -persistentDatapath…, you can add a check to see if your/virtualized CPU supports it (e.g. grep -o ‘avx[^ ]*’ /proc/cpuinfo) and if not, you can simply rename the file using the mv command (mv ${f} ${f}.bak), where $f is the .dll.

Wine / Linux

I got mine running under wine again. I was comparing a Windows server install to my wine one. noticed that steamclient64.dll and steamclient.dll on the windows install was in the same folder as the VRisingServer.exe file. so I linked /home/steam/.local/share/Steam/steamclient64.dll to the directory with the VRisingServer.exe

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 48 May 25 11:01 steamclient64.dll -> /home/steam/.local/share/Steam/steamclient64.dll
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 May 25 11:01 steamclient.dll -> /home/steam/.local/share/Steam/steamclient.dll

Then it complained about tier0_s64.dll and vstdlib_s64.dll missing. which i could not find at all on my Linux install. so i copied them off the windows install and placed them into the same directory as VRisingServer.exe and it all works

Actually copied all 4 just in case

-rwxrwxr-x 1 steam steam 642920 May 25 11:10 tier0_s64.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 steam steam 539496 May 25 11:10 vstdlib_s.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 steam steam 704872 May 25 11:10 vstdlib_s64.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 steam steam 340840 May 25 11:10 tier0_s.dll

Update:

If your Server crashed at Start-up its likely that you have a invalid ServerGameSettings.json file, check your log file for something like this JsonReaderException: After parsing a value an unexpected character was encountered: “. Path ‘FreeCastleClaim’, line 16, position 2.

Validate your File with Notepad++ or use:

https://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com