Outriders player discovers 23GB of crash dumps stuffed in a Windows folder
If you've been wondering where your free C drive space has been going, look here.
How's your C drive looking these days? Lots of headspace for Resident Evil Village next month? If you've been playing Outriders, you might find a little less free space than expected: One player discovered that the game had stuffed 23GB worth of crash reports six folders deep into their C drive.
I don't know why Outriders would store the equivalent of 7,188 copies of War and Peace in crash data. It's normal for Unreal Engine games to dump a bunch of data after a crash (they usually ask if you want to send it to the developer so they can figure out what caused it), but it isn't normal for the game to store enormous quantities of crash data on your drive long term. Presumably it's something People Can Fly will fix in a future update.
Here's the folder where Outriders stores crash reports: Users/[You]/AppData/Local/Madness/Saved.
("Madness" is just a codename for Outriders. If you've experienced crashes, you may have seen that "UE4-Madness" crashed.)
That's the folder where Reddit user Toasteroven47 found 23GB of details about every Outriders crash they'd experienced. They noticed the files with WinDirStat, which visualizes the data on Windows drives. (I only mention that because it's a great tool.) A different thread from a week ago pointed out the same problem.
It is safe to delete the files in that folder.
I tried to verify the issue myself, but I can't get Outriders to crash. It is maddeningly stable for me at the moment, but I guess that's a good problem to have. However, Morgan, who wrote PC Gamer's Outriders review, says he found two Outriders crash reports that take up nearly 1GB. That's obviously not as big a deal as 23GB, but it's enough evidence for me to say that there's a problem. Even 1GB of crash data is more than any game should be storing on your drive.
I poked around in my own AppData folder to see if any other games have been secretly hoarding crash data, but even games that I know crashed a lot (looking at you, Generation Zero) have only kept a few tiny logs. The biggest crash dump I could find is from The Medium, and it's 100MB. I deleted it. Those are my 100MBs.
If Outriders crash dumps were stowing away on your drive, let us know in the comments how much space you reclaimed.