Fix Abiotic Factor Freezing and Fatal Errors

It is frustrating when Abiotic Factor locks up or hits you with a fatal error right when you are trying to grab items or interact with the environment. The crash is usually caused by the game's voice chat plugin failing to communicate with your hardware, rather than a problem with your GPU.

Why this happens

The game engine often struggles with high-fidelity lighting and specific audio input formats, leading to memory locks.

What you'll need

You will need access to your Steam library and basic text editing software like Notepad.

Steps

1. 01
   Right-click your speaker icon in the taskbar, go to Sound Settings, then select More Sound Settings.
2. 02
   Under the Recording tab, right-click your microphone, select Properties, and change your default format to 44100 Hz.
3. 03
   If the game still crashes, right-click Abiotic Factor in Steam, select Properties, and type -dx11 in the Launch Options field.
4. 04
   To disable Lumen, press Win+R and navigate to C:/Users/[YourUser]/AppData/Local/AbioticFactor/Saved/Config/Windows
5. 05
   Open Engine.ini with Notepad. If it does not exist, create a new text file and rename it to Engine.ini.
6. 06
   Paste the following lines into the file: [/script/engine.renderersettings] r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Allow=0, r.Lumen.Reflections.Allow=0, r.VolumetricCloud=0, r.VolumetricFog=0
7. 07
   Save the file, close it, and relaunch the game.
8. 08
   If the crash persists, right-click Abiotic Factor in Steam, select Properties, go to Installed Files, and click Verify integrity of game files.