Xbox Players - I understand your pain now

I spent a few hours last night playing with the city building on my Xbox, and I understand the pain of all of the crashing and freezes now. What struck me the most is that I never really experienced FPS drops, things would be going along seemingly fine and then it would just lock up mid-step.

It's going to be difficult for me to resolve these issues, but I'm going to make an effort to do so. The biggest hurdle is the fact that I can't get any debug logs or open saves in an editor. Once I find a solution to this, I should be able to make some progress.


Based on my tests yesterday, I'd say the city building feature is largely incompatible with the original Xbox One and the Xbox One S - in it's current form. I would like to rectify that though, because I think the system is perfectly capable of handling it.

OMG Thank you!!!! I'm an xbox 1 user and I just had to restart my game without ROTC due to this. If there's anything I can do to help out with testing or anything please let me know.

Thank you. I do want to say though that when SS first came out it was the same thing and if you had more than maybe 7 or 8 plots anywhere you’d get the same thing, though some settlements would let you get around 15 without too much trouble, and that seems to have been completely fixed. I have really had no problems with SS itself recently. I’m sure I could push it if I tried, but clearly things are progressing greatly.

You are a king among gamers!

Is there a specific section in the forums for problems and solutions specific for the Xbox One? That may be helpful in identifying any issues and seeing what other members have done to solve the issue

kinggath said:

I spent a few hours last night playing with the city building on my Xbox, and I understand the pain of all of the crashing and freezes now. What struck me the most is that I never really experienced FPS drops, things would be going along seemingly fine and then it would just lock up mid-step.

It's going to be difficult for me to resolve these issues, but I'm going to make an effort to do so. The biggest hurdle is the fact that I can't get any debug logs or open saves in an editor. Once I find a solution to this, I should be able to make some progress.


Based on my tests yesterday, I'd say the city building feature is largely incompatible with the original Xbox One and the Xbox One S - in it's current form. I would like to rectify that though, because I think the system is perfectly capable of handling it.

Click to expand...

I've been considering upgrading to a One X and buying 7200rpm external HDD even before SS.

Atlas5 said:

I've been considering upgrading to a One X and buying 7200rpm external HDD even before SS.

Click to expand...

I apologize for my ignorance- but would an external HDD or even SSD actually help with SS? Because I'd be down for getting one if it helps gameplay. That would be awesome!

Not likely to help. I don't actually know what the specific problem on Xbox is yet, I've been testing several settlements and the FPS doesn't seem too bad, my best guess is it's the fact that Xbox only has so much memory shared for graphics and general needs. So if an area loads too many textures, the system just can't deal with it.

That's my best guess at the moment, still digging through to see if it's anything script related. If it's a script issue, I'll definitely be able to solve it.

kinggath said:

Not likely to help. I don't actually know what the specific problem on Xbox is yet, I've been testing several settlements and the FPS doesn't seem too bad, my best guess is it's the fact that Xbox only has so much memory shared for graphics and general needs. So if an area loads too many textures, the system just can't deal with it.

That's my best guess at the moment, still digging through to see if it's anything script related. If it's a script issue, I'll definitely be able to solve it.

Click to expand...

Digital Foundry did testing last year show some improvements. I can link it. Here.

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If I have both Abernathy and Sanctuary being built as RotC cities, am I just asking for crashes on my XBox One? I worry about them being so close together, let alone adding Red Rocket into the mix. I assume proximity is an issue for console players.

The CTD and freezing I get are random in different settlements at different times and except for the power line problem that I caused myself, because I didn't realize that I didn't need to supply power at level 0 it's they don't always happen at the same time and place.

has anyone tried using ROTC with just the interrior plots and no auto building of cities. I really dont want to uninstal ROTC and lose some of the cool benifits also I have been usinf a X-box one S with a external hard drive and only had one big crash and that was testing a creation club power armor quest

I haven’t tried specifically not building any of the cities, or only internal plots, but I have settlements that are quite built up with SS without it being RotC build and haven’t had any problems yet with those settlements.

Lortrick said:

has anyone tried using ROTC with just the interrior plots and no auto building of cities. I really dont want to uninstal ROTC and lose some of the cool benifits also I have been usinf a X-box one S with a external hard drive and only had one big crash and that was testing a creation club power armor quest

Click to expand...

Yes, use of rotc plans, even with the expansion installed, is entirely optional.

I think the bugs are being worked on for us Xbox one users. I have confidence that we will be able to use RotC with some tweaks/adjustments.

@kinggath Have you looked into getting a dev kit that lets you debug? xbox. /en-US/developers/id

I'll ask around the office to see if I can find someone that might be able to help you out.

I haven't - I'd be open to doing that though!

kinggath said:

I haven't - I'd be open to doing that though!

Click to expand...

Add a com between the . and / in my last post and that should take you to the form to fill out.

Download the Dev Mode activation app from the Xbox Games Store. Launching the app kicks off a welcome screen and a link to documentation that details what to expect when you switch over from retail to a dev kit, as well as the requirements.

The requirements include that you:

• Join the Windows Insider Program
• Are running Windows 10 on your PC
• Have a wired connection to your PC from your Xbox One
• Install the latest Visual Studio 2015 and Windows builds
• Have at least 30 GB of storage free on your console

The introduction also warns that once you've converted your console over, you may occasionally run into issues running retail games. In addition, the introduction says, leaving Dev Mode will require resetting your console to its factory settings and uninstalling all of your games, apps and content. Upon agreeing, you're given a code that can be entered on your computer once you sign into your Dev Center account. The activation can take awhile and usually requires updating your console. Once it's complete, the console restarts and returns you to your standard startup screen. It doesn't take a lot of time to switch to Dev Mode. After setting up Dev Mode, you pair the Xbox One with Visual Studio, which sees the console as a Windows 10 machine to which it can deploy content directly through a wired connection. When a UWP app is running, it doesn't know it's running on an Xbox, it just knows it's a Windows 10 device.

I'm not entirely sure how this would work with a retail game that you don't have the source code to but it may give you some debug spew that can help you figure things out. If you don't have any luck let me know and I'll reach out to my ID@XBOX colleagues when I get into the office on Monday to see if they have any suggestions.

would sim settlements cause crashes in general? as in, Not just around settlements? FOr instance, if I was in the glowing sea could a settlement using a city plan still increase CTD likelihood? Also is this just specific to city plans and not just the plots in general?

TrueAwesome said:

would sim settlements cause crashes in general? as in, Not just around settlements? FOr instance, if I was in the glowing sea could a settlement using a city plan still increase CTD likelihood? Also is this just specific to city plans and not just the plots in general?

Click to expand...

@TrueAwesome are you using original, S or X? I was using the original and had some weird crashing issues but I just upgraded to the One X and used some new performance and game settings for SS and haven't had a CTD in almost 5 days with all the same exact mods as before. Check the thread below for the settings and try those out.
https://simsettlements.com/site/index.php?threads/sim-settlements-not-working-help.4639/#post-35872