As fun as Outriders is, there’s also a ton of bugs that need fixing. And one of the latest bugs users have discovered is a bizarre tendency for Outriders to dump a ton of data to your Windows drive. Literally gigabytes of the stuff.
The most egregious example posted on the Outriders sub-reddit, and reported by PC Gamer, is one user who found Outriders had dumped 32GB of files to their C:/ drive. The files were stored in the Users/[Your Windows Login Name Here]/AppData/Local/Madness/Saved/Crashes folder, with Madness being the codename People Can Fly used for Outriders.
The files are basic crash dumps, but what’s staggering is just how large those files are. 32GB is a ton of crash data, and lots of other users in the thread reported having double digit volumes of files that, honestly, Outriders doesn’t need. Other users had slightly more welcome reports of their crash dumps only being several gigabytes.
Which doesn’t so bad, right? Until you consider that most other games generally only dump a few hundred megabytes at most for their crash dumps. Outriders, on the other hand, is doing that every single time the game crashes — singleplayer, multiplayer, whatever the case may be.
To make matters worse, all of this is being logged on people’s boot drives, which are typically the smallest drives on a PC. Get a few crashes or multiplayer lobbies that drop out, and the data used can stack up real fast.
What’s surprising about the whole affair is why these crash dumps are even being stored locally at all. Most engines would generally delete these after you decide whether to upload the report to the developers. And why are the crash dumps so big in the first place? Is Outriders just dumping the entirety of people’s memory into the log files? (And could it be related to the developers looking for as much information as possible to help resolve issues with inventory wipes?)
The bright side of all of this is that developers People Can Fly are investigating the situation. In the meantime, you can feel free to delete the contents of the Crashes folder — they won’t affect gameplay at all.
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