Best Practices | Avoiding CTD

I’ve had a roller coaster ride with the sim. Every alternate update has led to CTDs for me to the point that sim wont either launch or wont go beyond the checking-for-updates scree. Latest update to 1.15.10 did exactly that and now I am waiting for the 25th May Sim update which will hopefully rectify things.

I get updates through the Windows store and my take from all this is, somehow, at the time of update, the code gets corrupted and since there is no way of rollback, only path left is the dreaded uninstall and reinstall process that takes at least 4-5 hours for me while i am on a 300Mbps connection that gives the speed of 300 Mbps.

This time when I ran the sfc /scannow, it did tell me that some files were corrupted that were repaired but even after that no luck and this is the first time I got this message. Ran it multiple times earlier but never had any files corrupted in past instances.

So, the big question to all of you who have managed to give CTDs a miss for most part - what do you people do besides emptying community folder for updates to stay away from CTDs. Even beyond the updates, are there any periodic maintenance steps or scans that should be done?

@FilbertFlies - I follow almost all of your content on YT and you seem to have a pretty decent run, any tips will be of huge help. I really want to get out of this cycle.

I must be among the few who have very few problems. I have done the following

  1. emptied the community folder (exc AFC bridge which is Honeycomb connection) and the CRJ folders. otherwise I have moved all add-on scenery (freeware) to D drive (away from the sim). More recently, I have transferred only the scenery I expect to use to the Community folder each time, then delete it after. This keeps the CF virtually empty.
  2. I now only fly the CRJ (which flies without fault/stuttering etc)
  3. I invested in a new system i7 10700, RTX3080, 32/3600 RAM, 850W PSU - dedicated to Flt Sim only. I download through MS store.
  4. I check for/update Windows, Logitech, NVidia drivers weekly, before opening the sim. I re-boot after any updates.
  5. Updates have been flawless.

hope this helps a tiny bit. Good luck with yours.

Note: I did have problems earlier and re-downloaded several times…at 25MBPS, this takes me 15 hours a time. Now, haven’t had to do this…

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For those who want to run Community folder addons, it seems MSFS is only getting angrier when it comes to crashing when encountering bad addons. Here are 2 checks I make to every addon before installing. Note: I have 637 addons installed of this writing with zero CTDs.

Symptoms of a bad addon are 1) a flight won’t start or 2) when flying you get a crash (this could be other reasons, like overclocking).

  1. Incomplete layout.json files. Addon makers will tell you their addon is good, when I regret it isn’t. I’ve gone as far a making a little batch script to update all my layout.json files. For this, I’ll show you how to do it manually.
  1. Issues with MaterialLib folder. In this case, the problem addon is NOT necessarily related to where you are flying. The issue with MaterialLib folder is actually the folder underneath it called “MyMaterials”. If you have and addon with a MyMaterials folder directly under MaterialLib, then you have a problem. Further, this MaterialLib folder name must be completely unique across all addons. To resolve this:
  • a) Navigate to the MaterialLib folder and rename the MyMaterials folder to something unique. I like to use (ICAO)MyMaterials. So, something like “KJFKMyMaterials” for example.

  • b) Repeat the #1 action I posted above to update your layout.json file with the new folder structure.

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The only CTDs I encountered due to addons where because of duplicate modellib.bgl files. This is the standard name when you create a new scenery, and if two addons with an identical file name load at the same time MSFS will crash if I understood correctly. So you’ll have to change the file name(s). Tools like “MSFS Addons Linker” can do that automaticalky for all.

All other CTDs I encountered were most likely due to some sort of instability. MSFS is extremely demanding and doesn’t like an unstable system. Especially when it comes to overclocking.
Here’s what I did:

  1. Disable as many background tasks as you can when playing MSFS. “Game Booster 3.5” is a nice way to do that if you only want to disable a lot of stuff temporarily .

  2. Turn off all overclocking (incl. XMP and D.O.C.P.) in the BIOS and set everything to Auto. If this gets rid of the CTDs you can try gradually increasing overclocking again.

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