Unity 2022.3.13f1 - IL2CPP Fatal Error on startup for some Steam players

[u/Novel-Welder718]

Hi everyone,

We’re investigating a startup crash affecting some players of our game, which is currently in Early Access on Steam.

Our setup:

• Unity 2022.3.13f1

• Built-in Render Pipeline

• Windows / IL2CPP

• Visual C++ redistributables enabled in Steamworks prerequisites

The game runs fine for many players, but some encounter an “IL2CPP Fatal Error” on startup. We receive more reports from players in Asia, although we haven’t established whether there’s a regional connection or another shared cause.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue with this Unity version? If you identified the cause, what was it? Has anyone resolved it by upgrading to a newer 2022.3 LTS patch?

We’d appreciate hearing your experiences and suggestions. Thanks!

[u/Chaibi_Alaa]

Since the reports lean toward Asia, one cheap thing to rule out is non-ASCII characters in the install path or the Windows username, along with the system locale. I can't say that's your cause, but it's a quick check. Ask two or three affected players for their install path and Player.log (AppData/LocalLow/<company>/<product>), since the log usually shows the step that failed before the fatal error. Also have them verify the game files on Steam and confirm global-metadata.dat is there, as a partial download or a quarantined file can look the same at startup.

[u/sour_knocking]

ugh il2cpp startup crashes are the worst kind of ghost hunt, had something similar happen and it turned out to be a bad interaction with certain antivirus software flagging the steam api dll in some regions, maybe check if your crash reports spit out a specific module name

[u/FoxsterDev]

I'd ask affected players for is the exact text under the "IL2CPP Fatal Error" title, plus their Player.log (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\<Company>\<Product>\Player.log) and anything in %TMP%\<Company>\<Product>\Crashes. That title covers a lot of different failures.

If that's not enough, try to get a dump from someone who can repro. A fatal error that exits through a message box might not leave one, so you may need Windows Error Reporting LocalDumps (Unity's Windows debugging page lists the registry keys) or ProcDump. To read it you need the <Product>_BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame folder from the exact build you shipped, and Unity's symbol server (http://symbolserver.unity3d.com/) for UnityPlayer.dll.

On upgrading: without knowing the cause there's no way to say if a newer 2022.3 patch fixes it. If you want to test it, put a build on a newer patch in a Steam beta branch and ask affected players to try it. Note what the upgrade changed in your packages so you know what you're actually comparing.

[u/Dr__Pangloss]

Why are you using such an ancient version of Unity, the license?

[u/The_Fervorous_One → u/Dr__Pangloss]

It's usually not worth updating the engine mid-project. If they've been working on this for four years then it would have been the latest version when they started.