Wouldn’t be unlikely, though. I bet driver updates have quite some undocumented changes.
Same behavior today after updating from 441.41 to 441.62. Have played since 30 november on 441.41 without issues until a few days ago. Perhaps me changing soundcards to my old Focusrite audio interface from a steelseries usbcard has anything to do with it. That might actually warrant a testsession, ill report back
EDIT 6 kills without crashing using the steelseries usb soundcard now. I’m onto something
1 kill using focusrite, crashed on second try.
3 kills no crash, crash on fourth try.
3kills again no crash, crash on fourth try.
10 kills no crash using old focusrite. 11th try crashed.
possibly unrelated but.
Trying Steelseries soundcard now until I crash.
Crash on 7th try. I give up 
I should have added before my friend found his crash trigger to be looking at large explosions.
That happened to me as well. Everything slowed down for a moment and then the crash happened.
I absolutely believe that there are issues in the audio system they are using. Who knows what precise hardware makes it happiest, or perhaps it just has bugs that will surface regardless. I believe audio is related because audio issues are related to some of the crashes because audible audio anomalies always lead to crashes.
Disappearing footsteps or other sounds…
Usually in bunker living quarters a sound starts “following” me that is like a tick madly scurrying near me. Of course one is nowhere at all. A few moments after I start walking it will start up. When I stop it stops. It follows me wherever I go until I crash. It’s like a mad scuttling scurrying tickish metallic sound with some audio distortion. Whether it’s a tick spawned inside the walls or ceiling or floor following me or some screwy audio bug unrelated to any machine I don’t know but a crash comes soon once it starts and it almost always happens in cleared bunkers when I have gone back for looting purposes.
Crashes often seem to happen at the moment large sounds like tank stomps go up in volume due to closeness.
Random loud white noise bursts less than a second long that seem to be related to the game loading in machines or terrain, who knows, but it does seem to be related to loading in enemies in the area.
The weirdest of all is a sound that is rather rare but can occur anytime, seemingly usually outdoors. It is very loud and sounds like a distorted toilet flushing at first, a sort of giant SPUUHLOOOOSH sound that seems to disintegrate into a weird digital noise. It really sounds like someone flushing a mechanic digital toilet or throwing something enormous into a large body of water. Crashes usually come along shortly after. It’s a rarity but it always makes me jump out of my seat because I am usually alone in the wilderness somewhere and all is otherwise quiet then this sound comes in 10 times louder than anything else and sounds like it’s right behind me.
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Good observations!
If you can add anything substantial, it might help.
I also get the random scurrying tick noise with no ticks nearby, as well as the white noise blasts. I don’t crash though. They just randomly come and go.
Hi there,
got to leave my experiences here…
I really like the games setting, the really great graphics and everything...BUT Ive never experienced so many crashes…never, with any game.
Just for the devs - somehow I`ve got the impression that most crashes are somehow
related to the sound system. There is always a strange “krrcks” sound minutes before
crashing, so meanwhile I know the game will crash in the next few minutes when I hear this
sound…dunno, but its 100% sure. Interestingly it seems to happen more often while running
through the world, if you walk and not run crashing seems to happen less often… and by
the way, the new island is even worse than the “old world”…
Crashes are completely random, sometimes I crash a few seconds after loggin in, sometimes
I can play for a quite long time like 3h or so. Its always the .exe crashing, buffer overflow errors
like many people reported before. Its frustrating!
Dear developers, please make this crashing issues first priority to be fixed!!! We dont need more
expansion packs or whatever, first get these issues fixed please! They seem to be on all systems
as far as I read from lots of forum posts, so it seems to be programming errors definately…
None of the tips helped for me, I tried everything mentioned on forums & google search. And Generation Zero is the only piece of software that makes troubles on my PC during the last years, all other games
run perfectly fine in highest graphics setting, no problems with temperatures, drivers or whatever.
For the new year, please try to fix these damn crash errors! I`d really love to see the game running
without these damn frustrating errors…
Wish you all happy christmas & good luck in finding the damn cause of these damn crashes which
make this really great game frustrating and nearly unplayable, cheers
Nice post, right there with you. I too have noticed that if I stay crouched I rarely if ever get audio issues and don’t crash as often. It makes everything so slow though that it’s not fun crouching always. I definitely get the white noise bursts that you refer to as “krrcks” when I am walking or running but not sure if I’ve ever heard it while crouching. I have been thinking about mentioning this myself for a while but haven’t quite been sure if I had enough personal observation to make it worth mentioning, but since you have too, I will say it seems that way to me as well.
Quite a few crashes don’t get logged by my crash reporter. Of the ones that do I have been saving (and sending) all that I can in the last week. The current count in my saves crash dumps exported from Crash Reporter from the last week is 88 crashes as of this moment.
I definitely did get the krrcks while crouching, on win7. I’m on a new pc now, but still want to get to the bottom of the crashing issue.
I’ll try with the good old theHunter: COTW fix: Going to disable Steam overlay and VR mode, SSAO and put the game on borderless mode.
It’s the same engine and I have modified the game config files to match with my theHunter:COTW settings so it disables some of the super annoying filters/blurriness from the game.
OK, I had an entire 3 weeks of basically crash-free gameplay, but today I encountered few random crashes (in the middle of a fight, while walking, etc), and later, after destroying every rival on my map I started to farm more. At beginning it went well, but after getting 4 rivals in 4 different regions I moved to 5th, and there, after region level got to 10 I have regular crashes at the end of almost every combat.
Moved to a different region - same thing 
Please report back if it improves stability.
Looking forward to any results, and if you get positive results please give us all the little exact details.
Disabling the Steam stuff had no effect other than not letting me see achievements or take screen shots.
I still leave it off anyway because it eliminates one more potential issue. Even putting the game at minimum everything didn’t work at all. It actually is more stable on Ultra for me. But one thing I have not tried is borderless window. Not sure I ever noticed that was even an option. So I will try that. Still though, since PS4/Xbox users are reporting the same crashing I doubt any little configuration issue will truly solve it. It’s frustrating not knowing the root cause of all the crashing so we could at least take whatever steps were possible to minimize it and work around it as much as possible.
This is surely premature excitement and optimism however…
Palle hit on something I had missed in everything I have done. Even though I tried every possible combination of graphics setting and all the other things I’ve done I never realized there was a borderless window option in the separate settings area. So I just ran the game for I think about two hours. I left it sitting there not doing anything but not paused. Then I left it on pause. I got in several big battles with multiple machines including one with six dogs, a couple of hunters and two harvesters. I let them go on for a while. I stayed in a barn and a house while multiple enemies freaked out all around me to the point where sound was glitching out. I ran at full speed around fields. Blew up a relay beacon.
No a single crash so far. So GZ crashers on PC - try borderless window with Steam overlay disabled and see what happens.
Edit to add: A couple more hours of play. Had one crash while squatting down in a military office while a harvester clomped around nearby. Other than that have done lots of stuff and had a lot more time than usual. Now I am also in a new area (Marshlands) which usually does also lessen crashes. Fought three hunters, twelve runner, three harvesters all while in the same house at that large town in the north of Marshlands and no crashes for the whole thing. I even got to loot them afterwards and then go on exploring. It does seem anecdotally and after four hours of experimentation that borderless window might actually make a real difference with crashing over dedicated full screen. Graphics are not quite as smooth with some stuttering at times that wasn’t there before but… interesting.
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Borderless windowed handles frame buffers differently (hence the different stutter experience), more like triple-buffering (which can be good if your framerate is very high, much higher than your monitor Hz). I wonder whether pre-rendered frames play a role in it. Like a conflict in pre-rendered content with sudden developments or something else related.
FWIW, I have set NVidia Low latency mode to “On”. That is what formerly was called “Max prerendered frames”, set to “1” for lowest latency.
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So far so good after a 5h of gameplay. Not a single crash, but this is still a very small timeframe to declare anything.
If I can rack up +10-20h of gameplay, maybe this is at least some kind of quickfix for the crashing.
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I’m still getting crashes, unfortunately, but that doesn’t surprise me because there are clearly more than one source of them. However I think I’ve put in enough hours now in Borderless Windows mode to feel confident in saying it has noticeably reduced the frequency and some of the “randomness” of the crashing. I did have a random crash when I was just walking straight ahead outdoors. If I leave the game running but do not touch mouse or keyboard, paused or just left in a safe location, it will eventually crash. It usually takes a while but it will crash eventually. This leads me to think it would have crashed either way, and that some process is always working its way up to a crash internally no matter what. Also, more and more it seems impossible to deny that there’s some kind of issue with ticks that when they explode, or spawn, or when they are supposed to spawn but don’t, the game chokes. Most of the crashes since I went borderless have been when something was going on with ticks.
I tried setting it to Ultra Low Latency. Got a crash pretty quick. Set it to “on”, crashed pretty quick. Turned it completely off, played for a while.
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Edit: What I wrote below about overlays were NOT the cause for crashing.
I’ve always played in borderless window. As stated earlier, in my case, Afterburner/Riva Tuner overlays were to blame. I used to crash a lot, and I mean a LOT. Ever since I disabled the overlays, I haven’t experienced a single crash, and rivals spawns normally for me now.
If it’s related to overlays (amongst other things), I guess it can have something to do with the red rival text that pops up when they spawn (or level up).
System: Xeon 5650, Radeon RX570, 24 gig ram, Win 10 pro