A friend has suggested this game to me as he really enjoys it. After having the game open for ~2mins, in game or in menu, it crashes silently to desktop.

I am running a new laptop with an 1165G7 Xe iGPU, so there is possibly a 'too new' driver issue here?

I have tried:
- Updating all of .net/dx/UE frameworks
- Latest and 2nd latest graphics drivers
- All graphics settings to 'Low'
- Using fullscreen and windowed modes

If anyone has any idea, that would be much appreciated!

edit: Apparently I can't type, or edit the topic title :(

I'm experiencing the same issue. The game quits after about a minute without giving any errors. Everything looks and works great while it's running. I'm also running on new hardware - an Alienmware x17 R1 laptop with 11th gen Core I9 processor and NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics card running Windows 10 Pro 21H1 with all the updates. As far as I know all my drivers are up to date. If anyone has found any solution to this problem I'd like to hear it. Thanks!

[Update] I still haven't figured out why the program is dying after only a minute or two of game play. During that one to two minutes everything works fine. The graphics look great, the sound is good, the game is responsive. But then for no apparent reason it just shuts down. I would really appreciate it if anyone has any ideas how to fix this. Thanks!

[Update 2] I've determined that the program is causing an access violation exception (0xC0000005) when trying to read from memory location 0x00000000. The program causing the problem is AvenColony-Win64-Shipping.exe and the location of the error is AvenColony_Win64_Shipping!opus_repacketizer_out_range+55b23. I used the DebugDiag 2 tool (update 3.2) to get this information. You can find the tool on Microsoft's web site. I've opened a ticket with GOG Support on this and have attached all the relevant files. Hopefully they will be able to figure something out.

The people at GOG support have finally hit upon the resolution for this problem. The issue appears to be a problem with the newer Intel i-Series processors (10th gen and later). The resolution can be found in a troubleshooting aricle on Gog's support website. Here is the link: (you may need to copy and paste it into your web browser)

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019775837-Game-does-not-launch-Intel-10th-gen-CPU-or-newer?product=gog

Basically, what you need to do is add a new environment variable to the System Variables in the Advanced tab of the System Properties dialog (press the Windows key and R and then type SystemPropertiesAdvanced into the Open text box and press Enter)

The new system enfironment variable name is:
OPENSSL_ia32cap

And the value you need to set this variable to is:
~0x20000000

Hope this helps someone.

Dave S

Hi Dave, Thanks for your work on this. I had the same problem and thanks to your post everything works fine now.

Thank you for this post dave.
I tried this out as well and it works!

I have a similar problem: the game starts, but keeps crashing to desktop after 2-3 minutes.
My setup is i7-12700H with a RTX 3060 Nvidia, Windows 10 v22H2
I contacted gog support about this problem, as well as the game developers.
The game developers mentioned a hardware incompatibility and suggested to turn off the internet connection.

So another workaround, was to go to the windows firewall and add the 2 Aven Colony files to the blocked list.

Step by step:
press windows start, type firewall and hit enter
at the windows defender firewall, go to Advanced settings
click on outbound rules
create a new outbound rule
select program, click next
choose the path to AvenColony.exe, click next
select block connection, click next
select every possible domain, click next
give it a meaningful name and click finish.
create another new outbound rule for AvenColony-Win64-Shipping.exe
this one can be found in the Folder: Aven Colony\AvenColony\Binaries\Win64
in your list of rules, you will se a stop/blocked icon in front of your new rules

This solution was suggested in a Steam Forum.

Hope this helps.