Soul Hackers 2 How to Fix Endless Boot Screen Bug

For Soul Hackers 2 players who can’t start the game and stuck on a “spinning crystal of doom” screen, this guide will help you to fix it.

WARNING

The steps below are provided only as a courtesy. Proceed at your OWN RISK: this may delete save progress, etc., but is currently the only known way to get past this issue (so you can’t use the save anyway).

The full ramifications of this are unknown – so if you’re not confident, don’t do this step. Just know, that until/unless the devs fix this issue, you won’t be able to launch the game.

Consider also:

If you delete the two files only, it should work to restore access, but you may get corruption again. If you delete the whole SOULHACKERS2 folder, it should then cleanup the cloud save (in theory).

Which way you go is up to you. I couldn’t even get as far as manual save, so I just deleted the folder to make sure EVERYTHING was frickin clean. But if you got into the game a ways, you might want to keep your save, so deleting the two .DAT files should be enough – but again, proceed at your own risk.

The Problem

You were able to play the game; but when you booted this time, you got stuck in a “spinning crystal of doom” boot screen and cannot continue.

Root Cause

ATLUS/SEGA doesn’t know how to write their software to check the integrity of files and where there’s an issue, correct it. The result is that when you have cloud saves enabled, they end up getting corrupted during sync; you can manually re-sync, but you’re just sync’ing corrupted data files.

Solution

You need to delete the local user data file store for the game. In Windows, you need to navigate to your Roaming AppData folder. If your Steam is installed on the C: drive, and say your login username was “JSmith”, your path would be C:\Users\JSmith\AppData\Roaming. Open any Windows Explorer folder and type that into the address bar to get to the main folder.

Then, go into the SEGA folder, into the SOULHACKERS2 folder, and navigate down into the SystemData folder. So you’re going into (from the path above):

AppData\Roaming\SEGA\SOULHACKERS2\Steam\150288879\SaveData\SYSTEMDATA

And delete “data.dat” and “systemdata.dat”.

If you have NEVER created a manual save because you never got that far, you should be able to just delete the whole SOULHACKERS2 folder (because you lose nothing and it’s cleaner, just to make sure there’s not some other corrupt file somewhere

Game should run correctly now. If not, you may need to disable cloud save and repeat these steps.

That’s all we are sharing today in Soul Hackers 2 How to Fix Endless Boot Screen Bug, if you have anything to add, please feel free to leave a comment below, you can also read the original article here, all the credits goes to the original author inveni_te_ipsum

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1 thought on “Soul Hackers 2 How to Fix Endless Boot Screen Bug”

Erika says:

September 3, 2022 at am7:51

After having this issue myself I found a slightly better, if more time consuming solution. So long as the data.dat file for your most recent save is intact and uncorrupted, you can replace the corrupted system.dat file for that save with any other. Having not looked into the code but seeing what this did, I’ve concluded that the system.dat file stores the settings of the save file as well as what the file should display on the load screen. When I did this for my file (I replaced file 1’s system.dat with the autosave’s one), it said I was where I was in the autosave with the same time and so on, but the moment I loaded it, I was where I was in my file 1 save. I immediately saved to file 2 and the data that was displayed on file 2 was what it should’ve been for file 1 (in safehouse, with about half an hour of extra playtime).

Simply put, backup your saves outside the file, then delete the savedata folder. Reintroduce the saves 1 at a time, booting inbetween to find the problem save (keep the backups for the reintroduced saves tho). When you find the problem save, replace everything in the save except for the data.dat with that of a working save (if you don’t have one, create a new game and save to get one) and try booting the game with the frankenstein save. If the data.dat is not the corrupted file, the game should boot properly and, when you go to load the frankenstein save, the data on the title screen will be wrong, but on load it should be correct. If this works, make a new save on that file and it should be fixed.

I’m gonna play through on the frankenstein save i made to see if I have any issues, but I think cus it’s booted properly it should work just fine