PAYDAY 2: Common Issues Troubleshooting Guide

This guide gives recommendations on what to do with in-game bugs and issues, the game not properly working and mod-related issues.

On the forum some times people suggest actions that are pointless when trying to resolve issues are suggestions that are totally incorrect.
The following steps are extremely unlikely to resolve your issues and should never be undertaken unless you are sure they will help: (it does occur that these help but it’s better to first investigate your issue).

• A lot of people, even moderators, suggest to remove any mods even before having diagnosed the issue, do not do this, it’s often very easy to pin-point what causes mod issues and removing them before looking into the source is straight out dumb.
• Reinstalling Payday is also not a good way to try and solve issues, it’s better to verify the file integrity, if this doesn’t give any negative results than it’s unlikely that reinstalling the game will work.
• Reinstalling Windows, reinstalling Windows is far too drastic and only help if you have conflicting software that you forget about or have broken drivers that might reset.

To prevent issues I advice you the following:

• 1. Check for driver updates monthly, do it every 3-6 months if your parts are older, a slightly outdated driver probably won’t cause issues but one of 2 years old is far more likely to actually do.
• 2. The chance of a save corruption is quite low but I’d strongly recommend backing up your save file (save098) from Steam\userdata\
  USERID

  \218620\remote every few weeks or even do it more often IF you might be at risk of save corruption (old drive, broken mods), most people are not though.

• Avoid using windows switching like alt-tabbing and overlays, it can cause your game to no longer respond to your input.

Q: I have a processor with many cores but the game runs bad.
A: The game is old and can only profit from the speed of 1 processor core, certain processors with many cores but very low per-core clocks will cause bad performance.

Q: My game doesn’t run at the full refresh rate of my monitor.
A: Go to

and open renderer_settings.xml, then modify the listed refresh rate to that of your screen, your operating system does also not detect 60Hz+ monitors directly, don’t forget to change it in it’s settings too.

Q: My save with all my progress is gone.
A: You can try and scan your disk with file recovery software if you didn’t make a backup earlier, sometimes people suggest the save backup guide but that’s stupid as that’s only useful before the issue appeared.

Q: I don’t have the _CommonRedist driver folder in my game folder.
A: Download the drivers from these sites: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35 .

Q: I installed BLT and my game won’t start.
A: Make sure your download is up-to-date and official, if it’s BLT2 then also try https://superblt.znix .x y z/ (remove spaces), follow the installation instructions on the site.

Q: A mod is crashing my game, what to do?
A: mod_override mods pretty much never cause crashes unless they were improperly created, check your crashlog in

to see if any mod names are mentioned, if any is mentioned in the first 3 lines than that is almost always the one causing issues, if it’s not clear, move out mods (do not throw them away!) until your game works and then move them back one by one until you find the malfunctioning one.

Q: Why does the Payday 2 download keep pausing for me?
A: The Payday 2 download is very archived reducing the download size by around 50%, when the internet download pauses Steam is unpacking the already downloaded archives.

Q: My game has weird effects over it
A: Try updating your drivers and verifying the files