Outriders crash data file size is taking over people's hard drives - here's how to fix it

Outriders crossplay
(Image credit: Square Enix)

If you've been playing Outriders on PC since its launch on April 1, then chances are your device has been slowly amassing a file full of crash dump data that can rival the size of entire games. A player has reported finding 23GB of these crash reports deep within their C: drive, taking up precious space that could be used for other game updates or programs.

The full Outriders game only takes up 42GB (despite your system insisting it needs 70GB of available space to start the download), so the sheer size of the crash data is bewildering. It's typical of games built in Unreal Engine to save data after a crash, but this is so that the game developers can use the information to prevent it from happening by patching the root cause.

It's unusual for games to retain crash files on your drive though – especially long term enough to have amassed this much data. The issue was initially reported on Reddit by user Topasteroven47 on the official Outriders subreddit, so with any luck this issue can be fixed going forwards. 

How to free up file space

Thankfully, you can delete the crash data with no issues if you need to free up space.
Follow the steps below to see for yourself if Outriders has been commandeering your available drive storage:

  • Head into your (C:) drive
  • Find the file named 'Users' and click into it
  • There will be a file called whatever username you've put on the PC, so head into that
  • From there, click into AppData, and then Local
  • You should find a file called 'Madness' – this was the original codename for the Outriders game. Any crashes that have occurred may have appeared as "UE4-Madness".
  • Pop into the Saved file and then delete them if needed. 

Some users on the original Reddit thread are also experiencing this issue, with one individual finding a whopping 32GB of space being taken up. For context, that's larger than the entire game file for The Witcher 3. It's difficult to say if this is a common issue, but nobody on the TechRadar team has experienced the problem first-hand.

Outriders has experienced a rocky launch, a familiar tale with most new games on release. A patch has already been released on PC and PlayStation for crossplay, but it looks like Square Enix has some tidying up to do before the game starts to meet everyone's full expectations. For now, keep an eye on your available drive space to make sure the game isn't taking up more room on your PC than it should be.

Via PC Gamer

Jess Weatherbed

Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.