Almost every problem you will hit in The Crust has already been fixed and documented — the developer's patch notes read like a symptom index. Across 147 official announcements, the word "Fixed" appears 775 times as a whole word, "bug" 244 times, "stuck" 75 times and "crash" 37 times. So the first move is not to search for a workaround; it is to find out which build you are on and whether your symptom is already in the fix log. This page is organised that way.
- Official announcements read
- 147Whole Steam news feed
- "Fixed" occurrences
- 775Our whole-word count
- Most-patched symptom
- Drones stuck25 official posts
- Crash fixes
- SevenSave, load, conveyors
- Official workarounds
- OnemacOS black screen
- Fixes that need a new save
- At least oneOfficially stated
Diagnose by symptom, not by search
The most common mistake with this game is treating a bug as a mechanic. That is understandable — The Crust is a game where not working and not wired up correctly look identical on screen. A module with no power and a module hitting a known power-detection bug present the same way: nothing happens.
So the diagnosis order that saves the most time runs backwards from what people usually do:
| Step | What to check | Why it comes first |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your build version | Most symptoms are already fixed; a stale build wastes hours |
| 2 | The official fix log for your symptom | The developer’s wording often names the exact trigger |
| 3 | Whether the fix applies to existing saves | Several do not — this is stated in the notes |
| 4 | Only then, your own layout | Genuine player error is real, but it is the last suspect, not the first |
That third row is the one people miss, and it is a real trap. The Big FPS and QoL Update contains a fix with this exact caveat: “Fixed an issue where loading a save updated the market (fix applies to new saves only).” If your market prices behave oddly, no amount of rebuilding will help — that fix is baked into newly generated saves and simply is not present in older ones.
The most-patched problem in the game: drones that stop
Nothing else in The Crust comes close. Twenty-four references to “stuck” across the official feed, and the majority of them are drones. Here is the fix history, in the developer’s own words, because reading it in sequence tells you something the individual lines do not: this was not one bug, it was a category of bugs.
| Patch | Date | What it fixed |
|---|---|---|
| 0.99.79 | 24 Mar 2026 | “Fixed all known causes of drones getting stuck, including in saves where drones were already stuck.” |
| 0.99.82 | 31 Mar 2026 | “Fixed an issue where hauler drones reserved a task but failed to execute it, causing standard drones to remain idle as well.” |
| 0.99.82.5 | 6 Apr 2026 | Drones stuck on hills; drones stuck at the edge of the map unable to return |
| 0.99.82.7 | 9 Apr 2026 | “Fixed an issue where drone navigation could break in some cases, causing them to become idle.” |
| 0.99.85.3 | 5 May 2026 | “Fixed an issue where drones could sometimes get stuck in the "Building" state.” |
| 0.99.87 | 22 May 2026 | “Fixed a bug where in some cases drones could get stuck trying to pick up a resource dropped from a conveyor.” |
| 0.99.88.4 | 29 May 2026 | Drones stuck because they could not pick up a resource from a hard-to-reach spot |
| 0.99.89 | 4 Jun 2026 | Drones stuck in the elevator after loading a save during a capsule landing |
| 0.99.92 | 23 Jun 2026 | “Fixed rare cases where a specific arrangement of modules and walls could cause drones and colonists to get stuck.” |
Three things follow from that table.
The March fix was the big one, and it reached backwards. “Including in saves where drones were already stuck” is unusually generous. If you are on a pre-0.99.79 build with a save full of frozen drones, updating repairs the save rather than requiring a restart.
Idle is a symptom, not a state. Two separate rows describe drones going idle rather than physically stuck — one because a hauler had reserved a task it never executed, blocking the queue; another because navigation itself broke. In both cases the visible symptom is the same and neither cause is the drone you are looking at. The practical implication: when drones are idle, check the haulers and the navigation mesh before you start rebuilding your base.
Colonists are in the same list, and that matters. The 0.99.89 patch records that colonists could get stuck at their workplaces if you set their schedule to 0% or 10% work time, and 0.99.92 groups “drones and colonists” together. If your problem is people rather than machines, the same patch set governs it — and the schedule detail gives you a workaround on an old build: move the slider off 0% and 10%.
Crashes: seven fixes, and the pattern in them
Seven crash fixes across the official feed. None of them relate to story beats, events or weather. Every single one involves saving, loading, or conveyor construction — which is a good clue about where this engine does its hardest work.
| Patch | Crash trigger (developer’s wording) |
|---|---|
| 0.99.78 | “Fixed a crash that occurred when toggling overflow on one conveyor after removing a resource source on another.” |
| 0.99.81.1 | “Fixed an issue that caused a crash when loading a save.” |
| 0.99.85.1 | “Fixed a crash that could occur when rebuilding conveyors without pausing.” |
| 0.99.86.1 | “Fixed a crash that could occur when assigning a route from the Mobile Drilling Rig interface.” |
| Big FPS & QoL | “Fixed a crash when saving with unconfirmed room wall/floor holograms.” |
| 1.0.8 | “Fixed a rare crash that could occur when loading save files containing a large number of rooms.” |
| 1.0.9 | “Fixed a crash that could occur in some cases when loading a save due to an error initializing road data.” |
The Big FPS one deserves to be singled out, because it is the one crash that is entirely within the player’s control and it matches a habit most builders have: saving while room walls and floors are still unconfirmed holograms. If you have ever saved at that exact moment, the fix note explains the crash you saw.
The 1.0.9 row is the newest of the seven and it is a launch-window defect — a road-initialisation error, which makes sense given that roads were introduced in 1.0 itself. If you hit a load crash on a base with roads and you are on a build earlier than 1.0.9, that is the fix you need.
Saves: three failure modes, one of them permanent
Save problems are the ones players fear most, and the official feed separates them cleanly into three cases with very different outcomes.
The cascade. Hotfix 0.99.78 records: “Fixed an issue where corruption of the latest save could cause all saves to become corrupted.” This is the worst historical scenario the game had — one bad write taking every save with it. It is fixed, and it settled a debate in the community at the time: keeping multiple manual save slots is genuinely the right habit here, not paranoia.
The infinite load. Patch 0.99.79: “Fixed an issue where, in rare cases, a save could get stuck loading infinitely.” If you are searching for this symptom, note the wording — rare, and infinite, meaning the load never completes rather than completing with errors.
The incompatibility, which is not a bug at all. 1.0 replaced the logistics system, the roads and the excavation system, and the developer stated the consequence twice and plainly. From the pre-launch post: “1.0 is not save-compatible with Early Access builds.” And then the reassurance that matters: “Your save files aren’t deleted - they just won’t load in 1.0.”
There is also a quieter category of save-adjacent bug worth knowing because it explains mysterious base behaviour rather than a crash. Several fixes describe state that survives a load incorrectly: overflow resources falling to the ground after a load, a non-existent Landing Platform appearing after loading and selecting a contract, drones stuck in the elevator after a load during a capsule landing, a rocket refusing to save its refuelling progress. In each case the pattern is the same — the load restores the world but loses track of something in transit. If your base behaves impossibly straight after loading, that is the family of bugs to look for.
Official workaround
The macOS black screen, and how the developer told players to get around it. Hotfix 1.0.6, 11 September 2026, in a dedicated MacOS section:
"As an initial workaround for the black screen issue on some Mac models, we've added the ability to skip any video while we investigate the issue with the goal of resolving it completely."
The developer's instruction is to hold down the Space bar for 5 seconds to skip a video. Read the framing carefully: this is a workaround added *while* the underlying issue is investigated, so it gets you past the video rather than fixing the display problem.
A second macOS-specific defect was fixed a week later, in Hotfix 1.0.10: "MacOS: Fixed: in some cases with high numbers of resources on the floor was causing screen flickering." Same story — Mac-specific rendering issues, handled by named patches rather than by general troubleshooting.
Source: official Hotfix 1.0.6 and Hotfix 1.0.10, Steam announcements for app 1465470.
Hardware-specific issues, and why they look like game bugs
Two graphics fixes in the official log are worth knowing about because both produce symptoms that players reasonably blame on their own hardware.
AMD cards. Hotfix 0.99.85.1: “Fixed an issue causing visual glitches and artifacts on AMD graphics cards.” If you saw artefacts on an AMD card before 30 April 2026, that was the game, not a failing GPU. The same patch also fixed “an FPS drop in the research window” — a frame-rate collapse confined to one screen, which is the kind of bug that sends people into their graphics settings for no reason.
The settings trap. There is a more general lesson here, covered in full on our performance and settings page: searching for a fix by symptoms you assume exist is how you end up chasing a setting that the game does not have. If a symptom in The Crust is caused by a driver-level or build-level defect, no options menu will resolve it.
Systems that quietly stop working
Not every bug crashes. Several of the most disruptive ones make a system silently do nothing, and these are the hardest to self-diagnose because the interface looks correct.
| Symptom | Fix (developer’s wording) |
|---|---|
| Modules will not connect to power | “Fixed a bug where in some cases modules would not connect to the power grid.” (0.99.87) |
| Rooms do not detect electricity | “Fixed a bug where in rare cases modules in living quarters wouldn’t detect available electricity.” (0.99.89) |
| Contracts never appear | “Fixed a bug where in some cases contracts would not appear in the active list.” (0.99.95) |
| Contracts only appear after resetting filters | “Fixed a bug where in some cases contracts wouldn’t appear in the active tab until filters were reset.” (0.99.93) |
| One faction’s contracts are missing entirely | “Fixed a bug where contracts from SCT Ltd wouldn’t appear.” (0.99.93) |
| Barter contracts cannot be completed | “Fixed a bug that prevented completing barter contracts.” (0.99.87) — and again in 0.99.90: “Fixed once again the bug where barter contracts weren’t working.” |
| Market prices frozen | “Fixed a bug where, in rare cases, market resource prices could freeze at a single price for 6 days.” (Balance & QoL) |
| Market prices at zero | “Fixed an issue where market prices could sometimes drop to zero.” (0.99.85.3) |
| Upgrade buttons stop responding | “Fixed a bug where module upgrade buttons would stop responding after being clicked rapidly at low FPS.” (0.99.89) |
| Resources vanish next to each other | “Fixed a bug where transferring overflow resources from one storage to another placed directly next to it would cause negative values of that resource.” (0.99.92) |
Two of those rows reward a second look. The upgrade buttons failure is condition-dependent: clicking rapidly at low FPS killed them. That is worth remembering before you conclude a module is unbuyable — and it also means frame rate and interface reliability are linked in this game, which is a reason to care about the settings on our performance page. And the barter contracts entry shows a fix for the same system shipped twice, which tells you the first attempt did not hold.
Achievements and leaderboard values not recording
One more symptom belongs here because it is invisible until you go looking: achievements and leaderboard scores that simply failed to register. Hotfix 1.0.10, 17 September 2026: “Fixed an issue where, in some cases, leaderboard values would not be recorded after starting the story campaign, and some achievements could not be obtained.”
A separate and older case was even stranger — Hotfix 0.99.85.1 fixed “an issue where the achievement for rescuing all colonists from Hope-2 could not be obtained.” An achievement that existed, had a published description, and could not be earned for months. Our achievements page tracks that one in detail, including which entry it is and how many players have it now.
Where to report, and which channel actually works
The developer’s own posts name the channels, and it is worth using the right one.
| Purpose | Channel | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Bugs, discussion, day-one breakage | Discord — the developer said “If something breaks on day one - tell us on Discord. We’ll be there.” | 1.0 pre-launch post |
| Detailed patch notes, before they are anywhere else | Discord — “We also post detailed patch notes on Discord” | 1.0 announcement |
| Feature requests and voting | idea.the-crust.com — “You can vote for an idea that could be added to the game, or submit your own” | 1.0 announcement |
| General community discussion | 1.0 announcement | |
| Official support | veomstudio.com/contacts, [email protected] | Steam store listing |
The pattern across all 147 posts is that this studio responds by patching quickly and describing the fix precisely, often naming the exact trigger. That is unusually useful for players: eight patches landed in the ten days after 1.0 shipped, and the notes say what each one repaired. It also means a bug report has a real chance of turning into a line item within days.
If you only remember one thing
Before you rebuild anything, check your build version. This game's defects were fixed in named patches with precise descriptions, and several of those fixes only apply to newly generated saves. The single highest-value habit is keeping more than one save slot — the developer once had to fix a bug where one corrupted save took every other save with it.
Where this leaves you
Three things to carry forward. Diagnose by version first — most symptoms you will find discussed online were fixed in a patch you probably already have. Drones stopping was a category of bugs, not a bug, and 25 official posts later the list includes idle drones whose real cause was a blocked hauler or a broken navigation mesh. And one problem on this page is not a problem at all: if your save is from Early Access, it will never load in 1.0, the developer said so in advance, and the Previous beta branch is the official way to finish what you started.
What we have not done here is collect player workarounds from forums. Some of them are probably fine. But this page’s whole value is that every line is traceable to a patch note with a date, and mixing in unattributed advice would destroy that — which is also why the next page in this section, the update history, is the reference this one leans on hardest.