WARDOGS blue screens: a patch shipped, and it did not land for everyone

New since Update 0.1.2: reboots on a key press

Within hours of Update 0.1.2 going live on 30 September, the Steam Report a Problem board filled with a new pattern. The game loads, and then the whole PC reboots or blue screens the moment you press something: the first key on the "press any key" screen, any mouse movement for one player, or, most often, a side mouse button. One player can play full rounds as long as they never touch their thumb buttons. Players who had no crashes before the patch are reporting it, and one crash report names a randomly named kernel driver, the signature of an anti-cheat driver. None of that is confirmed as the cause.

Bulkhead has said nothing about it yet, and there is no fix. Unbind your side mouse buttons, and if it still happens on any key, stop playing until a hotfix lands rather than rebooting into it repeatedly. If your launcher shows WD-L018 or WD-L014 instead, that is the WD-L page.

Before 0.1.2

Three separate faults take the whole machine down while you are playing WARDOGS, and they are indistinguishable in the moment. The stop code is what tells them apart, and reading it first will save you an evening of applying the wrong fix.

What has actually been done about it

On 3 September the moderator team in the official Discord pinned a thread saying that an update had been released which was meant to resolve the blue screens, and that the feedback coming back on it was mixed. The thread was opened specifically for players who had taken the update and were still crashing.

That is worth stating precisely, because it cuts both ways. Something shipped, which means this was accepted as a real fault rather than left as everyone's own hardware problem. And it did not clear the reports, which means updating and hoping is not a plan on its own.

Bulkhead have not published a root cause. We are not going to invent one for them.

What 588 players said afterwards

Six minutes after opening that thread the same moderator attached a poll, asking players which fault they were on and telling them to verify their game files first as an update to resolve this was deployed. So the answers below describe who is still crashing after the patch, which is the number that matters.

What they are hitting	Votes	Share
System crash, restart required — BSOD	318	54%
Unexpected Error	128	22%
AntiCheat Refuse	107	18%
RPC Service Error (Elytra Anti-Cheat)	25	4%
KERNELBASE.dll	10	2%

Read the top line first. More than half of the players who answered had taken the update and were still blue-screening. "Mixed feedback" is the moderator being polite about it.

The poll was still open when we read it, with eleven days to run, so these shares can move.

The three faults, and how to tell which is yours

The one the patch addressed. No consistent stop code, arriving during matches through the Closed Beta 02 window. If you were crashing before 3 September and you are not crashing now, this was you and it is done.

INVALID_KERNEL_HANDLE. A named bugcheck that traces to a Windows update and its interaction with a third-party driver, which is why the same crash turns up under other games on the same machine. A WARDOGS patch will never fix this one. The page for it asks you to stop playing until it is dealt with.

A dump naming a .sys file. The anti-cheat refusing to run alongside a third-party kernel driver — RGB software, motherboard utilities, hardware monitors. That page works through identifying and removing the named driver.

If the stop code is none of these, the patch is your best lead and the thread above is where the remaining reports are being collected.

Why we are not telling you to reinstall

Nothing in the reports so far points at the game's own files. A blue screen is the operating system stopping itself because something at kernel level did something it is not allowed to do, and a game running in user space cannot do that on its own — which is why all three of these faults involve a driver, an anti-cheat component or a Windows update rather than a corrupted install.

Verifying your files takes two minutes and rules it out. Reinstalling takes forty and rules out the same thing.

How firm this is

Graded reported. The update and the mixed feedback come from a volunteer moderator relaying them in the official Discord rather than from a Bulkhead patch note, and no root cause has been published by anyone.

The poll is stronger evidence than the sentence above it, and it is worth being clear about what it is and is not. It is 588 self-selected people in one Discord answering a question about themselves, which makes it good for ranking the faults against each other and poor for estimating how many players are affected overall. Nobody counts as a data point twice, the options were written by the moderator team rather than by us, and the poll had not closed.

What is not in doubt is the triage: the two pages below describe faults with named causes, and the stop code is a fact your own machine wrote down.

A fourth stop code, since launch

SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, stop code 0x7E, is the one arriving on the Report a Problem board since Early Access opened, and it does not fit any of the three above. It has its own page now, because it has its own answer: Team17 support tells players to turn off Hyper-V and every other Windows virtualisation feature, which has ended the crash for some machines and not for others.

WARDOGS blue-screens Windows on launch →

The first two steps on this page still apply while it is happening — stop playing, and repair Windows afterwards.

When there is no blue screen at all

Some players report the whole PC hard-rebooting around the point Elytra starts, rather than blue-screening — no stop code, no dump, just Event Viewer logging Kernel-Power 41 on the way back up. That is a different animal from everything above, because it carries none of the evidence a stop code gives you. WARDOGS hard-reboots the PC at anti-cheat start →