Trying to run Ark: Surival Evolved on Mac OS X 10.14.16 via Steam. However, the client frequently crashes with segmentation violations or bad instruction. Anyone else been able to run this game without these issues? If so, did u encounter these issues before but found a solution?
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.14
Good advice so far, but I'd start with...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes or more.
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
Good advice so far, but I'd start with...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes or more.
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
The "malloc" error is memory related. It may be a bad memory module, or CPU/Logic Board, a compatibility issue with some other third party software (usually anti-virus, cleaning apps, or third party security software), or a bug in the game itself.
You can try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected (try the extended test as well if offered), but they won't always detect problems. You can try running a longer more thorough memory test by creating and booting from a Memtest86 USB stick. Even this dedicated memory test may not detect any problems. Plus once in a while there may be false errors (Hammer test is one test which may actually produce errors that may not be significant as it is testing for a known memory vulnerability which a lot of RAM has and is unlikely to occur during normal use).
If you are using any of the third party software I previously mentioned in the first paragraph, then uninstall those apps by following the developers' instructions. Those types of apps are not needed on a Mac and they usually cause more problems than they solve, plus they impact system performance.
Is the game actually compatible with the version of macOS you are using?
Have you checked the Steam game forums to see if anyone else is having these problems or to see if they have any ideas? You may also want to consider contacting Steam directly for assistance, or perhaps even contacting the developer of the game directly as well. Games are always tricky to troubleshoot as they typically push computers and operating systems to their limits and many times game developers may utilize unsanctioned system calls to improve performance which is very dangerous to do as those unsanctioned system calls may not be stable.
RedWolf Said:
"ark survival evolved crashing with segmentation violations or bad instructions: Trying to run Ark: Surival Evolved on Mac OS X 10.14.16 via Steam. However, the client frequently crashes with segmentation violations or bad instruction. Anyone else been able to run this game without these issues? If so, did u encounter these issues before but found a solution?"
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No. I have not come across this issue.
It seems you may have a corrupt install. So, save all necessary data, uninstall the app, and then reinstall it.
Some Apps & indeed MacOS it's self can leave nearly impossible artifacts to track down, thisApp is great for finding & getting rid of those if the App is still installed...
https://nektony.com/mac-app-cleaner
Other than that a few places to look...
Have you emptied the trash lately?
Terminal code to clean DocumentRevisionsfolder…
System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community
System Memory OS 10.12.6 Sierra - Apple Community
4 suggestions…
Look for iOS backups…
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
OmniDiskSweeper shows you the files on your drive, largest to smallest, and lets you quickly Trash or open them.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
Purging local backups
Please note that although this doesn't affect your remote backup from Time Machine, this will get rid of the redundancy (at least until the next Time Machine backup) that a local backup disk will provide. If you need such redundancy or are worried about the recovery of your data then you would be best served to let macOS determine when to purge these files.
Start Terminal from spotlight.
At the terminal type tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates.
Hit enter.
Here, you'll now see a list of all of the locally stored Time Machine backup snapshots stored on your disk.
Next you can remove the snapshots based on their date. I prefer to delete them one at at time. Once my "System" disk usage is at an acceptable level, I stop deleting but you can delete all of them if you want to reclaim all of the disk space.
Back at the terminal, type tmutil deletelocalsnapshots YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS , where will be one of the dates from your backup. This will be in the form of xxx-yy-zz-abcdef. Try to start with the oldest snapshot.
Hit enter.
Repeat for as many snapshot dates as required
http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2018/03/27/cleaning-up-time-machine-local-snapshots.html
tmutil deletelocalsnapshots / # deletes all the snapshots
BobHarris file sizes…
sudo du -hx | sort -h
sudo du -hx ~/| sort -h
Nope. If I reboot and I go to the ARK options screen and wait about 30s, then usually it won't crash. Then I can go in and play singer player mode locally. Once I get that far, ARK doesn't crash. However, when I try to join an ARK server, it usually crashes after it loads the mods.
It's just so strange that it will run sometimes w/o crashing just by starting it up multiple times. Also the fact I can't really find anyone else that seems to have my problems.
I gave App Cleaner a shot but again deleting items there just added it to the purgeable disk space. What finally worked for increasing free disk space was to do a Time Machine backup to my portable drive and then delete the local Time Machine snapshots. Got back over 200 GB. I had no idea those existed, thanks for the info on them.
So once I had ample free disk space, I installed ARK under a new non-admin user. However, ARK still crashing as before.
I do have a Mac OS Mohave APFS that I set up a while back for running 32-bit only apps when i finally upgrade to Monterey as primary. I'll try to install ARK there and see how it goes.
Uninstalled and re-installed but app still crashes. It's crashing in malloc() with a bad instruction. Seems a rather odd thing to occur in a system library.
Got password reset using recovery mode on the Mohave APFS. Unfortunately, ARK has the same problems there as well. Given that safe boot didn't work, I didn't hold out a lot of hope it would work there. I can get into a single player local game after a number of tries but ARK crashes every time I try to join a multiplayer server. So yea I guess maybe I give up on ARK.
I have run Civ4 and Civ6 on Mohave w/o issues (kow).
I was going to re-install Ark with a different regular user since Steam doesn't see the ARK install on my main account. However, I have a disk space issue. To make room, I uninstalled ARK but it didn't give back the 90 GB+ to free disk space but rather it seems to purgeable disk space. I've tried a couple things for OS X to give me back some purgeable disk space to no avail. I've restarted and I tried creating a large file that exceeds the free disk space but got an out of space error when I tried that. OS X says I have over 200 GB purgeable but just can't get it to put it back on the free disk space. Steam only sees the free disk space so it won't install ARK.
No worries. You got me past the disk space issue. Thanks kindly for your help.
I'll report the results of my ARK install in the Mohave APFS setup once I get that far.
My google searches have not really turned up anything about the specific issues I'm having with ARK.
Darn, I rebooted to that Mohave APFS startup disk but it's been quite a while since I used it, I couldn't remember the password. I tried to reset using my apple id. It accepts my apple id and allows me to enter a new password but then the new password doesn't work. Apple's support document says it should tell me to restart before using the new password but it's not asking me to do that. Not sure what the problem is. Fortunately, I was able to use Option key on boot to choose the startup disk.
I have the exact same symptoms with Civ5 in Mojave, sometimes takes 4 tries to get it into a game, rarely crashes once in a game but curiously will freeze on trying to quit the game 4 out of 5 times.
I never play online.
Tried Safe mode (yup took a while to get to the login screen). However, Ark still crashes as before. Thanks for the suggestion.
Well, I'm out of ideas, sorry.:(
To find out if it's system wide or user specific, try this...
Open System Preferences>Users & Groups, unlock the lock, click on the little plus icon, make a new admin account, log out & into the new account.
Does it work in the new account?
ark survival evolved crashing with segmentation violations or bad instructions
