SE wont start

[rancid storm]

I have run into a issue with SE.
It used to run fine on my PC but something has changed and I don't know if it's the game settings or if some upgrade to Windows or other software has interfered with how SE runs.

First the game wouldn't launch. It got stuck halfway and then exit.

So I uninstalled and reinstalled.

Yesterday it booted up however the stage merging duplicates took almost an hour.
I exited and started again. No go.

How do I narrow down the problem?
Is there a preference file I can delete?

Suggestions ?

[lament hound]

@rancid storm if the merging stage was so long, maybe you have a Gaia workshop addon installed?
From the steam client, right-click on SpaceEngine > Manage > Browse local files, then go to the system folder, se.log is a text file. Can you upload it here?
While you're at it, delete the entire cache folder, it will be created again.

From the Steam client, use Play > Launch workshop configuration and uploading tool;
From the "Manage addons" tab disable all checked addons you have, then launch the program and see if something changes.

[lament hound]

@rancid storm for some reason your addons folder contains extracted catalogs for each cluster, nebula, galaxy, planet and star distributed with the program. By design, SpaceEngine checks catalogs in addons folder first against existing default catalogs, evaluates differences, then discards one. Doing this for every object it takes time.
I suggest to delete the unused catalogs from addons, keeping only those objects actually modded if there are any.

[rancid storm]

Oh! I get it. Makes sense now that you say it. There was a reason why I extracted the catalogs but I didn't know the consequence. I'll try it out. 🙏

[crude atlas]

If you're going to extract the default assets, extract them to /data, not /addons

Then there won't be duplicates