How to Fix Nightwater Memory Leak and Performance Issues (2026 Guide)

Let me be honest with you: I almost refunded this game.

I picked up Nightwater the week it launched because I’m a sucker for automation sandboxes — I’ve got hundreds of hours in similar factory-builder style games, and I’ve sunk more time than I’d like to admit optimizing PC settings for buggy early-access titles. So when I tell you Nightwater’s memory leak is one of the more aggravating ones I’ve dealt with recently, that’s coming from someone who’s been through this rodeo before.

Here’s the pattern that gave it away for me: the game runs like butter for the first half hour or so. Smooth frame rate, no hitching, everything feels great. Then, right around the 40-minute mark — sometimes a little earlier if I’ve got a sprawling factory going — things start to fall apart. Stutters creep in. Biome transitions that used to be instant start taking two or three seconds. Eventually, if I push through it, I get booted to desktop with an Out of Memory error, and Discord or Chrome crashes in the background like they got shoved out the door by a bouncer.

That’s a textbook memory leak. If you’re seeing the same thing, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone — this has been all over the community forums since launch.

What’s Actually Happening Under the Hood

A memory leak happens when a game fails to release RAM or VRAM back to your system once it’s done using it. In a game like Nightwater, where you’ve got dozens (or hundreds) of farmers, assemblers, conveyor pipes, and biome assets all being tracked simultaneously, small allocation errors compound fast. The engine keeps grabbing more memory and just… never lets go.

I’m not a developer, so I won’t pretend to know exactly where in Studio Ashty’s codebase this is happening. But based on how consistent the symptoms are across different hardware setups, this smells like a garbage collection issue tied to the automation and biome-streaming systems specifically — not just a generic “the game is demanding” problem.

How to Tell If It’s a Real Leak (Not Just a Demanding Game)

Before you go down the optimization rabbit hole, confirm you’re actually dealing with a leak. Here’s what to watch for:

• Memory climbs even when you’re standing still. Pop open Task Manager on a second monitor. If RAM/VRAM usage keeps rising while you’re doing nothing — not building, not moving, just standing in an empty field — that’s a leak, not a workload issue.
• Restarting fixes it instantly. If closing and reopening the game immediately restores your frame rate, that’s the biggest tell. Actual hardware limitations don’t work that way.
• Biome transitions and menus start hanging. Multi-second freezes when switching areas or opening the crafting menu are a sign the system is scrambling for free memory.
• Background apps get killed. Windows will sometimes force-close browsers or chat clients to free up RAM for whatever’s hogging it. If Discord randomly dies mid-session, that’s your system fighting back.

If you’re nodding along to two or more of these, keep reading.

The Fixes That Actually Made a Difference For Me

I want to be upfront: none of this permanently fixes the leak. Only Studio Ashty can do that with an actual patch. What these fixes do is buy you time — they extend how long you can play before things go sideways, and in my case, that went from about 40 minutes to well over 3 hours. That’s a massive difference if you’re mid-way through automating a production line and don’t want to lose progress.

1. Give Windows a Bigger Pagefile

This was the single biggest improvement for me. When your physical RAM fills up, Windows uses your storage drive as an overflow (the pagefile/virtual memory). If it’s too small or set to automatic, the game just crashes the moment it hits the ceiling instead of gracefully degrading.

Quick version of how to set it up:

1. Search Advanced System Settings in the Start menu.
2. Under the Advanced tab, click Settings in the Performance section.
3. Go to Advanced → Change under Virtual Memory.
4. Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size.”
5. Select your fastest drive (NVMe SSD if you have one — this matters).
6. Set Initial Size to roughly 1.5x your RAM, and Maximum Size to about 3x your RAM.
7. Apply, restart your PC.

For reference, on my 32GB system I set initial to ~49,000 MB and max to ~98,000 MB. It sounds excessive, but it works, and modern SSDs handle it without much fuss.

2. Kill Hardware Acceleration in Everything Else

I didn’t expect this one to matter as much as it did. Discord, Chrome, and even Steam’s overlay all use GPU resources and system memory in the background, and when you’re already fighting a leak, every bit of freed-up VRAM counts.

• Discord: Settings → Advanced → toggle off Hardware Acceleration.
• Chrome/Edge: Settings → System → disable “Use graphics acceleration when available.”
• Steam: Settings → Interface → disable GPU accelerated rendering in web views.

None of these alone are dramatic, but stacked together they noticeably reduced how fast things degraded for me.

3. Dial Back a Few Graphics Settings

You don’t have to nuke everything to Low. In my experience, three settings mattered way more than the rest:

I kept everything else on higher settings and honestly couldn’t tell much visual difference, but the memory climb slowed down noticeably.

4. Clear Your Shader Cache

This one’s easy to overlook but worth doing, especially if you’ve been playing since launch week. A bloated or corrupted shader cache can cause its own memory spikes that stack on top of the existing leak.

• NVIDIA: Control Panel → Manage 3D Settings → set Shader Cache Size to 10GB or Unlimited, then clear out the %localappdata% NVIDIA folder (DXCache/GLCache).
• AMD: Adrenalin app → Settings → Graphics → Advanced → Reset Shader Cache.

5. Watch How You Build and Reload

This is the fix nobody talks about, and it’s the one that actually surprised me most.

If you’re constantly reloading saves in the same session — testing layouts, retrying a minigame, whatever — some assets apparently don’t clear properly between loads. I started fully closing to desktop before reloading a save instead of using the in-game load option, and it genuinely slowed the leak down.

Also, if you’re like me and love cramming fifty assemblers into one tiny corner of your base for “efficiency,” know that this seems to make things worse. Spreading your production lines across multiple biome zones instead of stacking everything in one chunk eases the load the engine has to track locally.

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My Honest Take

Look, I love what Studio Ashty is building here. The automation loop is genuinely satisfying, the biome variety keeps exploration fresh, and the lighthouse endgame has me hooked despite everything. But this memory leak is a real problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to just tell people to “wait for a patch” without giving them something to actually do in the meantime.

The combination above got me from crash-every-40-minutes to comfortably playing multi-hour sessions. It’s not a fix, it’s a life raft — but it’s a pretty good one. If you’re still struggling after trying all of this, it might genuinely be a hardware ceiling issue (8GB VRAM cards seem to suffer the worst from this), and in that case, lowering textures further is going to be your best friend.

Keep your drivers updated, keep an eye on the patch notes, and don’t be afraid to just restart the game every hour or so as a preventive habit rather than waiting for the crash. It’s annoying, but it works.

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