game_frozen.md

Game Frozen or Stuck?

Infinite Loop in Scripts

If your game is frozen or stuck in any way, then the most likely culprit is an infinitely running loop in your script. To get past the freezing, run the game with ?noScripts in the URL:

Link to no freeze

Then, to fix your script, make sure you have a sleep() or any other timed function like hack() or grow() in any infinite loops:

while(true) {
    // This is an infinite loop that does something
    ...
    await ns.sleep(1000); // Add a 1s sleep to prevent freezing
}

Also make sure that each while loop gets to the awaited function or break, for example the next snippet has a sleep() function, but it nor any possible conditional breaks are never reached and therefore will crash the game:

while(true) {
    let currentMoney = ns.getServerMoneyAvailable("n00dles");
    let maxMoney = ns.getServerMaxMoney("n00dles");
    if (currentMoney < maxMoney/2){
        await ns.grow("n00dles");
    }
    if (currentMoney === maxMoney){
        break;
    }
}

If n00dles current money is, for example, 75% of the maximum money, the script will reach neither grow() nor break and the game will crash. Adding a sleep like in the first example, or changing the code so that the awaited function or break is always reached, would prevent the crash.

Common infinite loop when translating the server purchasing script in starting guide to scripts is to have a while loop, where the condition's change is conditional:

var ram = 8;
var i = 0;

while (i < ns.getPurchasedServerLimit()) {
    if (ns.getServerMoneyAvailable("home") > ns.getPurchasedServerCost(ram)) {
        var hostname = ns.purchaseServer("pserv-" + i, ram);
        ns.scp("early-hack-template.script", hostname);
        ns.exec("early-hack-template.script", hostname, 3);
        ++i;
    }
}

If the player does not currently have enough money to purchase a server, the if's condition will be false and ++i will not be reached. Since the script doesn't have sleep() and value i will not change without the if being true, this will crash the game. Adding a sleep() that is always reached would prevent the crash.

Black screen

If the game window becomes a black screen without the game itself crashing, this is caused by the game running too many concurrent scripts (the game runs on a browser and each tab can only use so much ram until it crashes). Depending on which scripts are running and your hardware, this number can vary between 50000 to 100000 instances (in version 2.0.2. In prior versions this number was about 1/5th of that). To prevent this from happening make sure to multithread the scripts as much as possible.

Bug

Otherwise, the game is probably frozen/stuck due to a bug. To report a bug, follow the guidelines here.