Solved [HELP] Game will not launch from Steam on PC

criswaller

Greenhorn
I am reporting this for my husband.

He has a new Helios Predator laptop running Windows 10. On his old laptop, SDV ran with no issues, but he had not previously tried to run it on this PC.

After the 1.5 update, he tried to launch the game. He clicks Play and gets the small screen that says "Preparing to launch Stardew Valley" and the button changes to the spinning Steam icon, then the window closes and the icon on the Steam launch page goes back to Play.

We have tried-
  • Uninstalling SMAPI and all mods
  • Uninstalling and reinstalling Stardew Valley
  • Restarting the computer
  • Renaming the the startup_preferences file in %AppData%/StardewValley- this file does not get rewritten when we reinstall/relaunch
  • Checking under Properties > Set Launch Options to make sure it's empty
  • There are no error logs.
Any hints as to how to solve this?
 
Last edited by a moderator:

PinkRabite

Newcomer
The only way I was able to get it to launch on PC was fully deleting the startup_preferences file. Maybe he could try that? Though in theory renaming it should have been enough, but you never know.
 

toughflower

Newcomer
I am also having this issue! I have done all the same things you have done and still can't get it to launch either.
 

ConcernedApe

Creator & Developer
Staff member
Here is the normal checklist of things to try when Stardew won't launch:
  • Delete the startup_preferences file in %AppData%/StardewValley
  • Go into the game file directly (you can find this by right clicking game in steam library > properties > local files > browse local files...) and then into the folder titled “_CommonRedist”, then “XNA”, then “4.0”, then “xnafx40_redist” installer. Once there, run the installer and hit repair.
  • If you don’t have SMAPI installed, right-click on Stardew Valley in Steam, then go to Properties > Set Launch Options, and make sure it is empty.
  • If you are running the software "RivaTuner", exit out of it completely before running the game
  • Go to Device Manager > System Devices and check if there is something called "FrescoLogic Display Adapter". this can cause incompatiblity issues.
 

criswaller

Greenhorn
Here is the normal checklist of things to try when Stardew won't launch:
  • Delete the startup_preferences file in %AppData%/StardewValley
  • Go into the game file directly (you can find this by right clicking game in steam library > properties > local files > browse local files...) and then into the folder titled “_CommonRedist”, then “XNA”, then “4.0”, then “xnafx40_redist” installer. Once there, run the installer and hit repair.
  • If you don’t have SMAPI installed, right-click on Stardew Valley in Steam, then go to Properties > Set Launch Options, and make sure it is empty.
  • If you are running the software "RivaTuner", exit out of it completely before running the game
  • Go to Device Manager > System Devices and check if there is something called "FrescoLogic Display Adapter". this can cause incompatiblity issues.
Thanks!

We had already done #1 and 3.

We do not have RivaTuner or FrescoLogic Display Adapter.

The last step worked! We could not find the XNA file earlier; thanks for the directions on how to locate it, but we couldn't find it there. It actually turned out to be here:
image_2020_12_23T04_32_56_837Z.png
 
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