Game doesn't load, crashes system or freezes on Nintendo Switch

My wife and I are currently having the same problem, limited to the Switch release. We ended up starting a Realm just so we could move her world to the XboxOne for her to play on.

The problem is two-fold: first, everything becomes laggy (with a small chance of recovering) and second, when this happens often the only fix is to return to the Home menu and close the game, which will take much longer than it should (and if you close it when the problem is not occurring the game will close quickly)

We've noticed that there are several "triggers":
-Starting up: When you load in on Switch, the game first goes through a couple of checks to make sure you are logged into your Microsoft account and that everything is synced properly. During this step, trying to do anything can cause the game to do everything extra laggy, though if you wait a little bit it should finish the process ok. HOWEVER, if you stay in the main menu for very long (like, a couple minutes?) then it will hit the perma-lag that you then have to close the game.

-Accessing the Marketplace or Profile seems to easily lock in the perma-lag unless you time accessing them just right after the game hits that "safe" time.

-While playing, at any random time, the game may start lagging; you can move around like normal, but breaking blocks, creatures moving, etc. will not be updated (wonderful when a currently invisible Creeper comes along...). The loading image will pop onscreen every time you try to open a chest or your item menu as well. If you are lucky, it will recover and let you continue playing. Otherwise, Home and quit.
Also, this seems to be very likely to happen within 10-30 minutes of starting to play in multiplayer (online/network) worlds. Haven't tested with split-screen.

It seems like the problem is a weird memory issue, just based on how long it takes to close the game when this happens...?

We are also having this issue. The game will not load at all.  It doesn't even get to the mojang screen. Then we get a screen that says it encountered an error and had to close.  I have restarted the switch, redownloaded and checked for corrupt data nothing works.  I'm frustrated because we paid for the game and can't even play.  It's been like this for months.  

I have the same problem, it loaded once but it took aproximately 15 minutes to load.

Same problem since the nether update's full release.

Same problem here. Never was too much of an issue at first but recently it has been happening. 

Its gotten worse sadly. I hope it gets fixed. Maybe a memory leak issue?

For those experiencing this issue, please check that the Nintento Switch firmware is updated to the latest version (11.0.1). You can check this in System Settings > System. Please let us know if this improves the issue.

Yes, I am updated in the last version and it stills happens.

Same for me, running 11.0.1. 

My system firmware is up to date, as well as out minecraft. It still will NOT load in our main players switch profile. Loads fine in all others (3 other profiles)

I'm having the same problem. I have also been in realms and all of a sudden I would be able to see through blocks. Then if I try opening something, like my inventory, I am on that stuck loading screen, where my only option is to exit the game causing it to crash. Def a bug they need to fix for the Switch. I was very excited to get Minecraft yesterday only to have this happen.

There is a similar bug where sometimes if you open a chest or inventory it won't load.

also experiencing the same issue as everyone else. It is every easy to duplicate for debugging. Just load minecraft and go make a cup of coffee. when you get back and click Play you will see the loading bar (i know everyone has seen this). Having a microsoft account tied to the switch account seems to be a thing, when i log out of my MS account and try to play i experience the issue alot less however then i cannot access my online servers which is the whole reason we want the game so we can play with friends and family online. I thought maybe it was the actual online issues that could be causing it so i downloaded the bedrock server from mojang did some MAGIC in my router and connected to a local PC server i set up and i experience the same problems. I am happy to assist with debugging if needed please message me if i can help.....just like everyone else i just want to smash blocks and shoot arrows at Ghast's from the safety of my base.

EDIT:After playing on my custom server i setup my game only crashes when i go to the marketplace. Its been so fun playing with no crashes me and wife now play like its a realm and its private on my PC behind the firewall so no connection problems 🙂 maybe this will help figure out where the issue is such as a packet drop issue or something similiar....

Having the same problems as everyone else and reported it as a bug aswell. It only happens on realms and servers for me as well as opening marketplace which tells me that it may be a connection issue. I have great internet connection so it isn't my wifi. I have also checked the logs on my router and the crashes don't show up which tells me that it isn't on my end. The switch has always had terrible connection so it is probably that combined with something else on minecraft/Microsofts end. This has been happening to me since I got the game summer of 2019, but has been more frequent since the 1.16 update.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that cause the menu to load slowly, or to essentially freeze the game. These seem to happen inconsistently, but occur the majority of the time. For me, it is rare that any of the menus work as expected.

• Attempting to load a realm, including if that's the first thing you try to do when opening the game

• Attempting to load a different world after exiting a previous one

• Accessing marketplace content

• (Sometimes) when attempting to access your inventory or a chest in a realm

• (Sometimes) when attempting to access your list of realms and offline worlds

For the things which don't outright cause the game not to respond, there are also things that take far too long.

For example, the 'fetching realm information' dialog can appear on screen for a minute just to toggle a basic setting.

Just to reiterate: Switch firmware fully updated, game fully updated, no other connectivity issues in other games or on other devices. It is a faulty product as things stand, because although the game (largely) works when a world is loaded up, the menus fail more often than they work.

I am having the same issue on my Nintendo Switch with my realm which has progressively become worse. It first started as the game not showing when I would interact with objects (ie- hit a block, open a gate, open a chest etc.), so I'd have to leave the realm then rejoin, then it would not let me join the realm or check the marketplace as it would be stuck forever loading, and now it won't even let me get beyond the Play button on the starting page. In order to escape the loading page I need to force quit and am given the message that 'the software closed because an error occurred.' I've done all suggested troubleshooting (ie- restart my switch, delete/reinstall software, check to make sure it's not the physical cartridge, check for system/software/controller updates, check for corrupted data, check internet connection) and nothing has helped. My friend who plays in the realm on Windows 10 has no issues. 

For me, this is happening constantly even when I'm not on a Realm. I mostly play on my own in my own little survival world, but crashes and lagging are a regular occurrence. There have been times where I'd open the inventory menu and get stuck on that gray loading bar for like 10 minutes, forcing me to close the game. Then when I reload, certain mobs in my world like my villagers or farm animals disappear. Because of this, I make plenty of back ups and use Realms to back up to my PC.

Same issue here, and it is definitely getting progressively worse. I also thought it was a memory issue, and I archived a bunch of my other games into my SIM card to see if the additional free space in the console memory would help. It doesn’t. It sometimes takes up to 5 minutes just to load my custom character, show a chest inventory, or even show my personal inventory, and half the time just doesn’t load at all. And if you force-close the game from the home-screen, it does not close correctly and results in the gray “The software was closed because of an error” message every time. I started playing Minecraft to play with my friends in a realm a couple nights a week, so this is a huge issue, and I don’t like that even when I play on my own survival world offline, it is way more laggy and prone to crashing than before the last update. 

Further update. This might have been clarified above, but it must exclusively be due to an aspect of the online stuff. I set up a second account on my Switch, which doesn't have a Nintendo Online account. As the account can't connect to marketplace or Realms, the game loads offline worlds without any issues at all. I had one random crash, but none of the other issues mentioned above.

Yes, I updated my Switch firmware, I have seen zero change after hotfixes, I have deleted the game and redownloaded, I have even started an offline single player world to see if that helps, NO CHANGE. This has made the game completely unplayable at times. I used to stream from a multiplayer realm I have been a part of for over a year now. I can no long stream Minecraft at all because it is so problematic and no one wants to see the thing freezing and lagging out in the middle of building/mining, let alone as often as it happens in a single 3 hour long stream is ridiculous and unacceptable. 
On top of that, this has been an issue for months now. 
Some of us may have the option or ability to change to a different console or play on a computer instead, but many do not have that option or luxury. Please keep this in mind when looking to resolve this issue. and on top of it, why should anyone have to spend more money for bedrock version on pc, buying the game on a different console, or buying a different console to be able to play a game they already own? Please give this issue the attention it deserves. Because the longer you take to resolve this issue, the longer you are neglecting a large part of your customer base (young and old) while pumping out hotfixes for other issues on other consoles. Please help solve this problem, I miss playing MC and I miss having fun with friends in a time when we can't leave our home.

• I recently found a strange "Miscellaneous" cached data in the Minecraft storage on my Switch taking up 161 MB. I wonder if anyone with this issue has that?

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• In my experience the wavy loading lines in the picture below just attached by someone else indicate that the client is trying to catch up with processing the amount of data coming from the server. Normally it's rare to see that in singleplayer. I think it suggests that the Switches with this issue have a background process stuck in a loop that is eating up processing resources.

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When the game crashes and I log back in I have the following problems;

 Animals missing from   my farm, named cured villagers missing,  items duplicate.

 If the game crashes while on day cycle when logging back in it will suddenly be night time or vice versa.  All these problems don’t happen all the time but are really annoying! 

This has actually been an issue with nintendo switch since 2018.

I have purged all my downloads and reinstalled the game multiple times, still nothing. If anything it makes it way worse.

Also on startup the game takes anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes to launch and a solid 3 minutes to join a world or create a world.

So my game was completely unable to be played before because it wouldn't even let me into the realm, but I've found a slight solution. Someone on FB suggested logging out of my Microsoft account in the game, archiving the software (on the home screen of the switch hover on the game icon and click the minus button, manage software, archive software). Then once that's done click on the software as if you were going to open it to play and it prompts you to update the software. Once the software is updated I am able to log in and join my realm! Still have the issue of it always spawning me in at night and an occasional lag, but I was completely unable to play before so I think it has helped! Curious to see if this helps anyone else! 

I've noticed that when I don't press any controls for more than a few minutes the game has the above listed issues.  When is this getting resolved?  It is getting old and really really really annoying.  I too have had animals disappear, my horse disappear and items in my inventory disappear.  It sucks that I spend time on the game only to have the things I am collecting disappear.  Especially when they are rare items that I have spent a lot of time trying to collect.  I am running off a download.  My brother is running off the hard copy and having the exact same issues.

I've noticed that if I turn off the game during one of its freezing sessions, a combination of three things would occure:

1) My progress would not have been saved up to that point, which is to be expected.

2) One or more of my villagers would disappear. A certain farmer specifically would always vanish, which has resulted in me always saving right in front of him.

3) An item would be replaced with a copy of another item. For example, my Depth Strider II Diamond Boots were replaced by a second copy of my Frost Walker II boots.

Hello,

I've posted this in another similar bug here: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCPE-111640?focusedCommentId=904884&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-904884

I think these all related, so decided to duplicate here as well.

I might have discovered why this is hapenning, but I would need your input on this to prove.
I think this is related to Nintendo Switch Online Cloud backup. It almost feels like the system is trying to backup save files while you're actually playing the game and it locks save files (and all your settings) and this causes some internal issues within the game and it shows us this great and annoying loading indicator.
What I did is disabled automatic backup for Minecraft in system settings and so far I haven't see that indicator.
I will keep on watching this, but please, try doing the same and answer these questions:

1. Do you have Nintendo Switch Online subscription?
2. Do you have automatic saved data backup enabled?
3. What is the size of your backup data for Minecraft? * 
This also explains why this issue never happens in Flight mode - auto backup system just doesn't work without internet and Minecraft works fine.
Please, answer this comment and ask your friends to vote for this issue.
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* The size of my backup data for Minecraft is 1,4 GB! Which means nintendo is trying to upload such amount every time! You can see that the save data for other games is dramatically smaller!

I have the same issue, I added a video I took with this issue if it's alright!

I tried what Andrew said but in the end I still got this issue even with the automatic upload to cloud turned off, it's really annoying because it's making the game unplayable...

@Adrian Baku, What a bummer. Thank you for checking! Probably i'm just lucky that I haven't had this for a couple of days...

Whenever I go to settings or achievements, this happens to me. 

We have 2 switches with each their own Minecraft game, only 1 is having this weird issue and only seems to be under the main person's account. I fixed it once before by deleting it and turning auto save off, but it is doing it again even with autosave off. It stops at the start up screen and nothing seems to be helping. I can get past the startup if I create a new account, but then I can't then connect it to the main person's Microsoft account.

I have literally tried everything to resolve this issue, I even emailed mojang support like the nintendo website says to do but they directed me here. This error makes it so Minecraft is completely unplayable, I can't even get past the long loading screen.

I tried everything too and it's very frustrating. I know they're probably trying whatever they can to fix it but I'm unable to play at all right now and would like to know kind of how long until it'll could be fixed or what they're doing to try and fix it.

Can anyone at Mojang actually confirm this is being worked on??? We would like to play the game we paid for on the platform we choose & we can’t because of these ongoing errors.

Are they finally fixing this?

@Nathaniel Philip Deford...no its not fixed

I downloaded the update on my switch yesterday, read all the notes from the patch, downloaded the dedicated bedrock server 1.16.210 and ran it.

Connected to server with my switch and just let it sit on the screen for about two day cycles, tried to open inventory and it gave me the constant loading screen.

I had to close the game, wait for it to say an error occured and close the software then got back in server and played for about two hours with no issues, but if i let it set and go get a drink or whatever and take to long it crashes and gives me the constant loading bar again.....still frustrated but playing when i can : )

The loading and crashing issue happens more for me if i stay in one spot for too long (more than 1 second) or if i move/do thing too fast, it causes either loading issues or just a crash.

 this seems to happen just before it crashes for me and it happens when I'm in single player multiplayer and on suv servers also online multi player the game dosent seem to work when the game is world-based whether in creative or in suv 

So, smallish update for my experience. I tried uninstalling the game and then did a fresh install (left the save files alone) and haven't had the issues anymore. I tried that after my friend had installed it for the first time and he had no issues playing, online with us or not.

No guarantee that it is actually fixed, but now I wonder if it could be that the issue is a piece of code that was remaining through updates and so needed a clean install of a more recent version (which had assumedly fully removed that code) to get rid of the problem.

Would appreciate if anyone can see if this is not just me being lucky (or lucky so far), since if this is the case then a clean install with the newest release would solve it.

@Eli: The game failing to load textures for sections can occur when there are memory issues (or just loading a lot at once), so it could certainly be related, though in your case it isn't likely more than a tell that a crash is about to happen. (It is normally not a big deal when textures don't load immediately and the game will just finish loading the textures late.)

The issue i tend to have is I open the game and it crashes on the Mojang loading screen or the loading a world screen. Its really frustrating because I can't even start to play my game right now. I've tried playing the game 12 times today and the one time I got past the Mojang loading screen it crashed on the world loading screen.

Edit: Finally was able to play but when I went to save it crashed half way threw. Seems like the crash didn't delete any previous work though. Went back and saved a second time and it crashed again on the loading screen.

Since yesterday my game keeps crashing and i cant play AT ALL. im not sure but this crashing, or at least in my experience is because i downloaded another adventure map and it took up more memory on my console and may be related to MCPE-62708 no fix for a year and a half.

This bug has stopped happening to me in recent months. I didn't do anything that I know of to stop it.

Only thing I can think of is 1.17 fixed it. I took about a 2 month break from minecraft before 1.17, so I don't know for sure if that was it.

Followup from before: If you have seen my previous post, since I fully reinstalled the game (on both my wife's and my own Switch), we have not had this problem at all. I would strongly recommend that anyone with this issue trying a reinstall and seeing if that fixes it.

To note, you do not have to delete any save data, just the game itself. (If you have a save file causing a problem, it's a different bug.)

When a player is changing his skin while playing, my game is freezing a lot, it's really annoying 😞

Another bug, since 1.16.200, when i'm playing on servers (NOT a server issue because it's on all servers) i have some short freezes, like 1s or 2s freeze, but really often, it's EXTREMELLY annoying while PvP!!!

@Herbubulle: That does not sound like this bug (when you say "feezing a lot", do you mean a full crash or just laggy? If it's just laggy, then it definitely isn't this bug. Also, this hasn't been noted before to be triggered by skin swapping, though I've noticed the game lag a bit sometimes if skin swapping happens during split-screen play). It doesn't help to report different bugs to a different report, each different bug needs to be reported separately to be handled correctly.

Jacob is right. The crash that we're talking about brings up a loading bar that only goes away when you close the game. Upon closing the game, you get a message that says "Software was closed because an error occured."
Mod GoldenHelmet posted a picture of what the loading bar looks like.
If anybody is getting crashes other than the one with the loading bar, I don't think that that is this bug.

This issue is related to MCPE-120971, the generation kind of freezes the chunks and the loading screen doesn't load

Is anyone still experiencing the issue described here, that the game crashes or hangs at the main menu or when trying to open a world?

@GoldenHelmet
yes. crashing on world loading is still happening to me. it seems to happen when the data size is large

Still.taking very long. After 10 minutes of watching a black screen, I'm currently at 42% (and also already taking 5 minutes).

Theres a similar issue on Windows 10 edition/bedrock but on realms, It  barely happens but in some rarities, It randomly freezes, Only the game, everything else is fine. I know this a report about switch, but it might be catching upto W10

[MCPE-172980] please also vote for this issue to get some added attention to the issue we are having on Switch 

1.20.81 Switch OLED, Game Card

It's gotten to a point where it takes 10-20 min just to reach the title menu (before anyone asks, yes I redownload the game, moved it to the Switch's local storage, restarted it, on every launch to give it the best possible chance to NOT crash).

My patience is still going strong, but these days I have to plan (yes plan) my sessions hours prior. It's gotten that bad.

The game has trouble priortizing what to sign in 1st. It used to sign in to the Nintendo account 1st, but now it's trying to sign into both that & the Microsoft account simultaneously. You can check this by looking at the bottom left of the title screen ("Signing into Nintendo Account") & looking at the Realms section ("Signing in with your Microsoft Account"). Several minutes later, it would have a message saying a "server connection error has occurred."

Had to hit the HOME button to give the log in a bit of a kick, so the Achievements & Inbox icons can appear.

Lastly, I would cycle through these 2 menus alongside the Account tab in the Settings menu to see whether or not the featured servers would load in, indicating that I've synched both accounts properly.

TL;DR: This whole process just to play online has been a real chore. It really isn't something any player should think about, to be perfectly honest.