Stuck in Hunting Grounds - Cannot Recover My Character?

New player - been playing 2-3 days without any of the issues around crashes and freezes other than the odd frame rate drop. All good. Got to Lvl11

Until I went into Hunting Grounds - game immediately crashed. And now every time I try to load my character, it crashes before I can do anything.

Windows 11 23H2

Geforce RTX 3080 / AMD Ryzen 9.

Have tried:

Switching between DX12 > Vulkan - no difference

Lowering all graphics/lighting settings - no difference

Downloaded PoEUncrasher and ran that before running the game - no difference

Downloaded Battle Encoder Shirasé and set PoE2 to have maximum 80% CPU limit, also tried with 60% - no difference

Disabled GPU threaded optimisation - no change.

Cleared shader caches - no change.

Anytime I load that character (now stuck in battle grounds) game crashes before the loading screen even finishes.

Perhaps even more annoyingly, I just start a different character - works just fine.

So, haven’t found a fix that allows me to load up my character currently stuck in hunting grounds.

Anything else i’m missing I can try? I see there is a huge variance of the issues people are having across all types of hardware. It’s very clearly something to do with hunting grounds in my case. Game was fine before, and is fine starting a new character.

Can the devs just like, set me to load somewhere different on next login.

Any potential workarounds to retrieve my character anyone else know of? I really don't want to have to start again, I know i’m not that deep into the game but this really shouldn’t be a thing and its just sucking the fun out of the game I was getting into, starting again will just kill it for me.

If you are playing the PC standalone client,
run the PackCheck.exe tool in the Path of Exile 2 install folder to check your GGPK file for corruption. This will take some time, even on an SSD.

If playing on Steam/PC, try using the steam Verify File Integrity (or similarly named) option to do the same thing.

I'm not sure what options you have on consoles to verify the integrity of your game files.


This is to cover the possibility that you are crashing because the game is trying to unpack texture/enemy files that contain corrupted data. This is one reason you might always crash in a specific zone. You may be able to see this in your Client.txt file toward the end where the game crashed before trying to restart it (on PC in the Path of Exile 2\logs folder).