Reading Reports

Reports are saved as Markdown files in a crashes/ folder at your GMod root (next to the game's own crash dumps).
Each one is named for what happened and when, so they're easy to find and read.

The folder can be moved with CRASHCAPTURE_DIR (or a dir line in crashcapture.cfg), see Configuration.

Warning

Do not share crash captures to others unless you have sanitized them, they can contain private/sensitive information about your server!

What is in a report

A report starts with a one-line reason describing what happened and where.
Below that you get the captured state at the moment of failure:

• The faulting thread's native call stack, with function names and source lines when debug info is available (CRASHCAPTURE_SYMBOLS).
• Lua traces for every bound realm, with locals summaries for Lua frames.
• The loaded modules.
• A Hang map section on freezes: the plugin burst-probes the stuck thread a few times and lists the PC sites it kept landing on.
  • Controlled by CRASHCAPTURE_HANG_MAP, with CRASHCAPTURE_HANG_MAP_SAMPLES and CRASHCAPTURE_HANG_MAP_INTERVAL_MS tuning the probe count and interval.
• A patches line in the header showing how many engine fixes were applied versus skipped (e.g. 3 applied, 1 drifted).
  • That line tells you whether you are looking at engine behavior or at one of our own patches, see Patcher.
• Third-party data: key/value lines registered by other binary modules through the C API.
• Diagnostics: output from a Crash Script Diagnostics, if CRASHCAPTURE_SCRIPT is set, plus hexdumps those scripts requested.

When a report is printed to the console as well (short notice plus the file path by default), CRASHCAPTURE_CONSOLE=1 prints the full report too.

session.txt

The crash folder also contains a session.txt, a running log of what the plugin itself did.
This gets wiped on every boot.
You can use it to debug what went wrong with crash capture itself, or for more information; it pairs with CRASHCAPTURE_DEBUG (verbose internal tracing).

Housekeeping

At startup the plugin deletes reports in the crash folder older than CRASHCAPTURE_MAX_AGE_DAYS days (default 14), so they don't pile up.
Set it to 0 to keep them forever.