Mortal Shell 2 Memory Leak Fix: Symptoms, Diagnosis & the Page File Workaround

Status: Workaround. The long-session memory leak is community-reported — no developer patch note has confirmed a leak fix by that name. The page file workaround below is the most consistently reported mitigation. It is not a guaranteed fix, and specific claims beat vague ones: everything here names its symptom, cause, and source type.

What the Mortal Shell 2 memory leak is

The Mortal Shell 2 memory leak is the community's name for issue #16 in our crash tracker: the game closing without warning after long play sessions — typically an hour or more into a run — with no crash dialog, or occasionally an out-of-memory style message. The tracker logs it as "UE5 memory leak over long sessions — closing after long play sessions", affecting all GPU vendors and every game version, Hotfix 2.0 + Balance Patch 1 included. Because Unreal Engine 5 titles have a documented history of memory handling quirks, the community attribute is plausible — but it is an attribute, not a developer-confirmed diagnosis.

That distinction matters more here than anywhere else in the Fix Center. Content-farm sites circulate "confirmed memory leak" claims with no specifics, and our Not Recommended list warns against trusting them. What is verifiable: memory usage that grows over long sessions as reported by players, closing behavior that correlates with session length, and one workaround a meaningful number of players report as resolving it. Everything else on this Mortal Shell 2 memory leak page is labeled community-reported, including the leak name itself.

Symptoms: memory leak or something else?

Several different crash types get called "memory problems," and applying the wrong fix wastes an afternoon. Match your issue against the three distinct memory-adjacent patterns:

• Long-session closing (issue #16, the actual memory leak) — runs fine at startup, then closes to desktop after an hour or more of continuous play, usually with no error dialog. The game's RAM usage in Task Manager trends upward the longer the session runs; some community reports say time-to-close shrinks across consecutive long sessions.
• Out of Video Memory error (issue #14) — an explicit "Out of Video Memory" message, hitting GPUs with 8GB VRAM or less on Ultra textures. This is a VRAM capacity problem, not a leak: it triggers in minutes, not hours, and dropping Textures to High resolves it.
• Garbage Collection exceptions (issues #6 and #8) — hard crashes with EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION codes in a GarbageCollection stack (0x00000000000002c8), or the settings-menu crash (0x0000000220000769). These are UE5 GC bugs with their own fixes — Frame Generation and Ray Tracing off for #6; Steam Overlay off plus file verification for #8.

If your crash matches the first pattern — fine at launch, dead after an hour, RAM climbing — the page file workaround below is the community's best-supported next step. For the other two, follow the links into the full crash list; a page file change does nothing for a VRAM ceiling or a GC exception.

Memory-related entries in the 19-crash data

Of the 19 documented PC crash types, four are memory-adjacent — the full set, with current status labels:

Two patch notes round out the picture. Hotfix 2.0 officially "improved memory management to prevent GC-related crashes during extended play sessions" — so part of what launch players saw as memory misbehavior is already patched. And Balance Patch 1 reportedly fixed a memory leak tied to the shell-swap mechanic, per the Fix Center's patch summary. In short: the developer is visibly working the memory-adjacent list, but the long-session Mortal Shell 2 memory leak has no patch note of its own — which is why the workaround below carries a Workaround status instead of Fixed.

How to confirm you are seeing the leak

Five minutes of diagnosis tells you whether the workaround is worth applying — all of it uses tools Windows already ships:

1. Watch the RAM trend, not the snapshot. Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) → Processes, note the game's Memory column every 15-20 minutes. The leak pattern is a value that climbs steadily — several hundred MB per hour by community reports — and never settles. Normal usage oscillates as areas load and unload.
2. Check the closing style. Silent closes with no dialog fit the leak profile. A crash dialog with an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION code, or an explicit Out of Video Memory message, points at issues #6/#8/#14 instead.
3. Correlate with session length. The reported pattern is startup-clean, dead-after-an-hour. Crashes in the first 10-30 minutes point to Frame Generation (#4) or shader compilation — start with the Phase 1 quick wins instead.
4. Skim Event Viewer for the timestamp. Windows Logs → Application around the closing time, looking for an application error entry naming the game executable. That confirms Windows saw an abnormal termination and gives you timestamps to compare against future sessions.

The page file workaround, step by step

The fix tracked in our crash data as the handling for issue #16 is to replace Windows' automatic page file with a static one: 16384 MB initial, 32768 MB maximum, on an SSD. The logic: if a long session's memory appetite outruns physical RAM, Windows needs swap headroom it can reach instantly; a fixed, generously sized page file on fast storage provides it, and player reports say the Mortal Shell 2 memory leak closings should stop afterward. About five minutes:

1. Press Win + R, type sysdm.cpl, press Enter.
2. Advanced tab → Performance → Settings → Advanced → Virtual memory → Change.
3. Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives."
4. Select the drive where Mortal Shell 2 is installed (an SSD — the system drive is fine), choose Custom size, set Initial size: 16384 MB and Maximum size: 32768 MB.
5. Click Set, then OK, and restart the PC.

Three honest footnotes. This is a community-reported workaround — it does not repair the underlying engine behavior; it changes the conditions that behavior operates in, and reports say the closings should resolve. It is fully reversible in the same menu. And the static page file reserves real disk headroom — the 32 GB maximum is a ceiling, not an immediate write, but keep free space in mind before committing.

Supporting mitigations while you test

• Stay on Hotfix 2.0 + Balance Patch 1. Memory management improvements and the shell-swap leak fix both landed post-launch — a day-one build reproduces problems that are already patched.
• Trim background memory competition. Disabling hardware acceleration in Discord and Chrome is the documented step for the Out of Video Memory error (#14) and frees real system RAM too — relevant headroom for long sessions.
• Cap FPS and disable Frame Generation for GC-pattern crashes. If your symptom turns out to be #6 rather than the leak, that is the handling until a developer patch — tracked in the Still broken section.
• Save at Beacons during long sessions. The Beacon fast-travel crash remains pending in the tracker, and losing an hour of progress to any long-session instability stings twice. Frequent Beacon saves cap the damage whatever the cause.

What the patches already fixed

Check you are not chasing a solved problem. Memory-adjacent fixes in official patch notes so far: Hotfix 1.0's D3D12 device-removed corrections, Hotfix 2.0's memory management improvements for extended sessions, and Balance Patch 1's reported shell-swap memory leak fix. What remains community-reported and unpatched is the long-session closing behavior this page covers — that status is re-checked with every new patch, and this page and the Fix Center hub update within 24 hours.

Mortal Shell 2 memory leak FAQ

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