Facepalm: Users typically don’t worry about accumulating crash reports because they are usually text files occupying a few kilobytes. However, Mortal Kombat 1 PC players discovered that enormous dumps were behind cases of mysteriously disappearing storage space. NetherRealm and WB Games are investigating the issue.

If you’ve experienced frequent crashes while playing Mortal Kombat 1 and are wondering why your OS drive’s available space is shrinking, the game’s crash reports are the likely culprit. The recently released competitive fighting game requires 100GB of storage upon installation, but repeated crashes have nearly doubled that size for some players.

Testing from multiple users and PCGamesN reveals that each time Mortal Kombat 1 crashes, it creates a new crash report folder in one of two locations within the App Data directory. To free up space, users should delete the folders at C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\MK12\Saved\Steam\Crashes, and C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\CrashDumps.

Each folder contains a Windows Crash Dump file that can balloon to around 1GB. Users on X (formerly Twitter) and the game’s Steam discussion forum describe experiencing so many crashes that the reports occupied between 16 and 70GB.

Everytime MK1 crashes on PC, it creates a report automatically, and stores 1GB of space for each report LOL.

Images provided by @divine_hat pic.twitter.com/VjGC0a5lZ6

– X-Azeez (@X_AZEEZ3) October 17, 2023

Since the reports go into the AppData folder, they occupy space in the OS drive. Thus, installing Mortal Kombat 1 on a large secondary drive doesn’t address the problem.

A community manager confirmed that WB Games is investigating this and other issues. Massive crash reports are one problem, but the math from comments suggests that some users have suffered dozens of crashes in the month since Mortal Kombat 1’s release, which is concerning regardless of how big the crash reports are.

The game’s most infamous tech-related controversy has been the Switch version’s graphics. Attempting to ship Mortal Kombat 1 on Nintendo’s six-year-old portable console is an ambitious endeavor, considering the game otherwise only supports the current-generation consoles and the PC. However, NetherRealm tried it anyway due to the Switch’s undeniably significant install base, with shocking results.

Soon after launch, Switch users reported unacceptably pared-down graphics, bizarre glitches, and inconsistent performance. Possibly the most egregious aspect of the issue is that this version costs the same as the others – $70. NetherRealm has since released a large patch, which players report somewhat improves the graphics and addresses some glitches, but other issues remain.