Space Engineers: How to Fix “error loading world”

The first step after receiving the error is to close the game and go to your %username%\AppData\Roaming\Space Engineers folder:

Scroll down until you find the log produced right after the game gave the error (it will be your last log, though it isn’t in my screenshot, unless you loaded another game after the error which I did):

Open the log. Search for “modified“.

This term is part of an auto-generated message that is apparently added when the game encounters the error that causes the world to fail to load and the error message to appear. The message is:

Notice that the message occurs after the game fails to load a file that has been modified. It seems that this usually happens after I download workshop items. Unsubscribing from the item does not solve the problem, nor does reinstalling the game (as some people find), as the message states.

Note the file in reference:

This is the file in question.

The second step is to go to your Space Engineers install directory. For me it is \Steam\steamapps\common\SpaceEngineers

From there open “Content” (not ContentPC), and then open “Data“:

Find the file mentioned in the log file (for me it was LCDTextures.sbc but it will probably be different for you).

Delete this file.

Now simply verify the game files integrity on steam (go to steam library, right click on the Space Engineers, click properties, go to the “local files” tab, click “verify…”). Once the new file(s) needed are downloaded, you are ready to launch Space Engineers and load the world.

This method has worked successfully for me every time I have done it, though I’m not a mod enthusiast. If you are playing a heavily modded world or have many workshop items (especially old items), it is possible that you will have to try this method multiple times. There might be multiple corrupted files in which case you will have to perform this method, relaunch, and if the error appears again you will need to go to the new log file and find the other file(s) that need to be deleted and reacquired. Repeat until the world loads. And pray for a stable, future release in which this problem is fixed.