Expedition: Into Darkness stuck loading after update (fix)
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Last checked
September 23, 2026
After a patch, the game's loading indicator stops moving on startup; a prompt appears asking whether to keep waiting or close the game, and waiting doesn't help. Verifying game files through Steam doesn't fix it.
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This surfaced after the demo's 1.0.6 update and was corroborated by several players in the same Steam Discussions thread ("The Game Down?"), who all hit the same stuck-loading prompt right after updating. One player relayed a workaround posted in the official Discord by another player: deleting the local `inventory.json` save file lets the game load again. The tradeoff is real — that file is where the demo's client-side inventory is stored, so removing it wipes your character's items rather than repairing them, which is why several players in the thread were reluctant to do it on a leveled character. Antediluvian Interactive hasn't posted an official acknowledgement of this one, so treat the cause as save-file corruption from the patch rather than a confirmed root cause.
What to try
- 01Back up your save folder first if you want any chance of recovering your inventory later, since the only known workaround deletes it.Unconfirmed
- 02Delete `inventory.json` from the game's local save folder, then relaunch. Multiple players in the "The Game Down?" Steam Discussions thread confirm this clears the stuck-loading prompt, at the cost of losing your stored inventory.Reported
- 03Verifying game file integrity through Steam did not resolve this for the players who reported it, so it's worth skipping straight to the step above rather than repeating it.Reported
Did this fix it for you?
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What people are saying
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- Nothing reported here yet.