How to Fix “Preparing Shaders” Progress Bar Crash in Hogwarts Legacy

If you’ve ever read or watched Harry Potter and lamented the fact that you’d definitely be a muggle, read on. Because today, we’re going to perform some technological wizardry. It would seem that some wizards are struggling with a particular bug in Hogwarts Legacy that refuses to allow them access to the game. It’s especially odd when, in some cases, these same users were able to play for a short while prior to this bug.

According to a Reddit thread posted in r/HarryPotterGame, a user named u/r00m-lv details this problem. It looks like this problem is — so far, anyway — exclusive to those playing on PC via Steam. If you’re facing this issue, the game will display an innocuous loading screen that reads “preparing shader cache,” but it’ll stop loading at around 10%. To add insult to injury, all game sound will also halt. If you’re dealing with this issue as well, read on to learn of some methods to solving it!

How to Fix “Preparing Shaders” Progress Bar Crash

If you’re currently facing this annoyance, there is thankfully something you can do. To start, close the game and make double — if not triple — sure that it’s closed. Navigate to the AppData folder within your PC’s C:\ Drive. Then, head for the Local folder, then Hogwarts Legacy, and finally, Saved. In here, you’re going to perform the Avada Kedavra spell on every single file — that is, you’re going to delete everything. That is, everything aside from the SaveGames folder. But, you may not even have that, so …

But, that’s not all! Navigate to the Hogwarts Legacy folder located in your C:\ Drive’s ProgramData folder. As you did before, delete everything here aside from one file named “NotAllowedUnattendedBugReports.” If you’ve followed this guide, then loading Hogwarts Legacy after these two steps should force the game to re-load the shader cache, thus solving the problem!

We hope you’ve found this Hogwarts Legacy fix helpful! Big thanks to Reddit user u/r00m-lv! If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all the newest releases, consider ‘liking’ Gamer Journalist on Facebook! And, in the meantime, take a look at our other work, including All Updates and Changes in Hogwarts Legacy Patch Update and How to Block Accio in Hogwarts Legacy!