Summary
Since the current season, joining a published Creative island intermittently hangs on the loading screen. The client connects to the game server within 1-3 s (“Welcomed by server” → TravelCompleted), all content downloads and mounts with zero HTTP errors, but the island match never starts - the loading screen shows “The UI Director is still waiting for game state to be ready” indefinitely. After 600 s the engine hang detector kills the client (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION crash).
Critically, matchmaking keeps reassigning the SAME dead session on retry - same server IP:port and same EncryptionToken - and this assignment survives full client restarts for 20+ minutes, so players cannot self-recover. In a controlled test of 10 join/leave cycles, 9 fresh allocations loaded within seconds and 1 fresh allocation was dead on arrival (~10% failure rate; during worse windows it approaches 100%). Reproduces on PC and mobile on independent networks. Never reproduces in UEFN playtest sessions.
Primary island: 0466-6311-3333 (v8), also observed on other creators’ islands. Client ++Fortnite+Release-41.20-CL-55550516. Full client logs and two hang-detector crash dumps with exact timestamps, server IPs and EncryptionTokens are available - I will attach them in a reply.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Creative
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Matchmaking
Steps to Reproduce
- Play any published Creative island (e.g. 0466-6311-3333), (6196-2240-0427) then leave to the lobby.
- Rejoin the same island within 1-2 minutes (or simply join an island - fresh allocations can also be affected).
- Intermittently (~10% of allocations, up to ~100% during bad windows) the assigned session accepts the connection but the match never starts.
- Leave and retry: matchmaking reassigns the exact same dead session (same IP:port, same EncryptionToken), even after full client restarts, for 20+ minutes.
- If the player waits on the loading screen, the client is killed by the hang detector after 600 s.
Expected Result
Either the island match starts after the client is welcomed and content is mounted, or matchmaking detects the dead session and assigns a different server on retry.
Observed Result
Client stays on the Creative loading screen indefinitely with “The UI Director is still waiting for game state to be ready”. Log timeline of a typical occurrence (2026-07-25, UTC): 10:43:53 join 34.141.62.76:9093 - plays normally; 10:46:36 rejoin same server, same EncryptionToken - hangs; client restart; 10:49:28 - SAME token reassigned again, hangs again. Earlier the same day: 09:41-10:13, token ebd10aa1… reassigned across two client restarts and a visit to another island, 22 minutes apart, ending in a hang-detector crash (Failed to reach checkpoint: ‘LoadingScreen’ within alotted time of 600.00). Server-side content cook messages keep arriving during the hang (Completed cook … Version=[8]) while game state never becomes ready. Regular players experience this as “the game froze, I restarted Fortnite” and it directly hurts session starts on all islands affected.
Platform(s)
PC (Windows 11), Mobile iOS
Island Code
0466-6311-3333
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Additional Notes
- Two hang-detector crash dumps from 2026-07-25 are available: UECC-Windows-DA31A6014CD6EE7B26FF21A9BAAA305A_0000 (10:48 UTC) and UECC-Windows-DB8939624071172FE3A849BD2D7361EF_0000 (12:13 UTC), both ending with “Failed to reach checkpoint: ‘LoadingScreen’ within alotted time of 600.00. Triggering hang detector.” I will attach the zipped dumps and full client logs in a reply to this topic.
- Shader/PSO precompilation is ruled out: all ShaderPipelineCache activity completes ~8 s after connecting; PSO precompile takes ~2.1 s on this hardware (i9-9900K / RTX 4080 SUPER / 64 GB).
- The island itself is healthy: publishing validation passes, memory 83,814/100,000, download size 75 MB, content mounts in ~1 s with 0 HTTP errors (98.8% cache hit).
- Never reproduces in UEFN playtest sessions (VKEdit pool) - only public play sessions (VKPlay pool).
- Likely related reports: “Fortnite creative matchmaking bug” (June 11) and “Unreal Engine Creative Loading Screen Bug taking to long to load in and sometimes kicking player back to lobby” (June 12) in this forum.
- The failure window is worst in the first minutes after publishing a new island version (server-side per-platform cook on demand), but dead-on-arrival allocations also occur with no recent publish.