Creative island loading screen hangs for 10 min: server accepts connection but match never starts, retry reassigns the same dead session

General Issues and Bug Reporting
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1

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

  1. Play any published Creative island (e.g. 0466-6311-3333), (6196-2240-0427) then leave to the lobby.
  2. Rejoin the same island within 1-2 minutes (or simply join an island - fresh allocations can also be affected).
  3. Intermittently (~10% of allocations, up to ~100% during bad windows) the assigned session accepts the connection but the match never starts.
  4. Leave and retry: matchmaking reassigns the exact same dead session (same IP:port, same EncryptionToken), even after full client restarts, for 20+ minutes.
  5. 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.
3

Some players have reported an issue where the game fails to load on my maps tho. Apparently, this is happening frequently, especially on sidekick-themed maps, and there isn’t much we can do as UGC creators to work around it right now, since it isn’t related to any island settings or anything of that sort. I am willing to help with any information needed to contribute!

2 Likes
4

Same and It also seems to be affecting Sidekick islands more than anything else

3 Likes
5

We’re seeing the same issue on our end. Everything works fine during UEFN sessions and in private versions, but in public sessions the game randomly freezes on the loading screen from time to time on mobile or PC randomly, I can return to lobby and can’t return back. The Creator Portal is also showing an unusually low click-to-play ratio.

2 Likes
7

Update (2026-07-28): the same wedged session was assigned to me 5 times across 4 full client restarts.

~18 consecutive join/leave cycles on 0466-6311-3333 between 06:23 and 06:52 UTC were all healthy — each got a distinct fresh sessionId and the loading screen hid ~5 s after “Server entry confirmed” (same client build, island version and network — clean control group in the same log).

Then at 06:52:32 I was assigned sessionId 306054c96fdd4d18a5d77431675be6de (34.40.105.200:9096). Travel completed in 6 s, then The UI Director is still waiting for game state to be ready repeated every 5 s for ten minutes. I killed the client and retried — matchmaking reassigned that same sessionId at 07:05:52, 07:07:48, 07:10:29 and 07:14:35, surviving four full client restarts. A second session picked up in the same window (b78f382c..., 34.159.244.122) was wedged the same way. At 07:17:43 I finally got a fresh allocation (34.40.113.213) which loaded instantly.

Two details that may help: (1) behind the stuck loading screen the world is replicating — NPC pawns exist client-side, one with a never-initialized skeletal mesh spamming GetSocketInfoByName(Root_Effect): No SkeletalMesh (86 lines/s; zero occurrences in healthy sessions), so the server process is alive but the island game state never comes up; (2) quick retries appear to make it worse — every rejoin keeps the wedged session populated, so it’s never reaped and matchmaking keeps routing me back into it. A game-state-ready health check before a session is considered matchable would break this loop. Logs from all five assignments available.

8

I’ve had a similar issue when joining some of the Creatures islands. In some cases, the game just freezes on the loading screen

9

Hi all, we’re aware of this, and it is scheduled to be addressed in v42.00.

2 Likes
10

FORT-1130147 has been ‘Closed’ as a duplicate of an existing known issue. Origin Issue: FORT-1126759, Origin Topic: Islands with sidekicks crash fortnite when trying to go back to the same lobby