Shift At Midnight Troubleshooting

Almost everything below was reported by players in the first three weeks after release, and most of it has no fix yet. That is worth saying at the top, because the usual advice — verify the files, reinstall, update the driver — has already been tried by the people who reported these, and it did not work. Knowing that saves you an evening.

One thing does have a fix, it comes from the developer, and it covers the problem more people hit than any other.

The one fix the developer has published

If you cannot join a friend, opt into the beta branch:

1. Right-click Shift At Midnight in your Steam library and choose Properties
2. Open Game Versions & Betas
3. Enter the access code networkissues
4. Opt into the network-issues-patch branch and let it update

Two conditions decide whether this works. Everyone you play with must also follow these instructions — the developer’s own emphasis, and the reason it appears to fail for people who do it alone. And it is explicitly a stopgap: the announcement of 22 July 2026 ends by saying a proper fix for the main build is being worked towards.

A day later, the 23 July patch shipped a narrower one — fix for players unable to create joinable lobbies in Russia — alongside raising the lobby cap to six. The branch instructions have not been withdrawn, and a player was still describing themselves as running “the network fix version” on 7 August, so treat the branch as current.

Why the browser finds nothing, which is not the same problem

Getting onto the patched branch lets you search. It does not conjure anyone to play with, and those are separate complaints that get reported as one.

A player searching from the United States on 7 August described finding zero lobbies almost every time, and a single Japanese one on the occasions it worked. Another replied that the lobbies they reached were in Asia, and that they were kicked from one for not speaking the host’s language. Nothing there is a fault in the game — it is a small game’s player base spread across time zones, with no region filter announced.

The developer said before launch that a Steam-only public server browser was planned for launch or shortly after. Until it improves, inviting people directly is the route that does not depend on who happens to be online.

Steam and Xbox cannot see each other

This one gets reported as a bug constantly and it is not one. Before release the developer wrote that Xbox and PC Game Pass players would have crossplay, and that Steam players would only be able to play with other Steam players.

So a group split between a Steam copy and a Game Pass copy has no way to join up, no matter which branch anyone opts into. If your friends have not bought it yet, where each version is sold is the thing to settle first — this is a decision that cannot be undone with a setting later.

The black screens, and what has already been ruled out

Two distinct failures get called the same thing.

The more alarming one takes the monitor out entirely. The screen drops to No Signal while the case fans and lights keep running, and only a hard reset brings it back. The player who wrote it up on 4 August had done the work before posting: Event Viewer showed a Kernel-Power 41 entry from the forced restart but no driver crash, and capping the frame rate at 60, enabling V-Sync, switching between windowed and fullscreen, disabling the Discord and Steam overlays, unplugging a second monitor and clearing the shader cache all changed nothing. Every other demanding game on the machine ran fine. Three more players replied to say they had exactly the same thing, and two separate Chinese-language threads describe being unable to get in for three days running. No developer has answered any of them.

The second is quieter. The logos play and the game stops, often right at the Kwalee Gaming logo screen, while Windows stays responsive. Verifying the files and reinstalling did not help. If your PC survives the attempt, this is the one you have.

Neither has a fix. What the reports are good for is telling you which steps not to bother repeating.

What the developer has said he is working on

The 23 July notes close with a line worth keeping: the next minor update would aim to address people who crash, and are then unable to interact with the cursor or any buttons in the game. That names a real and widely reported failure.

The 29 July update that followed listed “various bug fixes and crash fixes” without naming that one, and players were still reporting frozen menus and dead inputs on 7 and 8 August. So it is acknowledged, and not yet resolved.

Where to report yours

The developer is one person, and says so. The 29 July notes ask people to bring bugs to the official Discord with the line “I’m only 1 guy, I can’t find everything myself”.

The Steam Bugs sub-forum works too, and its pinned post sets out what to include: which platform you are on, whether the issue is a crash or a bug, and any images or video. A report with those three things is the one that gets acted on.

One last thing worth separating from the faults above. If the tool that reads a customer’s mood has not turned up for you, that is not a bug to report — what the emotion detector is and when it appears is a question the game itself never answers clearly. And if you are reading this before buying, the free multiplayer demo is the cheapest way to find out whether your machine runs it at all.