The Last of Us bugs: 4 most common & how to fix them

Sony's beloved exclusive is here, but Steam reviewers hate it.

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Key notes

  • Sony & Naughty Dog's The Last of Us for PC is finally here.
  • Some users, however, have reported that the game is unstable and unplayable.
  • It's unfortunate, given how much hype surrounds the franchise in the past few weeks.

Sony’s beloved PlayStation exclusive, The Last of Us, has finally arrived on PC.

Dubbed ‘Part I,’ the game centers around Joel, a man in a post-apocalyptic world, as he travels across the country to smuggle 14-year-old Ellie. Little does he know, the pair will develop an unlikely father-and-daughter figure, but not without its ups and downs. 

On top of its top-notch storytelling, the game boasts rich visuals—at least on PlayStation 4 & 5. On PC, however, it is horrible, and it seems like it kills the hype that its HBO adaptation has created in recent weeks. 

On Steam, for example, users are tearing apart the game’s PC port. Some users reported that they waited for hours for the game to build shaders while crashing in the main menu every 5 minutes. Others also stated that on its medium settings, it consumes over 8 GBs of VRAM, and they were unable to boot it despite meeting the minimum system requirements. Unfortunately, the list could go on and on. 

Naughty Dogs, the devs behind the game, said that the team is working closely to investigate all the issues, promising that they will be fixed in upcoming patches that are coming in days or weeks. 

In the meantime, until they released those patches, we’ve covered some of the most The Last of Us bugs, but we’ll expand the list as updates on forums and Naughty Dog’s official page show up. 

What are the most common The Last of Us bugs?

1. Shade bugs

Some users said that The Last of Us on PC takes forever to load its shaders. Then, at the same time, its performance is super unstable and stuttering while the shaders are loading. For a game with visuals of this caliber, it’s not a good look. Joel and Ellie have seen better days. 

“I really wanted this to be good. And there are a lot of good things here, but the game is ruined by severe stuttering. Shouldn’t be shader compilation stutter, so I’m guessing it has to do with asset streaming.”

2. Stuttering & out-of-sync problems

For some users with PCs that tiptoe on The Last of Us’ minimum requirement, it’s common to see horrible stuttering and drops in fps. Then, the video and audio are also out of sync, and it can get annoying.

“For me I’ve been getting near constant stuttering in game (even in the main menu), cinematics stutter as well and even going out of sync almost every time, everything takes forever to load.”

“Please don’t waste your time with this terrible port, and don’t listen to people telling you how great it is… the only people defending it saying ‘yOu gUyS hAvE bAd pCs’ are all people privileged enough to have the best parts money can buy for the performance issues to not matter to them or they’re delusional enough to ignore clear poor optimization.”

3. Unable to boot

Or, better yet, the game is not booting at all despite meeting the minimum requirements. Keep in mind that The Last of Us has AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i7-4770K for CPU, AMD Radeon 470 (4 GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4 GB), or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB) for GPU, and 16 GB RAM as its minimum requirement. 

“Unfortunately this port is not worth it in its current state, I´ve tried the game for 3 hours, one of which was compiling the shaders, the rest was waiting on loading screens inside the game, I think i have a pretty capable machine, at least it has handled everything i´ve thrown at it so far, but it´s not handling this game whatsoever.”

4. Potential memory leak issue

The potential memory leak issue comes from a discovery that The Last of Us’ devs used a buggy 2.9.6 version of the Oodle decompression library, which has had memory-leaking issues problems in the past. 

“The developers/porters used a bugged release of the Oodle decompression library (2.9.6) which has confirmed memory leaking issues.”

“Several UE4/UE5 games use v. 2.9.5 of ODL. It’s not a perfect solution, but using an older version of ODL is working for me right now much better than the version they shipped with.”

How to fix common The Last of Us bugs?

1. Shade bugs

The long waiting time for shaders to reload is usually caused by errors from its decompression library. Although each of these bugs is connected to the other, we’d recommend you wait for Naughty Dogs’ upcoming patches. As the devs promised, they’re working closely to fix these issues as soon as possible. 

2. Stuttering problem

1. With the game open, press Esc to go to the pause menu.

2. Lower the Graphics option to Medium, or even lower. 

3. Reboot the game to find out if the problem persists. 

3. Unable to boot

Again, as we mentioned, it’s best to wait for developers to step up and fix this issue with their patches. 

4. Memory leak issue

To bypass that, this Redditor recommends finding its 2.9.5 version and rewriting it on TLOU’s install directory. You can do it if you have FIFA 23, Warframe, or Destiny 2. Or, you can also download it from a third-party website, but it would be very risky. 

1. Open C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\[THE NAME OF THE GAME]\Tools\Oodle\x64\oo2core_9_win64.dll

2. Right-click and hit Copy, then Paste it somewhere else. 

3. Go to your TLOU install directory, also at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Last of Us\Tools\Oodle\x64

4. Paste oo2core_9_win64.dll there.

There you go, these are some of the most common bugs that The Last of Us players on PC are facing. We will keep you updated once Naughty Dog or Sony have had their say in patches, but until then, let us know if you have any comments!