Cities: Skylines (Steam) - District names display corrupted

[Azuvector]

Describe your issue
District names display corrupted

What is your game version?
1.13.1-f1

Does your computer meet the system requirements?
Yes. Easily.

Are your computer's drivers up to date? (check the manufacturers website to see if any updates are available)
Yes. It's also happened before over the years, so this affects basically any driver version. On an nVidia GeForce RTX 2060. Windows 10. Fairly sure I experienced it on Windows 7 as well, and other nVidia cards.

What expansions do you have installed?
After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, Campus, Sunset Harbor

What mods are you using?
None. I have a bunch of non-mod assets from the steam workshop installed, a few ploppable buildings and such, though. No actual mods that show in the mods menu, however. (There are a bunch downloaded, but none are enabled.)

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
Sometimes the district names displayed in game will be corrupt, with random characters or symbols displayed. See screenshots.
There are other reports of this, eg: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ing-and-closing-editor-spells-them-o.1445270/ but the response seems confused. Hopefully this is clearer.

Can you replicate the issue? If yes, please explain how you did it.
I can't recreate it. It appears to happen at random, but it can be quite frequent. This has been a very long-standing issue with the game, I believe I was experiencing it before After Dark was released, and it does occur with no DLC installed. Apologies for not reporting it for such a long time. If you google "cities skylines districts corrupt" you will find multiple hits from multiple people over the years. Some with mods, some without.
Some samples of those posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/662r5j

District Name glitch? :: Cities: Skylines General Discussions

There seems to be no bug/glitch sub forum so I guess I'll just post it here.I just loaded a game and found that one of my district names wasn't displayed properly. See link to the screenshot. Screenshot

steamcommunity.com

District Naming Glitch :: Cities: Skylines General Discussions

I named a district in Cities Skylines and soon after, the letters became strange symbols. I have no idea how or why this happened. When I closed and opened my game again, it was back to normal. The symbols were back to normal letters. All I want to know is if this happened to anyone else and...

steamcommunity.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/keirtq

The name itself is normal, if you pull up the district to examine policies and such, it only appears corrupt on the main game view of your city.

This can be worked around/reset to normal by selecting the affected district, selecting the district tool, and selecting a different size brush.

Attachments File(s) attached

 

[AndrewT]

Is this reproducible in any unmodded saved game you might have? We'd pretty much need that for the devs to be able to diagnose and fix it.

 

[Azuvector]

Far as I know, other than that I've no idea how to trigger it to happen, it just decides to at some point for some unknown reason. The workaround being a consistent way to correct it ingame is the only reproducible clue I know.
Here's my current city(was in the middle of overhauling some stuff, so it's a bit of a mess, but irrelevant for the purposes here).
Again, only mods in use are ploppable assets, which the game doesn't list as mods. I think the game would just remove those, when loading the map? Just a handful of decorations/buildings/park assets.

 

[AndrewT]

That save does not show the problem here, on loading it anyway. Do you think it would if I left it running hands-off for a while?

This can be worked around/reset to normal by selecting the affected district, selecting the district tool, and selecting a different size brush.

Is that the only way? What if you save , exit, and reload ?

 

[Azuvector]

That's the thing, I've no idea how to reproduce it happening, just reproduce it being worked around. Restarting the game works too, but that's not exactly desirable when you're wanting to play, nor does it guarantee that the district name(s) affected will be corrected, or that others won't be affected.
It happens on its own; I don't know if it happens when the game is loaded, or if it just occurs at some point after it's been running for a while. Because of the size of cities and that there are often a bunch of districts that people don't always pay attention to, it just gets noticed at random sometimes.

 

[Avanya]

I have had this a bunch of times, but I mostly play modded, so never looked into it. I suspect it's related to memory usage, since I haven't seen it unmodded, but I can't be sure. And it's never been consistant for me. Happens maybe 1-5% of the times I load up a save. I can restart and load the exact same save and not have it happen. So definitely a hard one to pinpoint.

For me just clicking the district name to change it and hitting enter solves it (another reason I never looked into what might cause it).

 

[Azuvector]

Just a followup as I just noticed for sure. It does occur with the game immediately started fresh, from the save above. Noticed a corrupt district name even before I unpaused the game just now. So you should be able to reload it repeatedly until it happens to one or more of the districts in that city.

 

[ristosal]

This has indeed been around for a long time, I still get it regularly when loading a save despite switching PC's in the meantime. It's probably Unity engine related. The fix is simple though, just flick the district tool on and back off and all names return back to normal.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I first noticed it from the 81-tile mod not long after it came out.

But I've had it happen on non-81-tile modded cities as well.

I remember some mod returning it back to normal. I forgot which as I don't use mods myself.

I also remember loading screen mod doing it at the end, just before zoning in to the map. All of the text looks garbled like that.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I fired up you city for a bit, while I was waiting for GTAV to do it's 95GB download and install.

I has no issue with distrct names, until anout 30-minutes in when I made a railroad connection through a distrct, when suddenly the name turned to garbage.

I had unsubscribed a couple problematic mods, like 81-tiles and 25-tile mods. auto-bulldozer, and a few others I don't recall.

Is this a custom map or from the workshop? It could get tied to it from mapmaker if mods were used to create it.

 

[Azuvector]

Is this a custom map or from the workshop? It could get tied to it from mapmaker if mods were used to create it.

The map is an official one. Crater Falls from the Sunset Harbour DLC. The issue happens on other maps too.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I guess keep removing mods until it hopefully clears up. or try a new city each time you unsubscribe workshop and test.

 

[Azuvector]

I guess keep removing mods until it hopefully clears up. or try a new city each time you unsubscribe workshop and test.

.....see earlier in this thread. There are no mods in use here.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Ah, I must have loaded another game recently and loaded mods tied to another save.

I just let it run another 30 minutes and I did some more tweaking on the city and no issues.

I guess just ignore my last comment.

All seems fine on my end.