Explaining the long loading time error
Sometimes, users will experience the following error on The Forge: “(World name) is taking longer than expected to start. Please wait a minute and then try again. If this issue persists…”
This can happen for a few reasons:
Data migration after an update
Your world might be migrating data, usually after a major update to Foundry VTT, the world’s system, or important/large modules.
As it turns out, this is expected behavior. When Foundry VTT has to do a major migration to world data (at least as of version 10), it will not respond while migrating. This results in the unusually named error, where the user will not be able to connect to their world. Foundry VTT is on and working, but it is dedicating itself to migrating world data before responding to users attempting to join the world.
V12 Loading Issues
Forge users are currently experiencing longer than normal loading issues on V12. We are working to address this, and implement some solutions to expedite loading times.
How to load into a world experiencing this issue
Thankfully, this is a relatively easy issue to fix! If you get this error when connecting to your world, take the following steps:
- Attempt to connect to the world again.
- If the world does not load right away, immediately cancel loading into the world.
- Wait 15 minutes for the world to finish migrating its data.
- Attempt to reconnect again.
After taking these steps, your world should be good to go.
If the Error Continues
If you have taken these steps and the error is still occurring, this is usually the result of one or more of the following:
- The world size is large, resulting in longer than expected migration time.
- There is a module conflict resulting in long migration times.
- The migration has gotten stuck, for whatever reason.
We recommend taking the following steps:
- Attempt to connect to the world, and wait another 30 minutes. If this fixes the issue, it likely means that the world is too large, which could result in other issues- we recommend checking out a guide to fixing that here.
- Launch the game in safe configuration, which you can learn how to enable here. This will disable all modules activated in your world. If this fixes the error, it means there is a module error that was interrupting, or delaying your world migration.
- If the prior steps have not fixed the migration issues, turn your server/world off, and then on again on your My Foundry page. Attempt to connect, and if the world does not begin loading right away wait 15 minutes. Attempt to reconnect again at this point. If this fixes the error, it means that a bug occurred which prevented the migration from continuing.
Out of the rare cases in which this issue occurs, these steps will fix 99% of user issues. If you continue to experience these troubleshooting issues after following these steps, please reach out on our Discord, or email us at [email protected].