Alright, let me walk you through what happened the other day when Honkai Star Rail decided to throw a wrench in my plans. I was just settling in, ready to do my dailies, you know how it is.
Fired up the launcher, clicked that big ‘Start Game’ button, and instead of the familiar loading screen, bam! System Error 5151 pops up. Just like that. Didn’t even get past the launcher properly. My first thought was, “Okay, weird,” maybe just a temporary glitch.
First Steps
So, I did the obvious thing first. Closed the error message, closed the launcher completely. Waited a few seconds and tried launching it again. Same error. Okay, Plan B.
- Restarted the game? Check. No dice.
- Maybe my internet connection flickered? Checked that, everything else was online, speeds were fine. So, not the internet.
- Next up, the classic computer restart. Not just putting it to sleep, but a full shutdown and boot-up. Sometimes that clears out weird background stuff.
Waited for everything to load back up, tried launching Honkai Star Rail again. Still got that annoying 5151 error. Now it was starting to get a bit frustrating.
Digging In
Okay, simple fixes didn’t work. Time to try something else. I remembered the launcher has that repair function.
I opened the launcher again, didn’t hit start, but looked for the settings icon. Found it, clicked around, and saw an option like “Game File Verification” or “Repair”. Something like that. Decided it couldn’t hurt, so I started the process. It took a little while, scanning through all the game files, downloading bits here and there if it found anything messed up.
While that was running, I also quickly checked my firewall and antivirus. Sometimes they get a bit overzealous and block game connections. Made sure Honkai Star Rail and its launcher were allowed through. They seemed to be, but I double-checked the permissions just in case.
The file verification finished. Felt a bit hopeful. Closed the launcher again for good measure, then reopened it and hit ‘Start Game’.
Success… Finally
This time… success! The game actually started loading past the launcher. No error message. Logged in without any issues, got into the game world, everything seemed back to normal. Played for a solid hour just to be sure it wasn’t a fluke.
So, for me, it looked like the game file verification did the trick. Maybe some file got corrupted during an update or just randomly, who knows? Running that repair function sorted it out.
It was a bit of a hassle, took maybe 30 minutes of troubleshooting instead of playing, but glad I got it sorted without having to do a full reinstall. Hopefully, if you run into this 5151 thing, maybe trying the file verification step helps you too. Always worth a shot before doing anything drastic.
