Bandit Simulator TD is out: PC requirements and the developer's crash fixes

Bandit Simulator TD is now on sale on Steam for $10.79, with a 10% discount. It is a tower defense and base building game where you set up a bandit stronghold from scratch, from indie studio 游戏养家工作室. It asks very little of your PC, but the launch came with crashes and trouble getting into the game on some systems, and the developer has already posted how to fix them. If you play on Windows 11 or own an RTX 50 series card, this part matters to you.

Bandit Simulator TD PC requirements

The Steam page lists only minimum requirements, and only for Windows:

	Minimum	Recommended
GPU	Graphics card with DirectX 10 (Shader Model 4.0)	Not listed
CPU	Intel Dual-Core 1.6 GHz or faster	Not listed
RAM	4 GB	Not listed
Storage	500 MB	Not listed
OS	Windows 8.1 or later	Not listed

There is no Mac or Linux version.

Which graphics card do you need?

The minimum does not name a specific model. It asks for any card that supports DirectX 10, and there is no recommended spec. Without a reference model there is nothing to measure each GPU against with benchmarks, so we would rather not hand you a grade that does not hold up. What the spec does say is clear: 4 GB of RAM and 500 MB of space. If you are looking for more games that ask very little, check our list of low-end PC games.

On the Steam Deck, Valve has not verified it yet. canirun’s grade is S, but that is only a spec-based estimate, not a test on the device. You can find the details on the game’s Steam Deck page.

How to fix crashes and launch problems

These are the fixes the developer posted in the Steam announcements:

Crashes (mostly on Windows 11): right-click the game in your Steam library → Properties → Game Versions & Betas → select win11stable.
Can’t get in on Windows 7: same path, but select win7compat. The store page asks for Windows 8.1 or later, so this branch is the studio’s workaround.
Can’t get in and you see an NWjs error: free up space on your C drive. The engine needs some virtual cache space.
50 series GPUs: disable AI frame generation in your GPU settings, set the card to high-performance mode, or update your graphics driver. If you have an RTX 5070, that is the first thing to try.

The studio has already shipped two patches, 1.0.1.0 and 1.0.2.0. They fix the blueprint list showing up empty, decorative buildings missing their Relocate and Demolish buttons, text errors, and the option to set the game to Traditional Chinese.

A gift, and a warning if you played the demo

The developer is giving every player the playtest’s collector character, Pan Jinlian. To redeem it, keep at least 1 free population slot, press ESC, click “Input” and enter 6666.

The warning: demo saves do not carry over to the full version, because the data structure changed a lot. The studio presents this as the complete game, not early access, with 27 main city levels, 9 wilderness map levels, 100+ enemy types and 200+ legendary characters.