Saturday May 17th, 2025
Factory Startup Troubleshooting
Updated: May 25th, 2024
At some point, either a script that you make or an add-on you installed might adversely affect Blender!
Thankfully, there is a way to troubleshoot things by putting Blender into a temporary factory startup. What this means is that in this mode, Blender is treated as thought
it is a fresh install with no extra scripts / add-ons installed, and all keyboard shortcuts are reset to Blender's vanilla, out of the box ones.
In this startup mode, if the problem isn't present, this confirms the issue is with one of your scripts or add-ons!
Closing and reopening Blender restores it to the current configurations you left off with!
Below are some simple instructions on both Windows and MacOSX platforms to launch Blender into its default factory startup mode!
Factory Startup From Within Blender Directly
Regardless of the platform used, this is by far the simplest method! Simply go File > Defaults > Load Factory Settings. Blender will instantly reload without any add-ons/shortcuts, giving you a pure starting reference point for any troubleshooting you may need!
The best part is, Blender won't save your preferences (and rightfully so). Relaunching Blender will restore all installed add-ons / shortcuts!
Factory Startup Using Command Prompts
Windows 10+
- Start by typing cmd in the search field at the bottom left of the screen (the magnifying glass next to the Window button). This will invoke the command prompt.
- Once in the command prompt, you need to change the drive and directory to point to where your current version of the Blender.exe file resides. In my case, I typed cd c:\program files\blender foundation\blender 2.93 and hit enter.
- Finally, type .\blender.exe --factory-startup and hit enter again.
- Alternatively, you can type .\blender.exe --debug. This will display debug information in the command prompt!
Mac OSX
- Generally Mac applications are installed in the Applications folder. Launch the terminal (Command + Space bar brings up a searchable field - type terminal and double click the first search result to launch it).
Copy and paste these lines together into the terminal:
cd /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS
./Blender --factory-startup - With this pasted into the the terminal, it will enter these as two separate command lines.
At this point, regardless of which platform, Blender should automatically relaunch with its default installed factory settings. If any of Blender's previously broken functionality in question still remains,
this warrants a deeper investigation and might even be a good idea to create a Blender's Development account (it's free) and report a bug!
To do this in Blender, go to Help > Report A Bug to have system information automatically filled out in the resulting bug report form!
Otherwise, further debugging by disabling scripts / add-ons will be required to get to root of the problem! ∎