macOS Apple Silicon: Game causes complete system freeze (hard lock requiring power cycle)

Platform: macOS 26.5 (Tahoe), Mac Studio, Apple M3 Ultra (60 GPU cores, 256GB RAM)
Game version: 1.0.13.1-b769e88-sm (Unity 6000.3.6f1)
Mods installed: Harmony, Ladder, Mod Settings, TimberUi, TImprove (bug is in base game, not mods)

What happens:
When loading a save game, the entire Mac freezes completely — display frozen, no input, no crash log written. The only way to recover is holding the
power button to force shutdown. This has happened 27+ times over 17 days.

No kernel panic is generated. No crash report is written. The GPU hangs so hard that macOS cannot recover.

Root cause found:
Running with Apple's Metal GPU validation enabled (MTL_DEBUG_LAYER=1 MTL_SHADER_VALIDATION=1) catches the bug before it reaches the GPU. The game
crashes cleanly instead of freezing the system, with this error:

validateComputeFunctionArguments:1171: failed assertion
'Compute Function(computeMain): The pixel format (MTLPixelFormatR8Unorm)
of the Texture (name:<null>) bound at index 1 is incompatible with the
data type (MTLDataTypeInt) of the Texture parameter
(BrokenCornerLinks [[Texture(0)]]). MTLPixelFormatR8Unorm is compatible
with the data type(s) (float, half).'

The bug is in Timberborn.WaterSystemRendering.dll. The BrokenCornerLinks texture is created with R8Unorm pixel format (float data), but the compute
shader computeMain declares the corresponding parameter as Int. This is a pixel format / data type mismatch.

Without validation, this invalid operation is sent directly to the GPU. On Apple Silicon (AGX), it causes an unrecoverable GPU hang that freezes the
entire system.

How to reproduce:
1. Play on macOS with Apple Silicon
2. Load a save with an active water system
3. System freezes within seconds to minutes

Workaround:
Running with Metal validation enabled (launchctl set

timberborn-crash-bugreport_t7bzdx.log