It's not crashing, the game just takes a long time to perform worldgen (or to update an existing world if a patch has changed how terrain is calculated and/or managed). If anything happens that makes the OS try to interact with the program (such as if you try pressing a key, pushing a mouse/controller button, have other programs or services trying to monitor performance and "be helpful" [they usually aren't] towards anything they think isn't working right), it will get confused by the game having all of it's focus on something other than input management and think that it's crashed. You just have to be reaaaaaaaally patient for it to finish working (10+ minutes in some situations, even with good hardware).