Clean boot tested with third-party services/startups disabled. The issue still occurs.
Ollama process is running and port 11434 is reachable.
The game process remains responsive and keeps established TCP connections to 127.0.0.1:11434.
ollama ps shows the model loaded on 100% GPU.
GPU load is about 92%, VRAM usage about 8.7/16.3 GB, temperature about 61°C.
While the in-game chatbot is stuck, a separate ollama run request to the same model answers immediately.
So Ollama and the model are still responsive; the failure seems to be specific to the game request/response handling rather than system load or third-party software.