You should pay attention to close your Bitcoin Core GUI gracefully via File menu and Quit, wait until it actually all closes.
noted
I don't run Bitcoin Core in Windows, I run my Core in Linux and not with the GUI.
Yeah Im kinda regretting the decision to run this node on windows as I'm not at the linux level however most of the guides out there are linux based so prob would have been easier. As a novice a lot of these guides omit steps on the expectation that you should know..which I dont
Your setup only allows connections via tor (same as mine) and all your peers have indeed only onion addresses. So, that part is working properly. What did you install for Tor? Maybe you can find there some log entries indicating the onion address of your node?
I'm not sure if the reason could be that your Core can't properly communicate via the torcontrol. A log entry that torcontrol thread started is in your debul.log. Check if you have your Tor properly configured for Windows environment (can't help here much, but there are certainly thread on the topic Tor setup on Windows in this forum, too).
All I did was copy that bitcoin.config file save and run. The node crashed so I tried looking for solutions. This guide
https://miloserdov.org/?p=1839 alerted to the fact that I needed to install TOR as a service to keep it running. Soon as I did that and started bitcoin core I got oputbound running peers. I havent configured tor and I have no torrc file in the tor directory and have no idea what torcontrol is
That's not what I wrote in my post:
bitcoin-cli.exe getnetworkinfo
Yeah sorry I assumed that was the executable for linux or something cuz the only exe I have in is bitcoin\bitcoin-qt
I found bitcoin-cli in the daemon folder and this is what I got
c:\Program Files\Bitcoin\daemon>bitcoin-cli.exe getnetworkinfo
error: Could not locate RPC credentials. No authentication cookie could be found, and RPC password is not set. See -rpcpassword and -stdinrpcpass.