Abstract The higher-order fluctuations of the largest fragment charge were found to exhibit the signatures of a second-order phase transition in experimental data and simulations of the statistical multifragmentation model recently (Pietrzak et al 2020 Phys. Lett. B 809 135763). This work is devoted to study the dissipation of energy and higher-order fluctuations of the largest fragment charge in projectile fragmentation. The isospin-dependent quantum molecular dynamics (IQMD) model is used to study the non-equilibrium thermalization and fragmentation. The statistical code GEMINI is applied to simulate the second decay of the pre-fragments. To reveal how the incident energy dissipates into the excitation energy of the projectile-like system, the time evolution of the density, collective velocity, and random kinetic energy are displayed. It is found that the competition between the heat conduction and heat flux affects the excitation energy of the projectile-like system, which is the key variable in the fragmenting process. Displaying the mean multiplicity of the intermediate mass fragments and the higher-order fluctuations of the largest fragment charge, it is found that the decay mechanism of the projectile-like system transfers from the multi-fragmentation at mid-peripheral collision into the nucleon-evaporation at peripheral collision. The pseudo-critical point of this transition can be indicated by the zero of third order fluctuation together with the minimum of fourth order fluctuation. The calculations of the pseudo-critical point by the IQMD + GEMINI model agree with that extracted from the experimental data. Finally, the influences of the pseudo-critical point by the second decay, the mass number of the colliding system, and the incident energy are studied.