Update
I managed to reproduce the crash even without waiting in the main menu.
Afterwards I ran the Steam "Verify integrity of game files" and it reported/fixed 1 file .

At this point it looks like the problem was indeed on my side .
Thank you for the help and the time spent investigating!
I ...

Update
I tried reproducing the issue by simply launching the game and staying in the main menu for about an hour — this time it did not crash afterwards.
There is hope that this was indeed a problem on my side.

Tomorrow after work I will try again with the full sequence:

play for a while ...

Additional test results

I booted from a LiveUSB and ran a full filesystem check:

sudo e2fsck -f -v -c /dev/nvme0n1p2

Result: FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED (so some inconsistencies were fixed).
No bad blocks were found.

After rebooting back into the system (without reinstalling Factorio), the ...

1. Storage : The game and all data are installed on same NVMe SSD (Samsung MZVLQ512HALU-00000, 512 GB).
2. File : It is not always the same file . Sometimes the error points to one PNG, sometimes to another.
Example from the latest occurrence (permissions shown):

-rwxrwxr-x 1 anton anton ...

After a full system reboot (without reinstalling Factorio) the game started launching again.
It makes me think that some file permissions or access rights might be getting reset .

Also, I want to note that this bug has reproduced for me not only on KDE neon 24.04, but also earlier on Fedora 42 KDE ...

tl;dr : Since Factorio 2.0.0 the game randomly crashes on restart (~25% of the time on 2.0.60, ~10% on earlier 2.0.x), even with all mods disabled.

Factorio version : 2.0.x (currently 2.0.60, Steam, space-age)

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Description
Since the initial 2.0 release and up to today, the game ...