Phew, I thought I was going mad or one of the many mods I'm running was acting up

Yes, it is caused by factorio requiring a newer library, not a bug, but glibc 2.17 is the version supported by RHEL 7.4 (released in august) and all the related distros. If the upgrade was necessary because of bugs or features in the library that is one thing, but it does kill off the ease of runni...

Did you leave a debug print statement in the last update by any chance? The game is now spamming the chat with ticks

local function on_tick()
game.print("tick")

-edit-
I see it's not in the version on github, but it was in the 0.8.1 zip I just updated to through the mods menu