System crashing while loading mod

[Medium9]

I was hinted at reporting this as a bug, despite it probably being caused by a mod going (intentionally) crazy. The mod in question is Merging Chests (https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Atria/WideChests).

I set the max width and height of the chests to 512, and the max chest area to 262144. As I understand it, the mod creates a bunch of recepies for all the possible chests it might create, so this "bug" is probably due to an overabundance of recepies upon game start. (After changing these values the game automatically restarts.)

The effects were that after a few minutes of waiting while loading this mod (as stated in the loading bar sub-text), my Windows (10) GFX settings went from 2 monitors (1440p and 2160p respectively) to one monitor @ 1024x768 - so probably crashing the graphics driver. I subsequently killed the Factorio process and restarted my PC.

The only way I found to resolve this and being able to even start the game again was by deleting the mod-settings.dat file in my user directory, resetting all mods to default.

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report. It's creating a bunch of entities as you described and consumes all of the available RAM which if the OS rejects any of the allocation requests it will fail the mod loading and give the standard failed to load mod prompt.

However, you have to wait for it to exhaust all physical memory and page file memory before that happens and computers tend to go unresponsive before that happens.