Factorio Forums

Hi, you can close my strange issue as unreasonable but I write this as it is: factorio does something with disc and system shutdowns itself.

I have macbook pro 2012 with with last os and ssd installed and have playing in factorio for several years on it about 400 hours, (about 2 to 20 hours a week, depends on game's new versions =)
And at least one time in month I have this issue - when I play factorio, system crushes and I need to restart it.
It's repeated in various situation: with various web-dev software running foreground and on fresh os installed with only steam client. I thought it may be a os failure but a had this on all version from el captain. It have nothing with power as i played at different locations. OS have such rare crushes on some other reasons, but it always happens more frequently when I try to play game. It seems error happens with hdd\ssd as system reboots with hdd symbol. Last time at spring I even lost my ssd - a remember vividly that i've been playing factorio that time, and then i had unrecoverable disk.
Sorry, I don't know how to reproduce bug - that is the reason why i didn't submit bug report, but this time i have some malice inside, so decided to write this text.

One time, when .17 got released somewhere on the .20s I finally stopped my 7 days to day play session, downloaded the new factorio and started a super awesome map on my PC with a ssd. After playing an hour or 2 I pressed ESC and went outside for a smoke. Got called to run an errand. When I returned, about 30min later, my screen was black and Ctrl,alt,del didn't do anything. So I pressed the reset button on the PC and it looked like my graphics card was fried since my screen displayed weird colors, even in the bios screen. So I'm without a PC now, probably forever since I'm white in a racist black country and barred from employment. And everyday wondering if factorio fried my graphics card... But I love the devs and can play the game on my laptop so I don't hold a grudge. Still just wondering if the game can fry a ssd or graphics card...

It looks like the smoking kills your graphics card.

Quite frankly I wish I'd just kill me..

Sorry, but I fear there's not much of Factorio in this.
Without reading logs and loading saves I'd say that from my hardware experience op's problem originates on the fact that Factorio orders system to perform a write operation on a memory cell that was previously depleted by too many overwrites or otherwise corrupted by any means, which in turn is caused by multiple factors including SSD age, usage patterns (i.e. power cycles, usual unused cells count etc), shitty firmware implementations, technology choices, memory chip and controller implications, power surges and whatnot. Normally cells with problems are stored in internal blacklists, but there are a lot of reasons why this might not happen, which results in various kinds of stuff like what op has encountered. Despite giving edge in random r/w speed consumer SSD technology was not very much of a reliable to me at least two years ago. So any time a reproducible hardware problem like this emerges I recommend cloning the entire system on newly bought SSD, preferrably of brands with own memory production capacities. Moreover, having a full backup at hand is still a valid fallback strategy with regards to SSD usage.

As for frying the entire system, I'd suggest manufacturing defects of any kind (primarily bad soldering), power surge and/or failure to dissipate heat might be the cause of it. Assuming the latter, the system is pretty likely to hang itself in high power consumption state because of faulty drivers or firmware (likely video subsystem) or RAM problems, otherwise it is only able to reach high temperature under heavy load from an application that could be described as demanding, which I usually can't say about Factorio (at least in comparison to other games).