I need several versions of Factorio on my computer

[Plawerth]

I am using Windows 10, and I have Steam and a slow Internet connection. Some Factorio games I play are on stable release and some are on experimental. Changing versions via Steam is extremely slow due to my slow Internet connection.

I want to just make a copy of the stable game version, and store it somewhere separately from the normal Steam install location.

But for some reason this does not work. If I make a copy of Stable, upgrade the main Steam version to experimental, and then run the Stable Factorio.EXE ...... for some reason Steam gets in the way and forces the experimental version in the main install path to run.

If I then take the main line Factorio and rename it so there is nothing in the install path, when I try to run the stable version, I get a Steam error that it could not find the game. If I try this a second time, Steam starts an automatic redownload to the default path. I do not want this. I stop the download and cancel it.

And now I really confuse the shit out of Steam by breaking its updater. I have "Show extensions" enabled in Explorer, so I delete the Factorio folder in the install path, instead create a new text file and rename it to "Factorio" with no extension. Now when I try to launch the stable Factorio EXE, I get a repeated Steam disk write error as it's not expecting to have a file with the name of the directory in the default install path.

WHY can I not have multiple copies of Factorio? WHY is Steam getting in my way like this?

Is there some way to obtain Factorio that is not tied to the Steam platform?

[Loewchen]

Make a factorio.com account, link it to your steam account, download the stand alone, have as many installations as you like.