Problems hosting LAN game when offline

[IncrediblePony]

Hello!

We had a LAN Party going this weekend and played Factorio and had a ton of fun and giggles. But, at one point the internet connection went bust in the house. This was not a problem until I tried to leave the game to enter one of my own local savefiles to fetch a design/blueprint and then hop back in, to the LAN game. Here is where things became weird. The game was hasted as a Steam and LAN game with password and a few QOL mods (13 to be exact). When trying to reconnect to the server I got a "Could not establish network communication" error message. This seemed odd to me, since the server was hosted as LAN (e.g. LOCAL Area Network). Upon further research we found that since we had lost intenet connection we could not hit any API endpoints from Steam and Factorio. To me this negates the purpose of hosting on LAN, since in technical terms you cannot call it a truly local connection if the server and client requires internet connection to join the game. We resolved the issue and continued playing, and here's how:

- I shared a internet hotspot from a USB connection to my phone and went online for just long enough that I could hit Steam and Factorio authentication API endpoints. This was not enough though:
- The host of the LAN game also HAD to have an internet connection for some sort of authentication as well.

I report this as a bug since I don't think you can truly call a game a LAN game if it cannot be played, joined and hosted while offline. It makes no sense to me. It's totally fair if you guys want to have an internet connection at all times, but then you MUST tell people than upon hosting. Because this cost me about 1.5hrs of gaming time and as an adult with a job and so on and so forth I can only attend LAN or long gaming sessions with friends 1 maybe 2 times a year. It made me very sad and frustrated.

[Bilka]

You can host a game if you are offline by doing the following: Start Steam in offline mode. Turn off "verify user identity" when hosting the server. This means that both Steam and Factorio don't try hit any verification endpoints.

To verify that this works, I turned off my WiFi, did what I described above and then joined the game via localhost in a second instance:


Moving to technical help.