Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow admins of servers to force-undo for other players.

What ?

In the current state of the game and I expect even in version 2.0, when a griefer on a server does significant damage, it's almost impossible to recover and the easiest way to do it is to rollback, potentially losing some progress (which isn't much if autosaves are frequent, but it's a huge hassle since it requires booting everyone off for a moment). I suggest making it possible for admins of the server to force the undo action of any player that has joined the game. Maybe making it work for offline players is too much to ask for, but I hope it wouldn't be too difficult to implement this for online players. That way, when a griefer is caught, you just force-undo all their actions, and whatever action can be undone is undone. While this would greatly help, it doesn't perfectly solve the griefer problem because they can still do other insidious things that are irreversible with undo (changing train schedules, etc.), so I would understand completely if it's not something that will be implemented.

Why ?

Public servers having this feature makes the game better for everyone who likes playing on them.

As someone who's had to deal with several griefers yesterday: YES for better "damage control" tools for server admins.

We had four admins in-game, but the only person with shell access to the box was unavailable, so we were faced with repairing significant damage and no means to revert. We probably should've applied more care fine-tuning the default permissions, but as this is a popular public server, we don't want to be too restrictive for newcomers; the long-standing policy is to grant wider permissions to anyone who asks nicely in the chat.

Some random ideas:

- Undo for specific player (per OP's suggestion)
- Auto-pause the game after a huge lag spike (often caused by mass deconstruction, some insane rail BPs, etc)
- UI buttons for admins, to access the /admin and /permissions GUIs, so we can react faster
- Ability to locate and track the actions of another player via remote view (the way you can follow a train), best if it also follows their own remote view (a lot of subtle damage can be done without moving, e.g. request biter eggs into random chests throughout the base)
- Manage/load autosaves using the admin commands directly (e.g. /save, /list-saves, /load, etc)