Factorio Forums

Background: I'm currently playing Space Explore with friends on a headless server. Currently the game size has reached over 600MiB and the game takes a little bit above 13 GiB of RAM for every system. It is indeed heavy and we run Global Tick Time Scale at 30UPS to free up CPU so all computers involved can play smoothly and lag-free.

When closing down the game, we have taken into habit to pause the game, because the server setting does not carry out the pausing in a good fashion. If we forget this or is dropped, we are left to painfully slow joining times.

The setting makes it do pause the game after all have left, but, it does not keep the game paused until the first player have loaded the map. It instead unpauses the game directly when someone is downloading the map. When playing with such huge maps it adds several extra minutes in catching-up time. We are already talking minutes in just loading the map, so this behaviour makes the client be very far behind the server when the loading is done and it starts catching up. It do also contribute to disconnect errors since the server is running away from a joining client. More of that in another report.

What the game properly should do, is that it should wait with unpausing until the first client are ready, meaning when the map are loaded and the client can join directly without catching up. That would save a huge amount of time.

Thanks for the report,
Unfortunately this is working as intended, I will move this to ideas and suggestions

It do work in that way, because it keeps the server paused in case no one is connected. It's not that part I pointing at.

It is that it unpauses the game already at the phase the first player is downloading the map. I can't see the point of it since it adds a lot of extra joining time on huge maps. I expected it to keep the game paused until the first player was done loading, but in reality it worked differently.

Instead of changing the behavior for all, having an option to choose to keep the server paused until the first player is done loading, or even letting the first player unpause by herself would also be very appreciated for us.

a mod that reduces game speed to 0.01 when no one is online.

I ran into this as well. And I must say it’s a bit weird that you have to catch up to a server that assumably is paused. Starting the server only when the first player has caught up would make much more sense imo.

IMO, by what you write, this suggestion makes a lot of sense.

Seems to me an option to have the server ask for an "I'm caught up" ack from players connecting to an auto-paused server would be pretty easy to implement. Then the game could unpause as soon as the first ack arrives. edit: or unpause to 0.01 speed until it does and then go back to full speed.