I'm playing the Space Age campaign with a friend on a server over many days now. After a bunch of initial nest clearing on Nauvis we established our perimeter and left for space. After that point there have been several updates that we've applied, and we noticed that the invalidation for "Keep your hands clean" (having your first nest kill be via artillery) had been lost at some point.
We tested this by bringing artillery back from Vulcanus and shooting a nest, and we did get the achievement, despite many earlier nest killings.
Luckily, I've been running a script to keep 1 save a day, so I've got some history to back to.
Here's the first one, from 2.0.7: Loading this save (with a clean copy of Factorio 2.0.11) indeed clears the invalidation and shows that the achievement is still achievable. I've got some other saves available upon request. Here's the list of filenames and reported map versions:
- 2024-10-22: 2.0.7-0
- 2024-10-23: 2.0.8-1
- 2024-10-24: 2.0.9-1
- 2024-10-25: 2.0.10-1
- 2024-10-27: 2.0.11-3
Loading a save from an earlier version (unclear what version exactly) of the game lets you ignore the limitation that the spawner kill with artillery has to be the first one. The game essentially "forgets" that you failed it already when upgrading the save.