Factorio Forums

Having spent 200+ hours in Factorio before purchasing it myself (and recognizing that mods are a thing), I'm honestly stoked to play this game for a very long time. I do wonder, however, if there's a concerted effort to preserve Factorio and all the mods created around the game, or even if that's allowed in the TOS. I'm a fan of games preservation and archiving, and feel that Factorio could very much benefit from it, especially longer term, compared to something like Minecraft. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Saiyaken_PHOENIX wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2025 8:39 am Having spent 200+ hours in Factorio before purchasing it myself (and recognizing that mods are a thing), I'm honestly stoked to play this game for a very long time. I do wonder, however, if there's a concerted effort to preserve Factorio and all the mods created around the game, or even if that's allowed in the TOS. I'm a fan of games preservation and archiving, and feel that Factorio could very much benefit from it, especially longer term, compared to something like Minecraft. Any thoughts or suggestions?

You can download (and keep ) each and every version of Factorio ever made from their web page right now.

You can also download (and keep) individual mods, too, and re-install them whenever you'd like into whatever version of Factorio you'd like (that they're compatible with).

As far as I know and as far as I can tell, there's no DRM with the game.

I'm not aware of a commercial game that that is better for long term preservation than Factorio.

The Terms of Service are fairly permissive:

- The term of your licence under these Terms of Service shall commence on the date that you install or otherwise use Factorio or any other connected services or products and ends on the date that you uninstall or otherwise dispose of Factorio.
- Possession of the membership entitles you to all the updates to the digital content associated with this membership for free in the future. Specifically this means that future updates to the core game are for free. However this doesn't include any more significant products that we might release, such as a Factorio DLCs, Factorio 2, etc.
- Possession of the membership entitles you also to use of the mod portal (see below for the details) and multiplayer matching server.
- You may use Factorio and other paid content for your own personal use.
- You are not allowed to copy, transfer or distribute the game, its hacked or otherwise altered versions, any of its parts or any of the paid content.

Which basically means that you can Download and Use the Installer and Mods for as long as you want, for personal reasons, until you Uninstall the game or get bored. They don’t allow the posting of derivative content in a “repository” outside of the Mod Portal; although keeping source on GitHub seems to be fine, for practical reasons.

On a technical level, Factorio is one of the best Engineered pieces of Software that I have ever used. There are basically no Major Issues with core gameplay mechanic, and the Bugs Forum is well-monitored for anything Minor or the occasional Crash. The Installer itself functions well Offline with minimal Windows/Linux dependencies, with any historical version available for Download. Multiplayer is possible through the Matchmaking servers; on the public Internet with port-forwarding; or entirely Locally (like old-school LAN games) using the Desktop version or a dedicated Headless build.

Factorio’s savegame format is fairly friendly to long-term preservation and modification - it is a ZIP archive containing a series of JSON and binary-packed DAT files that are easy to experiment with, and only rarely cause crashes by doing so. With each Minor and Major version change they add comprehensive Migration compatibility for any changes (eg, 1.1 —> 2.0 and the Rails update kept the old ones as “Legacy Rails”, at least for now….).

I'm glad to see such a game exists, and to have started playing at the near beginning of this game. Hopefully I'll see some of you guys still here in the span of 20 years.