Can you periodically save the game? (Not autosave)

[octorok]

I've bee hosting a couple of long running Factorio games with friends, and whenever I bounce the server (e.g. going from v0.15.5 to v0.15.6) there is the initial panic of recovering the save game. I need to manually grab the latest autosave file and use that before I restart the server. Is there a better way to do this?

Specifically, when the game starts it loads an initial save game (`--start-server megabase.zip`), but the game never overwrites that file. Instead, it just creates `_autosaveXX.zip`. I can control autosave with `server-settings.json` and `autosave_slots` and `autosave_interval`. But is there a way to have the server regularly save progress to another file? e.g.

`server-settings.json` `periodic-save: "1day"` which produces `megabase-2017-05-01.zip`, `megabase-2017-05-02.zip`? Or at the very least `megabase-latest.zip` is a copy of the latest autosave file?

Or should I instead just create a background scrip that does file-system shenanigans while Factorio just updates autosave files?

[torne]

You can use --start-server-load-latest instead of specifying the filename, and ti will just load the latest autosave.

[octorok]

Perfect, thanks!