after some further testing i can confirm the bug exists in 0.18.1 too.
seem to be triggered by disabling the factorio extended mod group https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorioE ... -Plus-Core and trying to load the save
Is it still crashing in 0.18.3 for you? I wasn't able to reproduce the crash on Windows and it turned out there was something wrong with our Linux build (which was fixed in 0.18.3).