I normally play Factorio through Steam on Linux (Ubuntu 24.04), and until yesterday everything was working normally. Today when I pressed Play in Steam, the game would sync the cloud and the button would briefly change to Cancel / Stop as if the game had started, but then it would immediately return to Play. The splash screen never appeared and no log file was generated in the usual .factorio directory. I saw three processes launch: reaper , pressure-vessel-wrap, and scout-on-soldier-entry-point-v2. The factorio process didn't seem to start.
I tried the usual troubleshooting steps first. I verified the game files through Steam, and I also switched between the stable and experimental branches, but neither of those changed the behavior. I also downloaded the standalone zip version of Factorio from the website and that version ran perfectly, which suggested the game itself was fine and the issue was related to the Steam launch environment.
What eventually fixed the problem was changing the compatibility runtime used by Steam. In Steam
Properties Compatibility, selecting Legacy Runtime 1.0 allowed the game to launch normally again. When using the default runtime, Steam Linux Runtime 1.0 (scout), the game failed to start.While investigating, I tried launching Factorio manually through the Steam runtime wrapper. Doing that produced the following error:
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pressure-vessel-wrap: E: Child process exited with code 1:
bwrap: setting up uid map: Permission denied