Graphical Issues on Wayland (Linux)

[JGJones]

The rendering will flicker and glitches as if I'm using X11 on Wayland (this happens in Stable too if I set driver to X11 that but it's perfect with zero issues if set to Wayland). I switched to experimental 2.1.7 to check it out and getting this. The menus are broken like this and the text might flicker etc. The driver is set to Wayland still. I've double checked the config.ini file and the lines is set to wayland too:

Code: Select all

; Options: auto, x11, wayland
linux-preferred-video-driver=wayland

Wanted to check if it's something I need to fix (ie legacy settings from stable that might be impacting?) before submitting a bug report - I find it hard to imagine this might be a bug (big one) in Factorio given how fantastic the devs are

Sample images to demostrate:

screenshot-2026-06-23_12-02-38.png (277.45 KiB) Viewed 2069 times

screenshot-2026-06-23_12-06-42.png (3.62 MiB) Viewed 2069 times

screenshot-2026-06-23_12-07-38.png (1.54 MiB) Viewed 2069 times

[Loewchen]

See 134017

[JGJones]

Thanks for the link - I've read the thread there as well as the Reddit link that was posted in there.

Those suggest that it's a graphics driver issue.

I don't think it is in my case as I am able to play other games on my Linux box without issue.

Furthermore I have switched Factorio version back to the stable version (2.0.77 as of today) and I have no graphical issues - game works flawlessly using Wayland drivers.

Switch it back to experimental 2.1.7 and graphical issues is back.

I've gone back to 2.0.77 for now for my Crackrio fix but happy to switch to experimental if you can advise on getting logs or output to help diagnose the issue.

By the way - I can cause the exact same graphical issues on 2.0.77 if I switch the driver to X11 (I'm using Wayland) so this _suggests_ to me that the 2.1.7 somehow isn't switching to Wayland for whatever reason and continue to use the X11 driver - I see that the Auto option is new to 2.1.7, might this be a factor?

[Bilka]

Please post a log file.

[JGJones]

Added the log - I see at top of the log that it's picking the X11 driver despite the configuration being set to wayland:

0.181 Video driver: x11

I've moved my old config.ini to config.ini-bak and started a fresh instance of Factorio. The graphical issues remains, and it is set to Auto. Changed it to Wayland - confirmed that this change also shows successfully in the new config.ini

; Options: auto, x11, wayland
linux-preferred-video-driver=wayland

But the log I've attached is from after that - still using x11 driver.

[peikk0]

I don't have any graphical issues but I'm also running the issue with the X11 driver being used while the preferred video driver is set to Wayland in the config. This is only happening with the Steam version, the non-Steam version is using the Wayland driver as expected.

Logs attached for both.

[raiguard]

The preferred video driver is a "hint" to SDL to select a certain one, but it will still fall back to the old one if it can't use the preferred one for whatever reason.

Please launch the game with SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=wayland and see what happens - if it can't initialize on Wayland it should now crash and tell you why.

As for the graphical glitches... it's easy to blame nvidia. I would see if getting it to run natively on Wayland would magically fix it.

[JGJones]

Thanks

I added this to the Steam launch options SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland %command% and the log does show this env variable being picked up and it crashed. Have added the log.

Yes it's nvidia alas it's all I have - my concern is that I do not have any issues running the game on Wayland using nvidia on the stable branch (2.0.77) - it runs wonderfully without any issues. It breaks on 2.1.7.

So this is what I have done:

Ran Factorio 2.1.7 (experimental branch) with the SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland env parameter set. Game crash. Log attached as factorio-2.1.7.log

Ran Factorio 2.0.77 (stable branch) with the SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. Game start with SDL env parameter and the driver does get set to wayland. No issues at all. Log attached as factorio-2.0.77.log

[raiguard]

I am able to run Factorio 2.1 on Steam and Wayland just fine. I spent an hour trying to spin up an Omarchy VM to test Omarchy but ran into many issues. I may look into it again later, but for now I'm going to say, "unsupported distro".

I also don't own an nvidia card to test with.

[JGJones]

Fair enough.

I appreciate the time taken to look into this.

[JGJones]

I only discovered that I could with my Steam account download Factorio directly from Factorio.com site! So I've downloaded the 2.1.7 for Linux from there and ran it from command prompt. And it loads perfectly without issues - no graphical glitches and it picks up Wayland without issue. (0.295 Video driver: wayland)

So the issue is with the Steam version somehow - I suspect it's the Steam client that might be the issue rather than the game itself. Going to take a look to see where/how I can get the Steam log to see what it's doing differently (ie does it launch the game without envs or something).

[nofdak]

I'm seeing this too. I'm running the non-Steam version downloaded from factorio.com with Linux. I've tried both X11 and Wayland and both show the same issue. The graphics settings always looks like that and I can't seem to fix it. The background tends to get corrupted maybe 20% of the time. When it's corrupted, a new scene loading fixes the corruption and then that scene renders perfectly. I've attached my logs if they help

Screenshot_20260623_213015.png (8.55 MiB) Viewed 1455 times

Update:

I tried using Zink, an OpenGL implementation that runs on top of Vulkan and that seemed to have resolved the issues.

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 __EGL_VENDOR_LIBRARY_FILENAMES=/usr/share/glvnd/egl_vendor.d/50_mesa.json \
         MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink \
         ./bin/x64/factorio

[nofdak]

Here's a video if it helps:

Screencast_20260623_214324.webm

(43.53 MiB) Downloaded 35 times

[orangemammut]

I only discovered that I could with my Steam account download Factorio directly from Factorio.com site! So I've downloaded the 2.1.7 for Linux from there and ran it from command prompt. And it loads perfectly without issues - no graphical glitches and it picks up Wayland without issue. (0.295 Video driver: wayland)

So the issue is with the Steam version somehow - I suspect it's the Steam client that might be the issue rather than the game itself. Going to take a look to see where/how I can get the Steam log to see what it's doing differently (ie does it launch the game without envs or something).

I tried this, but it didn't help for me.
What I've done now is switch to a xfce session that uses x11 instead of wayland and that fixes it for me.

[pauldv]

I had this problem on 2.0.77 (and I think earlier too). In this case it is a dual GPU (Intel integrated + NVidia discrete). When running it on intel it works perfectly. When using NVidia drivers lower than 595 (experimental 590 or stable 580) everything works as expected. Currently on nvidia driver 610 it still does not work. I have not tried with the experimental 2.1 releases. In my case this is using kwin as compositor (at least versions 5.6.5, 5.7.0 and 5.7.1). It should be noted that when mouse hovering over the text, it does appear.

[peikk0]

This is working properly again for me with 2.1.8 today, it's using the wayland driver as expected.

[Antonius]

I know that playing via wine fixes this problem (at least for me), but god damn it I'm stubborn and refuse to switch away from native Linux for a game that actually has dedicated Linux developers.
I've deleted every single Factorio file in my system, switched back to X11, different launch parameters, tinkering with the config file, switching to the experimental branch, and a bunch of other things, but nothing besides Wine works.
Arch Linux, KDE, Nvidia (of course -_-).
Man, I really miss playing Factorio T_T

[JGJones]

I feel your pain. Nvidia is particular problematic it might seem. I updated my Arch recently. Incldued a GPU driver update.

Rebooted.

Now I have graphical issues. Even though the driver is correctly set to Wayland. The only change is that driver update so it's not the game that's at fault. I haven't tested the Steam version yet and will do that when I get the chance to. I've been using the standalone version the past couple of days without issues.

[JGJones]

Update: The updated drivers that caused an issue was the version: 610.43.02

I downgraded the drivers to the previous one before the update by using pacman on Arch using the packages in the cache (at /var/cache/pacman/pkg) to the previous drivers whcih was 595.71.05

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sudo pacman -U lib32-nvidia-utils-595.71.05-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst libxnvctrl-595.71.05-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst nvidia-open-dkms-595.71.05-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst nvidia-settings-595.71.05-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst nvidia-utils-595.71.05-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst opencl-nvidia-595.71.05-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Game runs fine with no glitches. I guess Linus wasn't wrong!

[emk]

Thank you to everyone investigating this! I can confirm virtually identical graphical behavior on Ubuntu 24.04.04 LTS running nvidia-driver-595-open and Factorio 2.0.77 stable on an Nvidia Blackwell card. This is a very boring mainstream Linux setup

Capture d’écran du 2026-07-06 17-13-11.png (1.58 MiB) Viewed 500 times

This is a brand new graphics card and it runs tons of Steam games 100% fine. This is very likely an Nvidia driver-related issue of some sort that Factorio trips over, I would guess?