How to: Launch using the steam snap on Ubuntu

[monochromic]

Hello,

I've seen a number of threads between here and reddit that are over-complicating launch troubleshooting when using the steam snap on ubuntu. This is a misunderstanding of snaps. Since the migration away from unconfined snaps, they are now namespaced for security reasons. This means that without interface request, r/w permissions are (intentionally) very limited per-snap.

The error you're seeing on initial launch (unable to create $HOME/.factorio or .lock) are a result of this.

The simplest way to work around w/o poking launch options is to just create a symlink to somewhere the steam snap can write.

# make the save dir in the snap common. This will persist through snap refreshes. DO NOT put it in current, as this is a sym link to the latest revision
$ sudo mkdir /var/snap/steam/common/.factorio
# Since you're probably not launching steam as root, add your user to a shared group and give the group write, or (more lazily) just a+w the folder
$ sudo chmod a+w /var/snap/steam/common/.factorio
# Create the sym link in your home dir
$ ln -s /var/snap/steam/common/.factorio/ ~/.factorio

Launch should just work with no extra requirements now.

I'd really encourage you to use the snap of steam over the deb. It's the only way to stay on the edge, and the compatibility using cores is always going to be superious to debian packages (for specifically the steam snap).

Cheers.