Factorio Forums

I am not able to write in English myself, so I am using ChatGPT for help. Please excuse any awkward phrasing.

I’m trying to limit the size of a planetary surface that I’m developing.

To do this, I set the width and height values in the planet’s map_gen_settings.
However, when I check in-game, it seems that these values have no effect at all.

All other members besides width, height, and seed seem to be applied correctly in my code. So I wondered if these values simply aren’t applied at the prototype stage. I tried setting width and height again during the on_surface_created event, but I got the same result.


How can I set the width and height of a surface? I have checked the documentation, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it on my own. If this is a technical limitation of Factorio, I would greatly appreciate any guidance or help.

Xeon257 wrote: Sun Oct 12, 2025 9:53 amI tried setting width and height again during the on_surface_created event, but I got the same result.

You need to write the modified map gen settings back to the surface

Ah, thank you very much for your answer. Could you explain why the above variables can only be set at runtime? If this is intentional, I would also be curious to know the reasoning behind it.

Those variables are part of the map generation settings that the player controls when making a new game and so the values from the GUI are used to make all planets runtime.

Ah, it seems that the user-defined map settings are being overwritten by the Lua object, which makes it look like they aren’t working. Thank you for the clarification!