Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Please have the game check for game and mod updates before initializing.

What?

Please change the client to do the update checks before fully initializing the game.
This is so we don't have to sit through the whole initialization routine twice or thrice when there are updates to apply that we want to apply.

The current worst case scenario is:

1. Start game
2. do full? initialization which can take a long time especially with a lot of mods or on slower computers
3. check for game updates
4. choose to update the game
5. update game
6. restart
7. do full? initialization which can take a long time especially with a lot of mods or on slower computers
8. check for mod updates
9. choose to update the mods
10. update mods
11. restart
12. do full? initialization which can take a long time especially with a lot of mods or on slower computers
13. finally play

Change this to

1. Start game
2. check for game updates
3. choose to update the game
4. update game
5. restart
6. check for mod updates
7. choose to update the mods
8. update mods
9. restart
10. do full? initialization which can take a long time especially with a lot of mods or on slower computers
11. finally play

The second set of steps requires running the initialization 1 time instead of potentially 3 times.
Speaking of the worst case scenario I just experienced it and wrote this up during the waits.

I have never understood why this was never implemented the whole time I've been playing Factorio. It just seems like a simple optimization to do.

Why?

To improve the overall user experience when there are updates of any sort.

+1, especially since in 2.0 it's already possible to browse mods without loading the entire game (just modify something in mods.json to cause a missing dependecy, the game will let you change active mods, download and update them before loading anything else). This shouldn't be too hard to implement for the mods window.
Hope Wube also thinks so