Factorio Forums

Hi there!

I looked around and searched for a save game location suggestion, but didn't find one. Perhaps someone can link it for me if there already is one.

Today the save games resides under the $user/AppData/Roaming user profile in windows. While that certainly is a good place to have it if you are an Enterprise Windows user it's not as good for regular users with synced cloud drives as those generally aim at My Documents when syncing. Microsofts OneDrive is the example I have in mind.

Many games choose their save game and screenshot location under My Documents/My Games/[...] these days. I think that would be a good place that is also substantially easier to browse and find as a user.
Two suggestions:

• I would ideally suggest to have game data in a location of choice rather than hard coded.
• Default save game location under [...]/My Documents/My Games/Factorio/[save|mods|etcetera]

Factorio is already very configurable: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... _directory
(I've just updated the wiki)

I hope this works, if not, please tell.

ssilk wrote:Factorio is already very configurable: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... _directory
(I've just updated the wiki)

I hope this works, if not, please tell.

Cool, I had missed that!
I think it would be good with a few absolute path examples in addition to the relative paths, such as C:\Users\$USER\My Documents\My Games\ and /Users/$USER/Games/Factorio/saves for instance to cover both Win and Osx.
Should I register an account for the wiki, or would you like to make an addition like that, please?

Your reply very nicely answers the first point of my two point question ssilk, thank you!

To ask everyone that reads this, how would you feel about moving the _default_ location for windows to a place that's easier to access by Explorer than the current one?
I suggest "My Documents\My Games\Factorio" in the current user home directory (-as per can be read from the registry, I'll find the key to read if this is desired, but you probably already do it in some code since stuff ends up in the system/hidden AppData folder of the user currently).

With games these days I got largely indifferent, where they put their stuff. Essentially, they are spamming it everywhere and a seldomly configurable. My general preferences are different from yours, though: Stuff in "My Documents" should only be there if it got specifically saved there by me. So I'm pretty satisfied with the way factorio handles this, especially since it also creates a link in its game directory to the current users savegame folder.

I get the argument, that (cloud) synchronizing solutions make problems, though I'm very surprised to hear, that $user/AppData/Roaming does not get synchronized by default? Isn't it the whole purpose of the "Roaming" folder to get synchronized?

Hello Tobsimon,

Referring to roaming profiles I agree with you. But if you are using backup services like onedrive/other.. then the appdata ( hidden folder ) is usually excluded as it also contains a lot of cache data.

I have tried to follow the instructions provided above and I still haven´t been able to move my save folder.
only paths found in the config.ini is the following
[path]
read-data=__PATH__system-read-data__
write-data=__PATH__system-write-data__
To me it is unclear if this refers to that these paths will move all system data or save folder only.

Also tried this instruction to the dot
"Windows:
1. Open a command prompt as administrator: Start Menu->All Programs->Accessories->Right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator
2. Change to the factorio directory: cd \<install directory> or cd \Users\<username>\AppData\factorio
3. Make the link: mklink /D saves D:\Dropbox\factorio\saves
4. If done correctly, should look like this: 05/06/2014 07:57 PM <SYMLINKD> saves [d:\Dropbox\factorio\saves]
"
But I get a return that a program have locked the Factorio folder structure ( No Factorio wasn´t running )

Im certain that Factorio can be customized a lot when I finally figure out how to

I moved this from suggestions to technical help.

hate to necro this, but just wanted to shout out a little FYI maintenance note:
As i just went over 1k hours played on the steam version, dont even know how much i had on pre-steam... Anyway, i was curious to see what all those saves added up to.

well, long story short: after pruning a couple hundred save files averaging 8-10mb, I just free'd up almost 2 gig on one of my SSDs.

LOL.