Factorio Forums

Note that I am running the steam version here.

Sometimes, when launching the game, there is a race condition causing the "Unable to create display" error. The game will then terminate.

This happens to me whenever the game window looses its focus during bootstrap, e.g. the steam window stay in front an I click on that while the game is launching.

This behavior is already known:
[0.12.29] Crash on start if game doesn't have focus [Minor issues]

The workaround for now is to set the Steam launch options to --force-d3d by right-clicking the game in your steam library, then select properties, then set launch options.

Thanks, then this can be "closed".