Factorio Forums

Factorio is one of the greatest computer games ever made, but autosave is a problem.

I live in the UK, where as standard, homes have ADSL. The A stands for "asymmetric". That means my download speed is 40x faster than my upload.

I play on two different PCs, a home gaming machine and occasionally on a laptop out and about. I want to be able to pick up where I left off. I disabled Steam sync because when I log out of a session, it would take up to half an hour to sync the files. If I'm playing a large map, a save can be 30Mb+ or even larger. The save itself plus three autosaves can easily go over 120Mb, potentially 200. Also, Steam sync is erratic, doesn't always use the full bandwidth I have, and seems to get confused quite easily about which saves are the newest.

So I disabled Steam sync and I now use Google Drive instead to sync both my "saves" and "mods" folders, using symbolic links. This works well generally, it cuts out several of the problems above, and I don't need to manually update mods twice plus the enabled/disabled mod list is also synced. It introduces new problems, where GDrive erratically "locks" the files meaning Factorio can't save to them. But autosave remains as the primary bugbear.

I tried playing without autosave. There were tears.

Suggestions:

• Put the autosave files somewhere else, in their own directory. Then they won't be synced. I don't need them to be synced. I suppose some other people might, but the main thing is that my actual conscious saves are kept.
• Delete autosaves when the game exits, or have that option available in settings.

I know people who play 99% on autosave only. And to me personally having them "somewhere else" sounds annoying.

I think the actual problem you have is that steam sync was never meant to be used for large savegames, but more for those typical small <2MB checkpoint saves from typical linear story games. Also i don't use steam, but if if doesn't offer an option to exclude certain files from syncing that sounds to me more like a bug in steam, and not something that should be fixed on factorios side. Having an option somewhere in config.ini to autodelete auto-saves might solve your problem, but it sounds awfully specific.

Also you say you're syncing from your PC to your Laptop. Why are you not using local (wireless) lan for that? Is that a bug in steam sync too?

Btw config.ini does have a setting for the autosave count: which is disabled by default, but if you set it to 1 you can at least cut down the size by 66%.

eradicator wrote:Also you say you're syncing from your PC to your Laptop. Why are you not using local (wireless) lan for that? Is that a bug in steam sync too?

No, I just don't always have time or want to make the time to do that before I leave home. I want it automated. It is Factorio.

Btw config.ini does have a setting for the autosave count:

Code: Select all

autosave-slots=3

which is disabled by default, but if you set it to 1 you can at least cut down the size by 66%.

50%, actually, if you count the main save file. And lose some save history.

My point was that there is no burning need to upload autosaves to the "cloud" whether that's Steam or any other cloud sync service. Reducing the bandwidth of syncing by 75% would be a major win for those of us with dodgy upload speeds.

Deadlock989 wrote:

eradicator wrote:Also you say you're syncing from your PC to your Laptop. Why are you not using local (wireless) lan for that? Is that a bug in steam sync too?

No, I just don't always have time or want to make the time to do that before I leave home. I want it automated. It is Factorio.

Fair enough. I guess it doesn't sync in background while your're playing?

Deadlock989 wrote:

eradicator wrote:Btw config.ini does have a setting for the autosave count:

Code: Select all

autosave-slots=3

which is disabled by default, but if you set it to 1 you can at least cut down the size by 66%.

50%, actually, if you count the main save file. And lose some save history.

If you don't sync them at all you lose access to all save history though. Contradiction?

Deadlock989 wrote:My point was that there is no burning need to upload autosaves to the "cloud" whether that's Steam or any other cloud sync service. Reducing the bandwidth of syncing by 75% would be a major win for those of us with dodgy upload speeds.

My point was that there are poeple that do rely on autosave. That said i still think you should request an "exlude files" feature on the steam forums and not here. Does steam allow any control at all over what is synced and what not? Also btw writing a batch file that automatically deletes the autosave files when you exit factorio is also an option.

eradicator wrote:Fair enough. I guess it doesn't sync in background while your're playing?

Yes, it does. But when I'm at home I don't have my laptop on. To sync it *down* to my laptop I would have to turn it on and connect. That is an extra piece of work which I don't always have time for, and getting back to the original point of this suggestion, I'd like it to be 75% less time consuming when I *do* do it.

eradicator wrote:If you don't sync them at all you lose access to all save history though. Contradiction?

No, because there is at least one copy left on the original disk. I just don't need it synced or uploaded. I'm not sure why I need to keep re-explaining this.

Deadlock989 wrote:My point was that there are poeple that do rely on autosave. That said i still think you should request an "exlude files" feature on the steam forums and not here. Does steam allow any control at all over what is synced and what not? Also btw writing a batch file that automatically deletes the autosave files when you exit factorio is also an option.

You missed the part where I explained that I don't use Steam to sync at all, any more. No, it doesn't allow any control over what is synced. And yes, I could mess around with batch files. But this is a suggestions forum and I'm making a suggestion, to the game devs. I wasn't actually after a discussion with a random.