Factorio Forums

I frequently switch playing Factorio between my desktop and my laptop. I know to wait until Steam completes syncing. Usually it works fine, and when it hickups I make a new save on the last computer I played and that typically fixes the issue.

Today I had a cloud sync problem after trying to switch to my laptop. I tried a couple of saves on the desktop but still they don't make it to the laptop.

Is there some way to force a clean sync (instead of the usual incremental) from desktop to steam? I am hoping that a clean sync will fix the issue.

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On a related but separate matter... if I start a new game in the laptop while the problem is happening and the desktop is the "master", will that botch the syncs? Or will it recognize that it is just another game and not affect the others?

achievements will be probly out of sync, but savegames, if named by different names, should not be affected, except autosave, newer one should win.

Thank you Mexmer.

From googling I see that failure to cloud sync is a common Steam issue that's not been addressed for years. There has even been requests for a feature to "force" a cloud sync upload/download but the Steam team seem to have ignored that one as well. What puzzles me is that the only hints about a cause are related to network connection quality, and there are lots of techniques nowadays to successfully transfer data over flakey network links. This should have been easy for the Steam team to fix.

Unfortunately there isn't much that the Factorio developers can do about it. It is not their code that is failing.

The only options for us players seem to be:

1) Keep trying to sync from the source computer to the cloud, and back to the destination computer. Creating a new save is a good way to see if it worked.

2) Give up on cloud sync and do manual moves of the game files.

I was lucky and I didn't need to do (2) last night. After about 6 resave/resync I was able to get the game to the laptop. This morning things went back to normal and I was able to sync back to the PC without any issues.