Factorio Forums

In single player (solo play, sandbox game),

If you pause the game and press T (to open tech tree), it doesn't open. But then if you unpause, the tech tree opens without having to press T.

If while in the tech tree, and you pause the game, you can't close the tech tree. If you press escape, it opens the main menu, which seems odd. Unpausing doesn't close the tech tree, unless of course you close the tech tree as per normal.

Another oddity of this is that doesn't the game automatically pause during solo play? So why then can you pause the game from within the tech tree?

Just in case it matters, included is my current save game so you can see if this is a mod issue.

Thanks for the report. I personally don't consider any of this worth looking into. Just stop pausing/unpausing the game while trying to interact with the tech tree.

Hi there, reviving this matter after two years:

(Post from my duplicate bug report)
Following situation:
While being in the tech menu and pressing Shift+Space (accidentally), the game is paused "a second time". This very confusing behaviour is not really visible to the player. Pressing T or the cross on the top right of the screen do not allow to leave the research menu, while selecting researches remains possible.
This makes it seem, as if the game was "frozen" and quitting was the only option.

For me, it took a moderator in the discord to help me figure out, how to "fix" the issue and to get my game back running. And it took us 10minutes to do so, only because he was aware of the possible problem after some contemplation.

Solution: disabling the Shift+Space (Pause) command while the research menu is open.

As this was already commented by a staff member, I want to raise awareness once again.

I think at least disabling the ability to pause the game while the tech screen is open (especially seems the game auto-pauses in SP already) is a good idea.

This still isn't possible!? It's so annoying.

To reiterate part of the weird behavior: Open Tech tree -> press Pause button -> press ESC, which you would expect to open the menu or to leave the tech tree. Instead the menu is rendered in the background of the tech tree, in a non-interactible way: https://i.imgur.com/zeLCgZj.jpeg

I can see that most of this doesn't necessarily seem important enough to warrant fixing, but the one part that I figure does merit changing is the following: ordinarily, you can exit out of the Tech tree via either T or ESC or the cross in the top right. But if you press Pause in that screen, you can exit out of the screen via neither T nor ESC; the only ways to escape that I'm aware of are to press Pause again or to press the cross in the top right. So if you pressed Pause by accident on this screen and don't realize that the cross button still works, then you're trapped, which doesn't seem good.

Easy minimal fixes for this particular issue: a) Disable the Pause button on this screen, or b) allow exiting the tech screen via ESC and T even if the game is paused.

The main menu being behind the GUI is tracked separately here: 134173