Factorio Forums

Hi everybody.

I am on Linux Mint Debian Edition and I tried to launch the game and it crashes at loading screen.

I used the search tool but I haven't found the a post with the exact same issue.

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1. What did I do ?
I launched Steam, I click the "install" button on the Factorio page into my Steam library. Then I clicked the "Play" Button after install was done (and seemed to work fine).

2. What happened ?

The game starts and the loading screen appears. At 50 %, the screen blinks and a few seconds later, the game crashes.

3. What did you expect instead ?

I expected the end of loading screen after reaching 100 % and to see the main menu.

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Maybe it is a 32-bit/64-bit conflict or something like that ? My system is 64-bits, but maybe some configuration somewhere does something else.
I have dual boot on my computer and it worked fine on Windows 7.

I tried two things via Steam (on Linux only - as I said, I got no problems on Windows) :
- Uninstall, then install version 18.12 (the first experimental version after 17.79)
- Uninstall, then install version 18.x (latest experimental version)
I got the exact same result.

Maybe the solution is really simple and I missed a something.
Thanks in advance for you answers

It's a graphics driver problem. It does not support S3TC texture formats which the game does not expect that to happen, since every desktop/laptop GPU made in past 15 years does support those formats.

You can try to use launch parameters --gfx-safe-mode, which might or might not help, but the real solution is to get yourself up-to-date graphics driver.

Ah ? It would be great that the solution would be as simple as that.
I have RX 460, I don't think it's old enough yet to have the problem you mention. I will try that and I tell you whether it works or not.

EDIT : Unfortunately, it seems not as easy to find proper drivers for Radeon GPUs on any other Linux distribution than Ubuntu. I tried with the Ubuntu target package and it didn't work (the installation showed an error and the game still crashes - but at 51 % and the log shows "frame 15" instead of "frame 23").

I saw LMDE 4 beta is there since february. If I can't solve the problem, I will wait for the next LMDE version and play on Windows meanwhile.

I had a lot of Mint updates to do. So I installed all updates (I saw linux-headers among them).
I needed reboot so I rebooted. I launched Factorio and it was apparently working. I made an alt-tab to chat with on Discord meanwhile Factorio was loading and the sound made me think that it had succeeded. But then it froze and I couldn't do anything. Thus I shut down manually and rebooted.

The game crashes now at 68 %. While it was failing loading any sprites (it was freezing just at the end of sprite checking), now it load a lot of sprites and then crashes.
I tried to reinstall Factorio but no change.

=> The game works well with --gfx-safe-mode option. I will try to find a solution without the option, but I can play on Linux in the meantime.