Support / Factorio / Factorio Autosaves and Rolling Back to an Autosave

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Factorio Autosaves and Rolling Back to an Autosave

The game Factorio has an automatic save system, that will store snapshots of your game progress on your server. Older autosaves are overwritten continuously as you play, and it cycles repeatedly through the autosave slots.

It is possible to copy one of the autosaves, rename it, and replace the main world save with it. This would allow you to "roll back" your server if you desired.

Location of Autosaves

On a server, the autosaves are normally stored in the saves folder. Files are named _autosave1.zip, _autosave2.zip, etc, etc.

Changing Autosave Settings

The number of autosaves slots that it uses, and how often it makes them, are controlled by three settings:

Autosave interval is the number of minutes between saves.
Autosave slots is how many separate autosave files it keeps at one time, and combined with Autosave interval above will sort of determines how far back in real world time your autosaves go.
Auto-save only on server Setting this to false will send copies of the auto-saves to all connected clients. Most of the time, this is normally turned off (set to true or the box is checked on our control panel).

These settings can be changed directly from the Nodecraft control panel, on the "Game Settings" tab, in the "Advanced" section.

A view of the Nodecraft server control panel, showing the options for controlling autosaves in the game Factorio

If you like to make the changes manually to config files, the config is called server-settings.json, and is normally found in your data folder. If you edit server-settings.json manually it will look like this when you open it:

A view of the server-settings.json file for the game factorio.

Simply change the settings that are in purple text, and save the file.

NOTE: This file is in JSON format, so all the quotes, colons, commas, brackets, etc are required. Erasing any of them will keep the file from working properly.

Restoring an Autosave

We highly recommend before making any major changes to your server, that you stop the server and back a complete file backup using the backups tab on our control panel. Though something might have happened in your game that was so bad you want to rollback the whole server, it's sometimes possible to make a bad situation worse. Having a backup to undo all the changes is a great thing; real lifesaver sometimes.

Find the _autosave.zip file you wish to restore to, and copy the file to another location on the server, or download it to your local computer. Rename the _autosave.zip file to exactly match your current game world name, keeping the .zip extender as is.

Upload or move the file to the worlds folder on your server. it will overwrite the current game world zip, since the names are the same. There will be no warning that it's erasing the old files. If you want to keep the original world save, either rename it first, or download a copy of the file.

Restart the Server

If everything has been done right, when you restart the server next time, it will load the newly renamed _autosave.zip as your world file. If it wasn't the correct point at which you wanted to rollback, repeat the process with one of the other _autosaves.zip until you find the correct point.