My Factorio Info

Factorio Headless Setup

Updated 2025/07/17

These steps were done with Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS

Resources:

• Multiplayer Factorio wiki
• Stable Factorio headless server

Check that your version of glibc is >= 2.18 using ldd --version

$ ldd --version
ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.35-0ubuntu3.7) 2.35
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Written by Roland McGrath and Ulrich Drepper.

Output of ldd command confirms glibc version >2.18.

Switch to $ cd /opt directory and download latest Factorio stable headless version (2.0.60 as of this writing)

$ sudo wget https://factorio.com/get-download/stable/headless/linux64

Rename file to match version (2.0.60 in this example)

$ sudo mv linux64 factorio-headless_linux_2.0.60.tar.xz

Extract archived and zipped file

$ sudo tar -xJf factorio-headless_linux_2.0.60.tar.xz 
anon@ox:/opt$ ls -l
total 55376
drwxr-xr-x 8 factorio factorio     4096 Jul 18 05:05 factorio
-rw-r--r-- 1 root     root     56693436 Jul 10 10:05 factorio-headless_linux_2.0.60.tar.xz

Remove file (save space, you can always download the file again, if needed) using sudo rm <filename.tar.xz>

Add a new user to run factorio and assign ownership of /opt/factorio directory to same user

$ sudo useradd factorio
$ sudo chown -R factorio:factorio /opt/factorio/

Verify permissions show factorio for both user and group with ls -ld /opt/factorio

$ ls -ld /opt/factorio/
drwxr-xr-x 4 factorio factorio 4096 May  4 17:07 /opt/factorio/

Test Factorio binary by switching to factorio user then start server

robot01@apu01:/opt$ sudo su - factorio
No directory, logging in with HOME=/
$

As factorio user create /opt/factorio/ saves directory. I used saves directory.

$ mkdir /opt/factorio/saves

Start server and look for something like "File /savename does not exist."

$ /opt/factorio/bin/x64/factorio --start-server savename.zip

At this point you can load up saved games or create some games. I find it easier to create new game in Factorio client, save it, then SFTP the saved file to my headless server save directory.

Update for 2.0.60

With a base client and headless server (i.e., no mods) installation, I encountered a mod mismatch error when attempting to connect with the client. To fix this, I had to edit the default "true" values to "false" in /opt/factorio/mods/mod-list.json file for "elevated-rails", "quality", and "space-age".

Here is my mod-list.json modified file:

$ cat factorio/mods/mod-list.json  

{
  "mods": 
  [
    
    {
      "name": "base",
      "enabled": true
    },
    
    {
      "name": "elevated-rails",
      "enabled": false
    },
    
    {
      "name": "quality",
      "enabled": false
    },
    
    {
      "name": "space-age",
      "enabled": false
    }
  ]
}

Publish game on Factorio matching server

Copy /opt/factorio/data/server-settings.example.json to /opt/factorio/data/server-settings.json.

$ sudo cp /opt/factorio/data/server-settings.example.json /opt/factorio/data/server-settings.json

Edit appropriate server-settings.json values.

I used _comment_token versus password value. The appropriate value is located in %appdata%\Factorio\player-data.json under the key name "service-token". The service-token is populated after you've browsed the multiplayer servers via your Factorio game client.

My player-data.json for user "anon" on Windows was located at C:\Users\anon\AppData\Roaming\Factorio.

Make any changes to config ini

robot01@apu01:/opt/factorio$ sudo vi /opt/factorio/config/config.ini

Updating Factorio headless server

1. Download the latest copy of the headless server using the steps above.
2. Move and rename the headless server following the steps above.
3. Assign ownership of /opt/factorio directory to factorio user used above.

Gaming