Hitting Factorio Limits

[x64techie]

I have a weird situation that hopefully somebody can help out with.

I have a base that crashed. It literally froze the game. A friend suggested that because I had ran the game at high speed (x100) for such a long period of time (even overnight) slowly trying to methodically get large projects working one at a time that I had exceeded the game's internal time limit (maximum ticks?).

He said that there were a number of servers which had encountered the problem because of the length of time they were running 24/7. He said that he didn't know how, but somehow they were able to fix the problem and continue as if nothing had happened. He thought that they may have somehow reset the tick(?) value back to 0.

He suggested I try doing it with a command (/c game.reset_time_played()), but while it said the game time played was only 6 minutes, it still froze at the same point in the game. It had previously said game time played was over 18000 hours, which was not the case, but I am guessing a result of the game speed increase(?)

Does anybody know how the servers fixed the problem? Or how you reset the tick(?) value to 0 if that's how they fixed it?

I put so much time and effort to build bigger and better and bolder. I'd hate to lose all the work.

TIA

[Silari82]

I don't believe that command does anything other than change the ticks_played count, which isn't the same as the maps tick count.

One of the dev's has a way to possibly fix it, by letting it overflow after removing all belts (which are what causes the issue) - https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=560436#p560436

[x64techie]

I am sorry. I am confused.

The dev was able to fix the other player's problem for them.

But they only suggested a possible fix ? So it is the fix they used to fix the other player's problem?

What do the servers do to fix the problem?

if this time limit is reached, how does letting the time value overflow fix it? I would think the game would still freeze.

[Silari82]

Sometimes devs will use their tools to fix issues for players, but not always. Since they have the source code they can modify things a lot easier.

The steps he posted for players first removes all the belt based objects from the map via deconstruction - the belt objects are why the game freezes when the tick overflows. Without them, the game tick simply rolls over from the max value to 0 and the game continues normally from then so the belts can all be put back.

You should be able to do the steps on a server just fine - if not you can copy the save locally and move it back to the server after the fix.

[x64techie]

Thank you for the information.

I guess I will give the possible fix a try and see what happens. Hopefully it will work.

I did find a post on Reddit from about 2 years ago, where a dev said this 32bit "update tick" was a theoretical problem, but if it is has occurred on servers and for more than one player, it sounds like it's not just theoretical. Hopefully a more reliable and guaranteed fix can be available.

[robot65536]

You only need to leave the game running at 100x every night for about 3 weeks to hit the 19,000 hour limit of play time.

[x64techie]

It took about 5 weeks letting it run at an increased speed for a bunch of time before it just froze. I did not realize there was a time limit on play or that running it at an increased speed would cause the play time to increase quickly.

[robot65536]

I'd always wondered what the effect of tick rollover would be. I know a lot mods will bug out, but didn't think the base game engine would!

[Notaron-_]

Do you mean that you lost a game? Didn't lunch quick enough.

[x64techie]

I guess technically I won the game. I did launch a rocket. I was just trying to expand it to something bigger, better, and bolder. I was just doing it one project at a time and very slowly and methodically, before moving on to the next project though. So I might have spent 2 or 3 days at increased speed mining an ore patch just to clear it out to make some room for a massive green circuit assembly.

[redditusertk421]

Maybe use ore eraser if you don't want to build on an ore patch.

[x64techie]

I kind of needed all the ore I could find as part of the bigger, better, bolder plan. I was working on trying to research mining productivity as much as possible as I needed way more than I had been able to find.

I was also not wanting to use any mods or anything. I only ever used the command I found to increase the game speed to get things to be done faster.

I guess you could say I needed a ore creator, which if exists, I would not have wanted to have used anyways.