There's a particular silence that falls over a Factorio save when whoever's hosting it goes to bed. The smelter column is half rebuilt, two people are still arguing about a rail signal, and then the host closes the game and the whole factory blinks out until tomorrow evening. Of all the games to do that to, Factorio is the worst one: the entire fantasy is a production line that keeps running whether anyone's watching it or not. The factory must grow. It can't grow on Dave's sleep schedule.
That's usually the moment people start looking at dedicated servers. So here's the guide for that moment.
We host Factorio over at LOW.MS, so yes, this ends up pointing at our plans eventually. The first half genuinely isn't a pitch though: Factorio is one of the few games where self-hosting is a properly sensible option rather than a thing people say to sound thrifty, and it's worth understanding why before you hand anyone a card.
Self-hosting versus paying someone else
Factorio on Steam is app 427520, from Wube Software. There's no separate dedicated-server app sitting next to it in your library (nothing to pull down anonymously through SteamCMD, no second entry in the tools list), which throws people arriving from ARK or Rust. Two routes instead.
If you've got a Linux box going spare, Wube ship a free headless build direct from factorio.com/download: no graphics, no audio, no Steam account involved. It's about as light as a game server gets. Genuinely, if you already keep a small VPS alive for something else, that's a decent afternoon's work and I'd not talk anyone out of it.
On Windows there's no headless package at all. You run the ordinary game binary in server mode:
.\bin\x64\factorio.exe --start-server .\saves\my-save.zip --server-settings .\server-settings.json
Which, for what it's worth, is exactly the path our servers take too.
The catch with doing it yourself is the usual one, and Factorio makes a piece of it worse. You'll be forwarding UDP 34197, fighting whatever your ISP has decided about NAT this year, and pulling a new build down every time Wube ship a patch. Fine. All survivable. The bit that actually bites is that Factorio's simulation is single-threaded, so hosting on the machine you're playing on means your client and your server are elbowing each other for one core, the only core that counts. Once the base gets big enough to matter that shows up as UPS drop, and UPS drop isn't a stutter you can shrug off the way you would a dropped frame in a shooter, because it's the simulation itself slowing down: belts move slower, inserters swing slower, the whole factory runs at reduced speed for everyone connected at once. Everything gets slower. Together.
A hosted server sidesteps all of it. It's up at 4am, it isn't also rendering your game, and updating it is a button rather than an evening.
What you actually get on a LOW.MS Factorio server
Minus the marketing:
- DDoS protection on everything, not a tier you climb towards.
- Cloud Backup running automatically, with Cloud Restore for when a mod eats a save.
- Regions in the EU, UK and North America, picked at checkout.
- Support from people who've actually run these servers, not a queue that answers next Thursday.
- Full file access over SFTP on port 8822, so
mods/andsaves/are just folders. - A Web Console for watching the thing boot, plus Log Viewer when you need the detail.
- Provisioning in minutes.
Hardware is high-clock AMD Ryzen, which for Factorio matters more than it does for almost anything else we host, for exactly the single-threaded reason above. What a plan costs lives on the Factorio hosting page, because numbers typed into a blog post go stale in about a quarter.
Ordering, briefly
Pick a plan, choose your region, pay. It provisions itself and lands in your account with connection details ready to paste into a group chat.
Choose the region for where most of your group lives rather than where you live. Factorio forgives latency better than a shooter does, but every client runs the full simulation in lockstep with the server, so a badly placed box punishes everybody rather than one unlucky person.
First-time setup
Log into control.low.ms and open your server. Service Settings, Configuration Files, Commandline Manager, File Manager, Web Console and the rest sit down the left.
Two things about Factorio's server catch absolutely everybody, and they're worth knowing before you click anything.
It won't start without an existing save. There's no world generation on first boot: unlike most games, the server just refuses. Yours ships with a save already made so you can get straight on, but a fresh world with your own settings is a deliberate step: edit map-gen-settings.json at the server root through File Manager, set World Name in Service Settings to a filename that doesn't exist yet, then pick Generate Map in Commandline Manager and start. Map generation only applies at creation. You can't make iron richer afterwards.
Which save loads is a dropdown, not a config file. The World Name field in Service Settings lists everything sitting in saves/, and that's what boots. So bringing a single-player factory across is a two-step job (upload the .zip, then select it there), and the upload a save guide walks the whole thing. Commandline Manager gives you four options in total, worth reading once: Select World, Last Autosave, Generate Map, Load Scenario.
Day-to-day settings live in server-settings.json, editable from Configuration Files. It sits at the server root, not in data/ where the Factorio wiki's examples put it. Set your server name, slot count and password in Service Settings rather than typing them into the JSON, since the panel writes those three into the file for you. The rest is yours: autosave interval, AFK kick, whether the game pauses when nobody's online. The configuration guide goes field by field, and the getting started guide is the shorter read for a first evening.
One default surprises people. The server is set to publish itself to Factorio's public matchmaking list, but that only works once your factorio.com username and authentication token are in server-settings.json. The token's on your factorio.com account page, or sitting in player-data.json in your local Factorio folder. Leave those blank and direct connect by IP still works perfectly, you just won't show up in the browser. If you'd rather lock things down properly, there's a whitelist guide.
Space Age, and what 2.1 means for you
Space Age is a separate purchase on Steam (app 645390, out since October 2024) and it behaves oddly compared to most DLC. Internally it's three mods: space-age, quality and elevated-rails. Enable any one of them and every person connecting has to own the expansion: no exceptions, the game checks on join. Turn all three off in mod-list.json and you've got a plain 2.0 server anyone with the base game can reach. Both are fine. Decide before your friends start buying things, and the Space Age guide is there if you're weighing it up.
Worth knowing where the game is right now, too. Stable sat at 2.0.77 through the summer, with 2.1 in experimental since late June. In Friday Facts #440 Wube said plainly that they "envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio", shifting to long-term support afterwards. I'd read that as good news for anyone standing a server up. The target you're building against is about to stop moving.
A few things we've learned running these
Mods break more servers than anything else, and it's almost never the mod's fault. Every player needs identical mods at identical versions, because Factorio compares checksums on connect and one point release is enough to bounce somebody. The saving grace is the "sync mods with server" button on the join screen, which sorts it for most people without anyone having to think. Server-side, mods are .zip files dropped into mods/ via File Manager or SFTP, and you don't extract them. The mod installation guide has the routine.
Update the server before your players update their clients, not after. Steam will quietly patch everyone overnight and then five people hit a version mismatch at once. Steam Update in the sidebar handles our end. The update guide covers coordinating the rest.
Take a Cloud Backup before you touch mods. Not after. A bad interaction can leave a save that won't load at all, and a snapshot from ten minutes ago is worth rather more than a good explanation of what went wrong.
And if UPS starts sagging, don't reach for more slots. Player count barely moves the needle here. It's active entity count that does, so look at inserters, bots and fluid networks first, and the troubleshooting guide covers the rest of the usual suspects.
That's the lot, really. Factorio servers are among the easier ones to run once you're past the "create a save first" hurdle, and the payoff is a factory that grows while you're at work. Get stuck anywhere in setup and you can open a ticket, and we'll sort it.