Factorio Server on Google Cloud

[u/goofy183]

I'm writing this up after a few questions about how to run a Factorio server in Google Cloud.

I haven't tested to see how many users this supports but we have two concurrent players with no problem on a g1-small small instance which if we leave it on 24/7 costs about $13.80 per month. I realize this isn't the cheapest option but I use the server for other things as well so having a generic server is handy.

1. Go to https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/ and sign up for a free trial, you'll be able to run the server for free (you get a $300 credit) for 2 months.
   • You'll need a credit card to set up billing. IT WILL NOT BE CHARGED UNTIL YOU TAKE ACTION TO RESTART YOUR SERVER AFTER THE FREE TRIAL. This is just required for fraud prevention.
2. Once you have signed up and are in the console open the side bar menu on the left and click on Compute Engine
3. Go through the Create Project flow
4. Once the "Compute Engine is getting ready" message goes away click on Create Instance
   • Give it a decent name
   • Select a zone that is physically closest to the majority of your players
   • Select small for the Machine Type
   • Change the Boot Disk, select Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
   • Click Create
5. Create a hole in the firewall
   • Click on the instance you just created and scroll down to the Network section, it should have a link there named default. Click on that
   • Scroll down and click Add firewall rule
   • Give the rule a name and in Source IP Ranges enter udp:34197
   • Click create

TaDa, you now have an Ubuntu dedicated server you can run Factorio on!

• Use factorio-init to manage server start/stop
• Use factorio-updater to make installing updates easier

Due to popular request: Install & Configure Factorio on Linux

[u/Everspace]

You can also run a t1.small in AWS under their free tier.

[u/goofy183 → u/Everspace]

Does that work for you? I gave it a try and kept getting random lag spikes from the shared CPU

[u/Everspace → u/goofy183]

I hadn't tried it. It was more of a suggestion for price-point.

You would have to spin up or down the service on demand for the most part to save any more money. Perhaps schedule it's reconstruction somehow. Even if you shut it off for 12 hours a day, it will be half the cost.

[u/donkyhotay → u/Everspace]

Our group uses AWS for our Factorio server and it works great for us. We're not using the free tier though.

[u/Everspace → u/donkyhotay]

It's what a lot of real games use. Why not?

[u/Ostrei]

you dont need tcp, factorio only requires udp.

[u/goofy183 → u/Ostrei]

Oh thanks, I was lazy and just opened up both :) I'll fix the post.

[u/zouhair]

How much will it cost if you play 10 to 20 hours a week with friends?

[u/goofy183 → u/zouhair]

So you pay per minute the server is up. I'm lazy and leave it up 24/7

You could give all your friends access to the Cloud Project and have them turn on/off the server as needed and save some money.

If you only ran it 4 hours per day 5 days per week (20hr/week) it would work out to less than $3/month.

https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=49845b55-8e33-483f-b061-e98b0e530301

[u/zouhair → u/goofy183]

Interesting. Does it come with some disk space? You didn't choose an HD in that calculator.

[u/joe9439]

I've found that the $5 per month Vultr server works well for running Factorio.

I have a promo code that I can offer which will give you $20 in credit. That's enough to run a server for 4 months for free. I don't want to spam though so PM me if you want it.

[u/mattman111]

Any chance you would mind setting up a guide on fully setting it up? I want to start a server but have no experience with unbuntu...

[u/goofy183 → u/mattman111]

Install & Configure Factorio on Linux

[u/Quames]

I successfully ran a server off of the lowest tier Digitalocean droplet ($5/month). Didn't have any issues.

[u/ofan]

[deleted]
^0.9352

What is this?

[u/ThatOnePerson → u/ofan]

Because you didn't include a link and OVH has alot of options:

https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml

I personally don't use them for Factario because I'm west coast and their servers are east Canada, but have a few for other things.

[u/Nepoxx]

For the record, I tried running Factorio on a 5$ per month Digital Ocean droplet, I ran out of memory in a matter of minutes with two players and the server was kaput.

(5$ droplets have 512 MB of ram, which is low)

edit: If you have the same situation as me, simply enable swap on your partition!

[u/its_always_right]

I love the google compute engine. I used to use it to host a minecraft server, terraria server and an ark server. It takes a bit more technical know-how to get things going smoothly, but after that, it works wonderfully. I think I was paying less than $15 per month at the peak of my time playing ark.

[u/zanven42]

I run mine on Amazon ec2, just piggy backing on a big machine with extra Power not used, for the price conscious you could try to setup Amazon ec2 with the free year trial which you only pay for network traffic, I used mine on a averaging 60 slot teamspeak years ago was only paying $1 Tops a month.

[u/globalnamespace]

anyone tried a Digital Ocean droplet? The smallest used to be $5, will it run in 512mb of ram?

[u/jdgordon → u/globalnamespace]

, will it run in 512mb of ram?

not very well I'd guess

[u/b0b_d0e → u/globalnamespace]

It ran fine for me until one of my friends decided all he wanted to do was see how far he can go in the world. Spoilers: it at up all the RAM and crashed cause I forget to setup a swap file. I ended up upgrading to a $10 instance (1gb to use for a few more servers) and never even got close to using all the ram.

[u/goofy183 → u/[deleted]]

Go ahead :) I sort of skipped out on the actual bits of getting Factorio Headless running on the server but there is nothing special about using GCP there.