Basic troubleshooting

This page will supply you with basic troubleshooting advice to get CFAN running on the off chance that it doesn't work out of the box as well as attempt to answer some frequent questions seen on irc. Note that this page is an eternal work in progress and might lack answers to certain problems or have notes of additions to be made.

CFAN won't start

• If you are on an OS X or Linux system first of all make sure that you have the latest version of Mono which is available here

You can check your current version with mono --version in a terminal of your choice

• Try redownloading the cfan.exe and running it again. The file can be found here

• Put the cfan.exe inside your Factorio root directory and try running it from there if you aren't already doing so

• Under Linux or OS X you might need to update mono's certificates using the command mozroots --import --ask-remove NOTE: mozroots is userspecific and as such must be ran as the same user running the commands to start CFAN

• As of version 1.6.6 CFAN requires a libcurl library under Linux which can be installed via apt-get in Debian derivatives and is named libcurl4-openssl-dev. In Fedora derivatives or other dists using RPM use yum install libcurl-devel

• Later versions of CFAN requires .NET 4.5 when ran under Windows, make sure you have it installed and updated.

I'm on Unix, I cannot run .exe files!

You can with this one, because cfan is magic! More seriously, the cfan client is built using Mono, which makes it a cross-platform executable.

You will need to install the latest Mono release in order to use the cfan client on a Unix platform.

I installed CFAN but some mods are marked as AD and I cannot interact with them

AD stands for AutoDetected and mean CFAN has detected the mod as already installed within your mods directory. It should be changed back to regular mod once you install all dependencies for it.

I have a very fast broadband connection but files are downloading extremely slow

This can be due to many reasons:

*If you are installing very many or large mods at once the supplier of those mods might throttle your download speed (this is known to sometimes happen while downloading many mods at once from Github repositories). Since CFAN cache all your finished downloads it can at times help to cancel the download, wait a few minutes and then try again. You will not have to redownload finished downloads from the previous session.

*Some mod developers use their own hosting solutions which might have slower upload or be under heavy load. You can see what sources CFAN download mods from in the installation window during the installation process.

I get errors when I attempt to download mods

All mods you download through CFAN are hosted on pages outside of CFANs control. These include SpaceDock, Github and a variety of more or less private solutions. If a mod repeatedly fail to download the page supplying it might be down. If you get many failed downloads in a short time a good first step is to check if www.spacedock.info is up since that is one of the primary suppliers of mods through CFAN.

When attempting to download and install a lot of mods I get 403 errors

If these errors are pointed towards Github adresses it's because github has a limit of downloads per amount of time. If you're on a fast connection (or unlucky) you might hit that limit. All finished downloads will be cached within CFAN and the easiest way to get around the 403s is to wait some time and then attempt the installation again. 403s will make CFAN stop the installation of all mods in the current batch as to make sure that your GameData folder isn't corrupted.

I get a System.InvalidCastException on Linux. Help!

Alas, you may have hit this bug. You'll have to use the command-line for now, or update your version of Mono.

I get a CodePage 123 not supported error

If your system is in non-English locale (for example Cyrillic) then CFAN instead of updating database will fail with error:

Unhandled Exception:
System.NotSupportedException: CodePage 866 not supported

Apparently mono installations don't come with as much locale support as we expect! If you're on a Ubuntu/Mint/Debian machine, try:

sudo apt-get install libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil

Otherwise you can try:

LANG=C mono cfan.exe

Since CFAN is not localized this workaround has no downsides.

GUI won't work on OSX, I get a big scary message!

If this mentions an InvalidCastException, you're likely experiencing an issue with Mono, if you haven't already update to the latest version of Mono here

Okay, how do I get to the command prompt?

On Windows, follow the instructions from this awesome reddit comment:

1. In the folder where the .exe lives go up one folder.
2. Hold shift and right-click the folder you just left.
3. Select "open command window here"
4. Type cfan.exe help to get started!

On Linux or OSX, open a new terminal window and navigate to the folder where you placed cfan.exe and run the command

mono cfan.exe help

Note: on Windows, you don't need Mono provided you have the .NET framework installed (and you most likely have it by default).

CFAN says my Factorio directory isn't valid, I'm pretty sure it is. Help!

The CFAN checks for two things to determine if a Factorio directory is "valid" or not:

• Game directory must have a data/base/info.json file with proper json.
• Your appdata directory %APPDATA%/factorio (or on linux/osx home directory ~/.factorio) must have config/config.ini file (meaning you must start and close the game at least once)
• For portable installation (those that do not use appdata/home directory) there must be a config-path.cfg file inside game directory with use-system-read-write-data-directories=false in it.