How to access Factorio: Space Age expansion

The highly anticipated Factorio: Space Age expansion is finally here, adding four new planets to the factory building sim and a ton of other features. But after purchasing the expansion, actually accessing and enabling it can be a bit confusing if you don’t know how to access the Factorio: Space Age expansion.

How to enable Factorio: Space Age

Once you’ve purchased the Factorio: Space Age expansion, you might be a bit puzzled after downloading the DLC only to see the vanilla Factorio load screen on launch. In order to access and enable the Factorio: Space Age expansion, you actually need to enable it via Mods through the Factorio main menu. Despite being its own expansion, developer Wube Software has opted to load the DLC via its built-in modding system.

In order to enable the Factorio: Space Age expansion, make sure you’ve purchased and downloaded the DLC, then launch Factorio as normal. From the main menu, hit the Mods button, located second from the bottom. From the Manage tab, make sure you enable the following three mods:

• Elevated Rails
• Quality
• Space Age

Interestingly enough, Elevated Rails and Quality are two new features added in Factorio: Space Age, which are dependencies for the actual Space Age mod and expansion to work. That’s because some planets require the two new features. However, you can actually enable both of the mods without enabling the Space Age expansion itself, meaning you can add Elevated Rails and Quality to base Factorio, which is pretty interesting.

Some of your mods may have been already updated by their respective developer to work with the expansion, but a majority of them will not be. Over the next few weeks more mods will be updated to work with the new Factorio: Space Age expansion, so be sure to check back and see when they are working.

Now that you’ve enabled the proper Factorio: Space Age expansion mods, hit Apply and Factorio will automatically reload your game. Once it’s completed, you should see the new Factorio: Space Age load screen which means the expansion has been enabled and is ready to play! Now there’s only one thing left to say: THE FACTORY MUST GROW!