Wube shipped something on Friday that Factorio players have been asking for, by the studio's own count, for at least eleven years: a native ARM64 Linux build. Friday Facts #446, posted September 18, 2026, frames it mostly as a Steam Frame story, and the coverage has followed that framing.
That is not the part that matters if you run a server. The part that matters is in the same post: the headless binary ships with it, a developer quietly hosted a multiplayer game off a Raspberry Pi for weeks, and nobody desynced.
What Wube Actually Shipped
Factorio now has a real, first-party ARM64 Linux build. Not an emulation layer, not a community patch. Wube named three targets directly: Valve's Steam Frame, the Raspberry Pi 5, and Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon MacBooks.
The speedups over emulation are the headline numbers:
- Steam Frame: 11% faster than the x86 build running via FEX
- Raspberry Pi 5: 28% faster than x86 running via box64
- MacBook Pro M1: 35% faster than the x86 version through FEX
Those are not rounding errors. Factorio is a simulation game where the update rate is the entire experience, so a third more headroom genuinely changes what a given piece of hardware can hold.
Two caveats Wube stated plainly. Graphics support on the Pi is limited, so it is a server box and not a play box. And the Asahi Linux build is unsupported: "Play at your own risk!"
The Headless Server Is in the Box
This is the line server owners should read twice. The ARM64 release includes the headless binary, the same dedicated server executable you would run on any Linux machine, just compiled for a different instruction set.
That removes the last excuse for the pile of ARM hardware people already own. A Raspberry Pi 5, an Ampere VPS, an old M1 MacBook running Asahi: all of them can now run a Factorio server without box64 or FEX sitting in the middle, eating a fifth of your throughput and adding a class of bug nobody wants to debug at 1am.
The mod ecosystem comes along for free, because Factorio mods are Lua scripts and asset files rather than compiled native plugins. There is no per-architecture build step for a Factorio mod the way there is for a plugin that ships native code. Your mod list is just your mod list.
Nobody Desynced, and That Is the Real Story
Factorio multiplayer is deterministic lockstep. Every client runs the same simulation and the server only ships inputs around, which is why a Factorio server can hold a large multiplayer game on modest bandwidth. It is also why the architecture question is genuinely frightening: if an ARM64 client and an x86 client disagree about a single floating-point result anywhere in the simulation, the session dies with a desync.
Wube's answer is blunt: "we never experienced an ARM64 vs. x86 related desync."
They hammered on it at a LAN party in May 2026, and developer raiguard hosted a server from his own Pi for weeks with other people joining, without telling them what the hardware was. Mixed ARM64 and x86 players in one game, no desyncs.
For anyone running servers, that result is more interesting than any benchmark. It means the architecture underneath a Factorio server is now genuinely invisible to the people connecting to it.
Should You Move Your Server to a Raspberry Pi?
Honest answer: for a small group of friends, yes, and it will probably be fine. For anything you care about, look at the numbers first.
A Pi 5 running native is 28% faster than the same Pi running x86 through box64. It is still a Pi. The headless server has to hold 60 updates per second across the whole factory, and UPS on a big base is driven by exactly what a Pi is weakest at: single-thread performance and memory bandwidth. A few hundred hours into a Space Age run, with trains, bots and several planets ticking at once, a Pi will start missing updates long before a modern desktop CPU does.
The rest is the usual self-hosting reality: your upstream bandwidth, your home IP, your power cuts, your SD card wearing out mid-save, your router's port forwarding. None of that is new and none of it is fixed by a faster binary.
So the useful framing is this. The ARM64 port is excellent news for experimenting, for a low-power always-on box, for a four-player run through the early game. It is not a replacement for a server sized to the base you are actually building. That is why our own Factorio hosting runs on high-clock x86: for this game, single-thread speed is the product.
How to Get the ARM64 Build
It is on the experimental branch, version 2.1. Two ways in:
- Steam: right-click Factorio, Properties, Betas, then pick the experimental branch.
- Standalone: download it from https://factorio.com/download/experimental, which also supports linking your Steam account.
Wube ships both platform binaries together with a script that picks the right one for the system running it, so there is no separate ARM download to hunt for. The Steamworks SDK update that made the Steam side work landed in 2.1.15.
Since it is experimental, treat it as experimental. Back up your save before you point a long-running server at it.
The Takeaway
The Steam Frame will get the headlines. The durable change is that Factorio's dedicated server now runs natively on the cheapest always-on hardware most people already own, and that mixing architectures inside one multiplayer game turns out to be a non-event.
If you already run a Factorio server, nothing breaks and nothing needs migrating. If you have been meaning to spin one up on that Pi in a drawer, the excuse is gone.
More Factorio server reading: what is coming in 2.1 and when and the best server-safe mods for 2026.
