This. I’ve run a bunch of lan parties where we just copied factorio around all the computers. The developers don’t really do any DRM. Intentionally. The only restriction for a pirated copy, really just a copied copy, is that you can’t play on servers that do username authentication. But for self-hosted servers you can disable that. Like for a lan.

And for all the people who came to the lan and played, nearly 100% of them bought the game. Because they love the game.

So if this is the kind of game you love, and you genuinely can’t afford it, pirate it, I think the whole community is behind you. And if you can afford it please buy it