I ran into this error while playing a heavily modded game. There are a few planet mods which I'm guessing caused an issue.

The mod Warp Drive Machine (1.0.8) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event Warp-Drive-Machine::on_nth_tick(30)
Warp-Drive-Machine/warp-control.lua:741: bad argument #1 of 3 to 'create_surface' (string expected, got nil)
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'create_surface'
Warp-Drive-Machine/warp-control.lua:741: in function 'warp_now'
Warp-Drive-Machine/ship-control.lua:647: in function 'update_ships_each_second'
Warp-Drive-Machine/control.lua:772: in function <Warp-Drive-Machine/control.lua:771>

This fixed the issue for my game, but it was done by an AI and I didn't check the work, so no idea if it's addressing the core problem. The next two surfaces seemed fine:

       677                map_gen.starting_points = map_gen.starting_points or {{x=0, y=0}}
       678                storage.persistent_planets[surface_name] = planet_number
       679                map_gen.persistent_surface_name = surface_name
       680 +              else
       681 +              -- nauvis-based discovered planet needs a surface name
       682 +              surface_name = "planet_"..planet_number.."_"..force.name
       683 +              storage.persistent_planets[surface_name] = planet_number
       684 +              map_gen.persistent_surface_name = surface_name
       685                end
       686              end --discover_planet
       687

Really enjoying your mod!

working on a new version, thks