More specifically I had set game.player.character = nil in the console. It would be nice to use this mod in god mode especially for testing builds. May not be worth supporting though.

The mod Autobuild (0.5.0) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event autobuild::autobuild-custominput-toggle-construction (ID 173)
'left_top': table expected, got nil
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'draw_rectangle'
autobuild/control.lua:39: in function 'change_visual_area'
autobuild/control.lua:82: in function 'toggle_enabled_construction'
autobuild/control.lua:164: in function <autobuild/control.lua:162

I can only second this - while I also don't worry whether this works in god mode or not, it should at least not crash the game and destroy precious progress,

I reproduced this crash in two ways:

• Enable autobuild (disabling seems fine) in editor mode with visual area opacity > 0 on a new default freeplay map with no other mods installed
• Save a new freeplay map with no other mods installed and opacity = 0, change opacity > 0 from main menu, attempt to load the map

I think both cases get fixed, when my pull request gets released:
https://github.com/mspielberg/factorio-autobuild/pull/6
But it's not released yet

This should be fixed now