Serious Question: Can Gleba not be idle?

[JackTheSpades]

I'm not talking about the spoilable things sitting on belts. I generally understand that any setup needs to be "self purging" of spoilage and you can use normal assembly machines to make your first batch of Yomako Mash and Nutrients to kickstart things...

But what about the eggs?
In general, if I want to turn the factory off I can just use a signal to the tree farms to leave the fruit trees alone and not harvest them. They will remain unspoiled and ready to harvest forever. Basically like a buffer chest.
But the Pentapod Eggs need to be recycled every ~15 minutes or they hatch and when (not if) they hatch the system is completely deadlocked since you need to manually fetch new eggs to restart it. But recycling them need Nutrients, which spoil. You could craft Nutrients from Spoilage on demand every time but this would take a TON of spoilage and with the factory in "idle" you will run out soon with no means to replenish it.

So unless I'm missing something the factory can never be idle, it need to constantly harvest and produce spores, driving evolution more and more.
The only way to be idle would be to destroy all your eggs and then fetch new ones when you want to start the factory up again.

[mmmPI]

So unless I'm missing something the factory can never be idle

You can restart eggs production by recycling biochamber
You can restart nutrient production by transforming spoilage

Combined those allow to let the factory "idle" if you wish.

[JackTheSpades]

Ah, I forgot all about recycling.
I guess the one thing that bothers me about it is the chance of not getting the egg back. The chance of failing to get an egg from N recycles is 0.75^N which comes out to:

1 = 75.0%
2= 56.3%
3 = 42.2%
4 = 31.6%
5 = 23.7%
10 = 5.63%
20 = 0.32%
40 = 0.001%

So at two stacks you're almost guaranteed to get the egg back.
It becomes comically unlikely that you'd fail but the fact that you can never be safe bothers the same part of my brain that demands I build everything symmetrical regardless of actual ratio requirements.

[GrumpyJoe]

Let the science rot if you don't need it. Better use them than to fight hatched eggs

My Gleba is never idle, I don't want to look at the belts again every time I turned it on.

[MeduSalem]

So at two stacks you're almost guaranteed to get the egg back.
It becomes comically unlikely that you'd fail but the fact that you can never be safe bothers the same part of my brain that demands I build everything symmetrical regardless of actual ratio requirements.

So just leave the gleba egg production running then. ^^

I am doing the same. While I totally know it is possible to put the factory in idle mode using the method that mmmPi wrote, I will never do that except as a guaranteed fail-safe if the factory goes haywire. But definitely not as a regular "idle mdoe". ^^

In that regard, I keep on producing science packs forever. And since my science pack production is ever so slightly pentapod-egg starved they never exist long enough to hatch into pentapods. ^^

Because the science packs can rot without any repercussions. And you don't need to deal with the hassle of a delayed upstart from an idle-mode.

[Krusnik]

Never idle so far. If you want constant science production, why would you want idle?

I guess you could easily setup a system that only starts nutrient production when your science goes below a certain amount.

[JackTheSpades]

The main reason I'd want to factory to be idle is spores and evolution. Also, there's still plenty of research that just doesn't need the Agriculture science.
I guess once you got defenses properly set up it won't be a concern anymore, much like how I left Nauvis crunching science without caring about evolution since I know even Behemoth Biters won't get through flamethrowers + repair bots.

Honestly, now that I have a steady flow of Agriculture Science going, I'll probably just take out the eggs when I'm done and manually pick up new ones. My brain doesn't like solutions that don't "automate" properly but my brain also doesn't like designing a circuit for 4 hours to try and handle every edge case.

[GrumpyJoe]

Having said "let science rot", I now remember that I may have played around with enemy values too much. Maybe pollution too...
Never got attacked and I'm a few infinite researches I into Agriculture

[mmmPI]

From what i understand the spores only comes from the harvest of trees, only when they are "cut" are the spore generated, so a way to "mitigate" pollution, or rather to be "efficient" on it, would be to make sure that every harvested tree is put to good use.

I found it more difficult to try and defend against the attacks than to make to sure they don't happen by having artillery covering more than my spore cloud. The more difficult even would be to make an "on demand" production for science ( on my list i made this after the others to try and 'go further').

One can compare the logic with Fulgora science pack, where you can have the factory idle, you can also have a factory that produces only half the science of your regular nauvis science, and have in vulcanus also a factory that produces half the science, and you queue 1 tech from Fulgora 1 from Vulcanus 1 from Fulgora 1 from Vulcanus and so on.

This logic in Gleba is difficult to apply, because if you try to stockpile some buffer with a slow and steady production, it will be worth almost nothing or spoil. Therefore it seemed important to me to be able to produce "a lot" of science, "fast". Which is easier to do than setting up a proper stop mechanism, hence the need to defend against attacks at first, then bringing artillery, and then having time to make the system smarter before scaling it more while controlling the extend of the spore cloud/ arty range research.

This is feels easier when it's not the first time

[Junorus]

For idling eggs, you can just disable the biochamber making eggs during production. Ingredients already consumed for production seen not to spoil.

[frony0]

For idling eggs, you can just disable the biochamber making eggs during production. Ingredients already consumed for production seen not to spoil.

This feels like such a dirty trick, but I love it. This might be the only way I'll be able to satisfy myself

[NineNine]

You can certainly idle it, but restarting it remotely can be a challenge if you don't have a good system in place. I just let mine run. The natives on Gleba don't seem to expand like the biters on Nauvis, so evolution doesn't seem to be a problem with Gleba. I've got some artillery and tesla turrets around in case some of the natives come to check out my factory, but it seems that once you clear out a nest, they don't make new ones in the same area.

[waterBear]

It sounds like your only reason for turning Gleba off is spores. The real problem here is not how to start and stop Gleba, it's how to automate defenses against Gleba's natives. That's pretty much just artillery, turrets, and bots. Build repair packs and other replacements on-planet.

In my experience, the way to deal with Gleba is to just trash excess. Let everything run straight into a recycler or heating tower. Belt unused science on Nauvis right into the trash. It's amazing how many other engineering problems on Gleba this will solve. You don't get spoilage on belts if items never back up. You don't have to restart factories if they never stop. There's never a shortage of eggs if you're always producing fresh ones.

[Mr Wednesday]

The natives on Gleba don't seem to expand like the biters on Nauvis

They definitely do expand, and to me it looks a bit like biter expansion, though perhaps not as frequent.

[frony0]

I just put together https://mods.factorio.com/mod/hard-boiled-gleba to make the whole egg situation less annoying... Puts my mind at ease at least

[adam_bise]

In my line of science chambers the science and egg chambers input inserters are disabled save for the first one that just keeps making eggs over and over. Those eggs go along a belt past all of the disabled chambers and into a line of heating towers to be burned. Once a request for ag science appears on the wire, the inserters enable and begin full production.

I've had outposts that I turn completely off when not used, but this isn't possible for bases that handle pentapod eggs. Even if you disable your ag towers and use spoilage to make the nutrients for your egg keepalive chamber, you could potentially run out of spoilage.

You pretty much have to abandon the concept of completely shutting down a factory that handles pentapod eggs. Unless you're OK with sending spidertrons out to get more eggs every time you want to boot it back up.