Gleba has killed the game for me.

[Daid]

- spoiling does not let you leave your factory design uncompleted, while everything else in the game works fine, being abandoned for a while.

I feel ya. After many hours of messing around on Gleba, trying to fix my factory into running smoothly. I just went for the simpler solution:
- Burn spoilage everywhere. While I already ensured that I could discard some spoilage here and there, I now have burning towers all trough my base so even if things stop and there is a massive amount of spoilage generated at once, it all gets burned off and fed again with new produce.
- This means the factory is always running, even if it's not producing anything. I always have egg production running and just burn off the excess, so that always consumes nutrients. Next to power generation this means a minimal flow is always running, and the rest is just spoilage generators that burn everything, until they are needed.
- Problem then becomes this causes a lot of evolution and spore generation. So, I next surrounded my whole base with a 2 layer thick wall, behind it a full line of gunturrets with piercing ammo, behind that a full line of laser turrets (which I imported from Fulgora) and behind that rocket turrets with a 2 turret gap in between. Each type of turrent line has it's own line of powerpoles, which all inter-connect as well, so a single power pole destroyed won't take out power of a section.
- This defense line has hold so far and I've finally felt confident enough to go off to another planet and that gleba won't need handholding at the moment. But that took 15 hours I think...
- And, I have started on "Operation orbital bombardment", where I want to ship in loads of artillery to keep the natives more at bay. As those stompers don't give a damn that you have a massive defense line, so taking out the nests hopefully will reduce the pressure on the defenses...

[mako00]

After reading a lot of posts like this, I think the game could do a better job of nudging the player towards the correct strategy.

The design goal of Gleba is not to "out-race" the spoilage timer, it is to build a factory that can deal with spoilage where it occurs.

In a nutshell, this means that every chest, belt and production building in your factory that handles spoilable goods needs to have a way to remove spoilage, like a filter inserter, "trash unrequested", etc. You are only done automating when spoilage cannot break your production anymore.

Once you focus on that, you absolutely can build it iteratively, leave the factory alone, etc.

[aka13]

I have a factory which deals with spoilage as it occurs. I even scale production corresponding to demand, etc.
I still don't find it neither engaging nor fun gameplay inside factorio

[Dixi]

Maybe the only easy way to solve spoilage everywhere problem is make all transfers via bots and requester-provider chests. In that case you can just request all spoiled wares in one place and it will be automatically delivered.
Since bots fly rather speedy, after enough research bonuses, this will likely work. But bases without belts are not easy to modify and upgrade, when they mass produce something, because zillion of bot flying above all your structures seriously obscure view.

[nrader]

- Problem then becomes this causes a lot of evolution and spore generation. So, I next surrounded my whole base with a 2 layer thick wall, behind it a full line of gunturrets with piercing ammo, behind that a full line of laser turrets (which I imported from Fulgora) and behind that rocket turrets with a 2 turret gap in between. Each type of turrent line has it's own line of powerpoles, which all inter-connect as well, so a single power pole destroyed won't take out power of a section.

The only type of turret you need is missile ones. Lots of them everywhere. Maybe regular ammo ones before you get access to missiles.
Gleba lifeforms has quite a laser resistance so laser turrets is a waste of energy. Tesla turrets is okay, but consume ungodly amount of energy, so unless you got nuclear reactor, they are no go.

[credomane]

I really hope that they will not "fix" what is not broken.

I didn't say Gleba was broken. It just, currently, isn't good as it should be. It needs some tweaking. I see the direction they were going for and I think it is an awesome idea. I just believe the execution of the idea needs a little work. Once you see how gleba is meant to work and succeed then, yea, isn't isn't actually that bad. The getting there part though. That's rough. Too rough. I nearly quit factorio because of it. Even pyanodon's mods didn't make me consider that. I understood Gleba as a concept but at the same time I didn't understand a damn thing. Until I took someone else's blueprints and used them Gleba was impossible for me. Now this makes sense...I can do this on my own but why was it so impossible just an hour ago? Until you manage to cross this magical "ah-ha" moment with Gleba it is near impossible. You might find your "ah-ha" on your own or you might not. That's the problem, that's why Gleba needs work. Again, Gleba isn't broken it just needs some tweaking to make finding the "ah-ha" more accessible because until you do...you hate Gleba with a passion. Then once you get it working you go form hating it to disliking it....which is where I am now and I don't think that will ever change for me as much as I think the concept of Gleba is awesome. I got 24 hours of pure nightmare fuel playtime from Gleba and that isn't going away anytime soon.

Maybe I went into Gleba too blind? Other than the FFF's I've avoided all information and spoilers on Space Age until I'd been to the first 3 planets or was in need of help. The Space Platforms need educational work, imo. Mainly in the form of smaller narrower platforms are much easier to defend while traveling. In hindsight that should have been obvious but I never had that kinda issue in Space Exploration hull integrity so it never occurred to me that I was getting too big for my britches and needed to slim down. Space Exp's limiting factor naturally prevented going to big too soon so defending was never an issue. I was getting stomped for a long time until I, again, stole a working design and saw how narrow theirs was compared to mine. Now I'm building platforms the way I want just fine.

I have a factory which deals with spoilage as it occurs. I even scale production corresponding to demand, etc.
I still don't find it neither engaging nor fun gameplay inside factorio

My gleba is mostly working after copying someone else's blueprint and I have a simple understanding of how gleba is meant to function now instead of the impossible hurdle is was before. It is manageable, finally, and I'm redoing to suit my personal taste but at least I've gone from a seething rage for Glebe to just loathing it. I find it engaging but definitely not fun...probably won't for a long time, if ever.


Radical idea and definitely not in the "little tweaking" category:

What if spoilage was a by-product of everything on gleba instead. Keep the time based mechanism around as is but don't turn stuff into "spoilage" anymore. Still gotta deal with all the spoilage as by-products but it is no longer an immediate you did it all wrong, loser, when everything spoils. Instead the less fresh your inputs are the more spoilage byproduct you get and the less desired product you get. Thus turning it into a trade off instead of a potentially base halting event. Too slow and everything is completely stale? You have lots of spoilage byproduct and very little usable product but you can obviously see what you are doing incorrectly. Doing it right? You get still some spoilage by-product still but lots of usable product too. That way you aren't completely punished for doing it "wrong" and have obvious hints at what you need to improve upon to keep ingredients "freshness" up. Biolabs would consume more nutrients since less fresh nutrients become less efficient when "burnt" (basically nutrients lose yummy value as they get stale).

The bacteria and eggs still behave the same though. Those are fun through and through.

Agriculture science should still "spoil" but not like it does now. Instead it should deplete the actual "hp" bar on the science. The more stale your agriculture science the less research you get out of it. That way when the science "spoils" it just vanishes like it was used up in the labs instead of becoming spoilage.

Maybe make a recipe for intentionally making spoilage, if needed, in an assembler such as water + nutrients. Assembler because it is a dirty machine exposed to elements and not the "clean room" biolab, if you will.

This way your Gleba base would still slowly work if your all your stuff is "stale" instead of completely breaking down because you failed to notice that one thing is randomly spoiling and the removal is slowing down everything just enough that you eventually hit critical mass and your base is spoilage everywhere when you come back.

The planet will mostly play the same, in theory, while not being an absolute fu when you do it wrong. No you have to start all over again and hope you get it right this time.

[angramania]

I feel ya. After many hours of messing around on Gleba, trying to fix my factory into running smoothly. I just went for the simpler solution:
- Burn spoilage everywhere. While I already ensured that I could discard some spoilage here and there, I now have burning towers all trough my base so even if things stop and there is a massive amount of spoilage generated at once, it all gets burned off and fed again with new produce.
- This means the factory is always running, even if it's not producing anything. I always have egg production running and just burn off the excess, so that always consumes nutrients. Next to power generation this means a minimal flow is always running, and the rest is just spoilage generators that burn everything, until they are needed.
- Problem then becomes this causes a lot of evolution and spore generation. So, I next surrounded my whole base with a 2 layer thick wall, behind it a full line of gunturrets with piercing ammo, behind that a full line of laser turrets (which I imported from Fulgora) and behind that rocket turrets with a 2 turret gap in between. Each type of turrent line has it's own line of powerpoles, which all inter-connect as well, so a single power pole destroyed won't take out power of a section.
- This defense line has hold so far and I've finally felt confident enough to go off to another planet and that gleba won't need handholding at the moment. But that took 15 hours I think...
- And, I have started on "Operation orbital bombardment", where I want to ship in loads of artillery to keep the natives more at bay. As those stompers don't give a damn that you have a massive defense line, so taking out the nests hopefully will reduce the pressure on the defenses...

I have done it in a different way. Spoilage is never burned because I have too little of it, I even think about creating line dedicated to producing spoilage. No need to burn eggs as their production can be limited. I had to destroy only a few nearby nests before getting all necessary science. There is no defense at all. And no robots.
Gleba can be handled in very different ways. This means more interest in next playthroughs. Best of three planets.

[angramania]

Gleba isn't broken it just needs some tweaking to make finding the "ah-ha" more accessible because until you do...you hate Gleba with a passion. Then once you get it working you go form hating it to disliking it

Exactly the same can be said about production+speed combo, two line railways, main bus, city blocks. You may never discover these cool concepts on your own and struggle with spaghetti forever.

[Tinyboss]

The only type of turret you need is missile ones. Lots of them everywhere. Maybe regular ammo ones before you get access to missiles.
Gleba lifeforms has quite a laser resistance so laser turrets is a waste of energy. Tesla turrets is okay, but consume ungodly amount of energy, so unless you got nuclear reactor, they are no go.

A small number of tesla turrets sprinkled into your field of rocket turrets, set to target stompers, is very helpful.

[credomane]

Exactly the same can be said about production+speed combo, two line railways, main bus, city blocks. You may never discover these cool concepts on your own and struggle with spaghetti forever.

That is totally different. You can still play the game without those. Nothing in Factorio's design truly forces you to use them, not use them or even discover them at all. I've finish many games vanilla and modded without ever using modules at all. Hell, I even kept trucking along with steel furnaces all to often because I didn't want to jack with a redesign to accommodate the larger electric furnaces. Who says spaghetti is a struggle. I whip that stuff up all the time for my starter base....that I never fully leave and keep adding on to. Gleba has a specific pattern to everything on it and forces you to follow the specific pattern damn close to the "T" in everything you build on that planet. Until you either stumble upon that pattern yourself or get it from someone else you can't continue progression. Once you know that pattern, it is surprisingly not hard at all and you are left wondering how/why other people are struggling so much.

On every other planet there is a very clear and obvious "wrong" indicator on what, when, where, why, and how no matter how little you know. You might not even care, or even need too, that something is wrong or slow on other planets as everything is mostly still functioning just slowly. Gleba? Not so. Everything rots when something goes wrong and you are left clueless and fumbling in the dark every time it happens. There is no chasing up and down the production lines to figure out what's wrong on Gleba. It is either working or busted all to hell. There is no middle ground until you "know" Gleba. Then you gain some intuition as to where the problem probably is and you investigate from there.

Gleba's factory concepts are completely new to Factorio and it very much needs some decent tips & tricks tutorials covering it. So if you get stuck you can check that and see a working method to produce...I dunno the science pack. So you see how a working design is supposed to function and you can adapt it to everything else from there. Have the tip & tricks unlock with each stage of the technology "researches" until you unlock the science pack. That way you don't get ahead of your self and at least learn one step at a time. If you don't want to use the tips-n-tricks then don't. You aren't forced to use them but if you get stuck at least they would be there to help you out.

[angramania]

That is totally different. You can still play the game without those.
Nothing in Factorio's design truly forces you to use them, not use them or even discover them at all.

You can always brute-force Gleba with bots without understanding of its mechanic. Costly but possible. Some players have done it this way.
Also you can change spoil rate up to ten times at map generator settings.

Gleba's factory concepts are completely new to Factorio and it very much needs some decent tips & tricks tutorials covering it.

That's would be nice.
Though I'm sure that good part of Gleba's haters have not bothered to look into factoriopedia and existing tips and tricks. Overconfidence and rigidness of some players are main source of Gleba frustration and it is not something that could be fixed.

[Qon]

I just hate spoil mechanics. It does not fit Factorio style. Some years ago Factorio was pretending to be nominated to "watch and relax" category of Steam best games.

"Pretending to be nominated"? LOL, what is that even supposed to mean? And just because some Factorio elements fit under that category doesn't mean the devs are obligated to shoehorn the rest of the game into that.

- spoiling does not let you leave your factory design uncompleted, while everything else in the game works fine, being abandoned for a while.
- both other planets (lava and lightning) can be left alone without any problem at all, almost at any moment. Gleba always cause troubles, something spoils, pentapod came to break something, and so on.

On Nauvis you need to complete your defense and complete ammo production and repairs if you want to leave it alone.

- feeding bichambers with fuel is also looks like step back and return to coal powered smelters.
- even Gleba science packs can't be stored forever, until needed.

This is interesting though. Coal powered bases without an electric grid is not convenience, but it adds more design and problem solving in the game. Same with Aquilo, having to heat everything up is a hassle, but without the hassle there is no challenge and no game.

So it turns me to spoiling speed parameter, that appears to be a game setting.
I set spoiling speed to 50 times slower, it's a little better, but still very annoying.

I think Gleba should be fixed some way, it could be an option, but must be a solution, that turn it more to "watch and relax" style, like rest of the game.

So you found the setting, and still complain about there being no setting...
And you can't just demand that the devs design the game around what you want it to be. Just install a mod to personalize it like everyone else.

[Daid]

- Problem then becomes this causes a lot of evolution and spore generation. So, I next surrounded my whole base with a 2 layer thick wall, behind it a full line of gunturrets with piercing ammo, behind that a full line of laser turrets (which I imported from Fulgora) and behind that rocket turrets with a 2 turret gap in between. Each type of turrent line has it's own line of powerpoles, which all inter-connect as well, so a single power pole destroyed won't take out power of a section.

The only type of turret you need is missile ones. Lots of them everywhere. Maybe regular ammo ones before you get access to missiles.
Gleba lifeforms has quite a laser resistance so laser turrets is a waste of energy. Tesla turrets is okay, but consume ungodly amount of energy, so unless you got nuclear reactor, they are no go.

I needed a solution before I got missile turret research&production and missile production up and running, and laser turrets proved to be a cheap and easy solution. Even if they are inefficient, they don't depend on anything else being produced other then power.

[MisterDoctor]

I just have to say: Gleba is amazing and is easily by far the best part of the expansion.

Spoiling is not such a bad mechanic as you seem to think because of a couple things.

1) Yumako and Jellynut are infinite, so you can have as much as you want spoil and it never matters; you aren't losing ground (as long as you keep and use your seeds). (I suppose technically if you have tons and tons of raw fruit spoil, then you are losing seeds, but still it's not that bad; once things are going you will overflow with seeds.)

2) Spoilage itself has uses and can be used for certain things. It can be used for electricity, though poorly. It can be used for nutrients. It can be used for carbon.

If you have problems with parts of your base stalling come up with ways to automatically keep it going rather than manually fixing it.

I could be more specific but it's kind of spoilers to just explain strategies in too much detail.

[Daid]

1) Yumako and Jellynut are infinite, so you can have as much as you want spoil and it never matters; you aren't losing ground (as long as you keep and use your seeds).

Not entirely true, harvesting more fruit causes spores, which causes attacks and evolution. So even if your factory does not produce anything and just cycles spoilage, it will cause more and more attacks, enemy expansion and stronger enemies. So you do need to deal with expanding beyond a certain scale in time, or you might run into a death spiral.

Honestly, only reason my base survived at all is because I had enough personal laser defense to take out a small stomper, which attacked my base while I didn't even have power setup other then the 50 solar panels I brought, and was still figuring out how things worked.

[Dixi]

So it turns me to spoiling speed parameter, that appears to be a game setting.
I set spoiling speed to 50 times slower, it's a little better, but still very annoying.

I think Gleba should be fixed some way, it could be an option, but must be a solution, that turn it more to "watch and relax" style, like rest of the game.

So you found the setting, and still complain about there being no setting...
And you can't just demand that the devs design the game around what you want it to be. Just install a mod to personalize it like everyone else.

Changing spoiling speed settings to much longer time does makes things easier, but it affect everything, while some reagents, like bacteria are supposed to spoil really fast. Setting everything to spoil slow almost disable iron & copper production on Gleba, and cause additional troubles with spoil production on Nauvis (for green speed modules)

There is no way to "demand". I can say, that some features like map zoom level, or interface change after quality research, from my point of view, are really need a fix. While Gleba, not only from my point of view, but for a lot of players, looks "not so well designed, and cause too much troubles". So we asking to fix it someway. This could be an option.

[Raphaello]

I think spoilage is a great thing - I've already found in this very thread that people came up with totally different strategies to deal with it. This is good to see different successful approaches to the problem.
I initially tried to minimize amount of spoilage by producing quantities that were exactly needed but this quickly turned out to be too circuit heavy to be fun.
I instead embraced spoilage and created a recycling system - end of each belt has a spoilage-filtered inserter and all the spoilage goes into furnaces, backup nutrient production, carbon or voiding. This in turn caused evolution to ramp up which nearly killed my base.
I've neglected the defenses for quite some time and I had to savescum to rectify it. The other solution would be to basically restart Gleba base - not fun at all. Stompers have too much power - one of them easily clears half of the factory in mere seconds.

My final solution to the Gleba enemies was artillery and a spidertron to clear the nests.

I'm now on Fulgora, slowly preparing for Aquilo but I would guess that with the current difficulty level Gleba should have been designed as the final planet.

[Flame1869]

Just laded on Gleba too for the first time yesterday; and i felt i also ha a pretty rough time getting started.
few most important stuff in by spaceships, and been building a big wall around my base pretty soon that could atleast hold off the attacks at the cost of having to rebuild parts of the fall/defence system now and then.
at first i found the spoilage really frustrating but i think im starting to get the hang of it now; Though not a huge fan of the mechanic yet, i do see how it add some interesting elements to the game addin a new dimension to it.

That beeing said, i mostly feel the balance between the planets been a bit odd; first time on Gleba really needs some time to wrap your head around the whole concept, while at the same time you have the pressure of enemies and evolution breathing in your neck the whole time.
yet e.g. Fulgora (it was my planet before Gleba) is completely empty of enemies while it would have been much easier to setup some defences on that planet. for some reason it would have made much more sense in my head that gleba would have been the empty planet while fulgora would have the enemies

well anyway; as being mentioned before; learn; adept; and ship in a sh*tton of stuff from your other planets; and i even made a special farmer spaceship that just hovers around gleba sending down astroid goodies nonstop (e.g. free unlimited iron ore):)

[Raphaello]

i even made a special farmer spaceship that just hovers around gleba sending down astroid goodies nonstop (e.g. free unlimited iron ore):)

That's what I like about Gleba when we find things difficult we also find creative ways to solve them.

The reason though many people complain about it is that it is designed by and for hardcore players. I'm having a lot of experience with mods and the mods I like are those that bring new mechanics / problems to solve i.e. Nullius. Gleba was a very interesting challenge to solve and I'm happy I went there without any prior knowledge.

There's also not enough info on the enemies - one of my ideas of dealing with stompers was to use mines as explosives are good against them. However mines do zero damage to stompers! This should be mentioned in F-pedia.

[Dixi]

Someone mentioned mods.... Yes, of course, there are already a lot of mods, that solve spoiling troubles. But for now, a lot of players trying to finish the game, at least once, without mods, ether for achievements or just to complete non modded Space Age.