They need to rename Gleba to Bartleby

[Tertius]

Nah, that's too tedious. I already have resources, why not use them? The kickstart, the start right from the beginning takes half of your whole time on that planet, just to get where you are already on Nauvis. Explorers and conquerors don't arrive empty handed.

[NineNine]

I thought it was super interesting to see the different ways of starting from the absolute beginning on the new planets. It was like playing 3 brand new versions of Factorio from the beginning. And they are all 100% doable from scratch. So very cool. I'm going to do it again in my next game.

[Jarolleon]

See my previous post about a sudden burst of spoil out of nowhere.

There's some detail you might miss about nutrients, spoilage and biochambers. Spoiled nutrients can accumulate invisibly during normal operation in a separate spoilage slot in addition to the regular temporary trash output slots. They can accumulate till there is one full stack (200) of them. Only then, if the 201th spoilage is created by a spoiled nutrient, the machine blocks until the spoilage is output.
If a biochamber gets not so fresh nutrients or stalls intermediately for a short amount of time, so nutrients spoil, they accumulate in a separate trash slot. It can happen this slot isn't being emptied immediately but instead the machine continues working as soon as new nutrients get inserted. For example, in one production line I set the output inserters to use spoilage priority and grab "freshest first". This left spoilage resulting from nutrients in place as long as there was regular output, and since the machine was continuously producing output fresher than spoilage, spoilage was never extracted until the slot was full.
Might perhaps be the cause of your failure.

I wanted to grab "freshest first" to get seeds from yumako and jellynut mashing. Without that, I only got the mash and never the seeds until a full stack of seeds accumulated. Since the seeds don't spoil, "freshest first" got me seeds first, then mash, then spoilage. But since there was always new mash in the output slots, any spoilage was never removed.

Why is it quite difficult for people to understand that I am anything but a person new to Factorio? And I really don't need help, but thank you anyway.

We are all new to Gleba's spoilage mechanics and its intricate details. We all need to explore new methods to deal with that. All your (and my) thousands of hours played are irrelevant. Get off your high horse.

See my example of the Agricultural Science Pack for 10 hours in my previous post.

With a few more strategically placed speed beacons, you could achieve vastly more output with vastly less footprint. You're transporting too much spoiling items over too large distances. You even store nutrients - what a waste. It spoils. Instead, create nutrients on the spot, feed the nutrient biochambers with their own nutrients, and kickstart them with a spoilage-to-nutrient assembling machine which turns off as soon as there are nutrients > 0 in the nutrient biochambers.

I'm not yet ready with my complete Gleba factory, but the science-related modules are this.
The first one produces bioflux, a certain amount of nutrients for various independent modules not shown, and other yumako/jellynut byproducts. It kickstarts from whole fruits (the farms run with electricity only) and spoilage-to-nutrients. It's a 2-level kickstart. First it kickstarts yumako mashing, then yumako mash to nutrients, and this finally enables jellynut mashing and the first bioflux chamber, so the real bioflux-to-nutrient production starts.
02-02-2025, 18-44-02.png


And this is the science production.
It's supposed to be directly plugged behind the bioflux production. It has its own nutrient production, since it uses direct insertion due to the high nutrient throughput not feasible for belts. It just needs a few nutrients from the first step to start its own nutrient production.
A small gimmick is present in the bottom left, it's a keep-alive for a single pentapod egg in case something goes wrong with bioflux supply or stuff stalling. As soon as the nutrient machines get empty, a single egg is put into a chest and refreshed every 10 minutes with nutrients from spoilage and put back once the regular nutrient machines start again. During keepalive, any pentapod eggs are expunged into the spoilage exit belt to keep pentapods appearing from egg spoiling. Only the eggs within the chambers will stay and spoil, but I limit their number. I thought about recipe changing to expel them as well, but didn't find the time yet. And pentapod egg production doesn't really need production modules, the effect is minor.
02-02-2025, 18-49-49.png

If it comes to performance, this is what it created during my development. The spikes are from tests when I removed supply, electricity or deliberately let the factory stall.
I guess 639/min with about 95% fresh science packs is more than the huge production line you showed. 2nd image has ~50 modules and 170 belts, 1st image has 100 modules and ~220 belts. Both together exactly 20 beacons, which is one rocket stack.
02-02-2025, 19-03-13.png

ps. as far as I see, the Gleba general bootstrap is this:
- import an assortment of intermediates
- create 2 biochambers
- create a yumako farm with 1 agricultural tower
- import heating towers
- create seeds and artificial soil to make a proper farm, as well as a huge amount of spoilage (2-3 chests full)
- create a jellynut farm with 1 agricultural tower
- create seeds and artificial soil to make a proper farm
- create a preliminary pentapod egg factory
- create a bunch of biochambers with imported ingredients
- start a bioflux production line
- start 2 bacteria production line to get iron and copper ore
- create iron/copper processing with a few foundries (with that ship from Vulcanus, also import a bunch of green belts)
- create a mall to be independent of imports
- create the rest of the factory from stuff produced locally
- start science production

How do you even get spoiled nutrients with that setup? With those beacons and modules the biochambers should chew through 3 nutrients per second each!

[mmmPI]

Why is it quite difficult for people to understand that I am anything but a person new to Factorio? And I really don't need help, but thank you anyway.

You keep complaining about things that are quite easy to understand and to learn for many players after a few hour of playing, that really seem like you need help, you keep saying the game need be changed so you can understand better what you failed in your setups. Clearly that's someone that need help.

Each item requires a rocket launch, which costs valuable and limited time. I am open to suggestions on how to substantively downsize this factory. Not adding to it.

You don't need help you are just open to suggestion ? x) Imo you are trolling

[Shulmeister]

Why is it quite difficult for people to understand that I am anything but a person new to Factorio? And I really don't need help, but thank you anyway.

You keep complaining about things that are quite easy to understand and to learn for many players after a few hour of playing, that really seem like you need help, you keep saying the game need be changed so you can understand better what you failed in your setups. Clearly that's someone that need help.

Each item requires a rocket launch, which costs valuable and limited time. I am open to suggestions on how to substantively downsize this factory. Not adding to it.

You don't need help you are just open to suggestion ? x) Imo you are trolling

The hardest thing when you need help, is recognizing you need help, look you can be stuck for 2 weeks on a failed Gleba setup and not understand what went wrong, and still not realize you need help ! That is not necessarily trolling, there's this saying about the comon sense, which is so admirably distributed amongst humans that none feels like they could use a little more than what they already have.

It may look like the person is a beginner when the solution to the complaints seem trivial, like adding an alarm, or lamps to indicate things, or do test in editor, but that would be missing the context !

When you read the first post of this thread you realize some players only attempted to solve the problems they face for like "3-4" hours and quit. But other player explained that they don't want to use their brain to play, they come back tired from work and just want their computer game to tell them they are good at something for a change !

And then they try to play and face again frustration ! Because they don't understand the game ! Who are you to say this is not a valid feedback ? just because the person use bad examples doesn't make the point any less valid that it is possible to get stuck in the game. I think it is fairly demonstrated by now that some players have no idea what they are doing even after "several thousands of hour".

Even if there is no suggestion that make sense to adress the frustration that the game doesn't win itself when tired players wants it. Many games have cheat code or like "god mode" , factorio only has an editor mode but not everyone know how to use it to learn useful things. Maybe there could be a button to click somewhere, and there would be an AI assistant, that is not here to help; only to make suggestions to solve problem one could be facing.

[mmmPI]

When you read the first post of this thread you realize some players only attempted to solve the problems they face for like "3-4" hours and quit. But other player explained that they don't want to use their brain to play, they come back tired from work and just want their computer game to tell them they are good at something for a change !

And then they try to play and face again frustration ! Because they don't understand the game ! Who are you to say this is not a valid feedback ? just because the person use bad examples doesn't make the point any less valid that it is possible to get stuck in the game. I think it is fairly demonstrated by now that some players have no idea what they are doing even after "several thousands of hour".

Even if there is no suggestion that make sense to adress the frustration that the game doesn't win itself when tired players wants it. Many games have cheat code or like "god mode" , factorio only has an editor mode but not everyone know how to use it to learn useful things. Maybe there could be a button to click somewhere, and there would be an AI assistant, that is not here to help; only to make suggestions to solve problem one could be facing.

But how do you explain the cherry picking of barely related complaints written by players with 3-4 hours of play if it's not trolling ?

Amongst those when you read points such as : "the ennemy i haven't faced because i rage quit before would probably be too strong".

What's the point of copy pasting this here and calling it a valuable feedback ?

[XT-248]

Add an alarm if it gets there.

Alarms for the levels of fruits in the chests.
The amounts in the logistic network.
Whether the machines are always running, if they are expected to.
Seeds levels (when empty and when full).
Nutrients level for these critical chests/machines.

An alarm when spoilage belt is too empty or too full. Or calculate item throughput and check that.

Generally, an alarm at any place about which you say "should not happen/must be present at all times".

I will think about possibly doing an alarm-hooked setup in the future to catch issues like this again. No promises.

However, as previously mentioned, I do not know exactly how the Gleba Factory failed. Therefore, everything will have to be connected to alerts, and that comes with a non-zero risk of introducing too much noise before usable data is found.

Fruit production graphs show repeated fluctuations (Yumako at 2.5, 1.5, 0.5, Jellynut at 3, 2, 1).
As there are no similar flutuations in their consumptions, it suggests the spoiling occurs between trees and fruit consumption machines.
How does that part of factory cope with bursts of fruits spoiling?

Agricultural towers output both spoils and fruits to passive provider chests.

There is a spoil-to-nutrient bioreactor that is both belt-fed and logistic-network-fed. The outlet includes both a passive chest (after splitter) + a splitter, with a priority being given to keeping itself fueled.

There are fruit requestor logistic chests next to the fruit processing bioreactors (visible in some of my screenshots) that request nutrients and fruits.

All chests either have a dedicated inserter to take the spoil or are set to trash the spoil to be carried to the spoil-to-nutrient bioreactor.


For this part to have a problem, it would require a particular set of scenarios or a series of events that didn't happen or have already been ruled out (e.g., a particular logistic chest being full).

Spoilage blockage lasting for an hour would suggest some errant fruit blocking spoilage belt. Two hours points more to an errant science pack or bioflux.
However, your new design seems to utilize bots, not belts.
If that's what you meant by abandoning (the belt) design, then yes, feedback/improvements about belt handling might not be directly applicable to bot handling.

Just a small clarification: both the previous and the current Gleba designs utilize belt and bot differently. Some ingredients went into the bot network for one design but not the other. Same for belts.

For example, both Gleba designs utilize bots to move fruits from agricultural towers. The former Gleba design was far more focused on belt logistics but not exclusively on belt logistics. The current Gleba has more direct inserting between bioreactors, and hybrid logistics (hybrid as in using both belt and bot for some items such as nutrients).

Another possible source of information is kill stats and/or entities produced/build, in case of pentapods attacks/hatching.
I would expect any losses to be replaced almost immediately.
Which is another assumption that needs to be checked. Either manually from graphs, or automatically via alarms.

The building chart has too much noise. For example, I was still setting up the blue area ( an incomplete and not running rocket fuel production line from jelly/bioflux), so you see a lot of pipe/under-ground-pipe construction (for water input), which has nothing to do with how the red area (agricultural science production) failed.


I constantly cleared the area around the Gleba factory, which is why you see an unusually high number of small wrigglers and others that aren't spawned from pentapod eggs (such as stompers, strafers, nests, etc.), and I have had zero buildings, belts, etc., lost to the local fauna.

02-06-2025, 10-39-42.png (358.44 KiB) Viewed 115 times

The only significant thing/event that happened close to the time frame when the agricultural science pack failed is that a small wave of pentapod eggs hatched while I was out and killing stomper/strafer/nests (you can see multiple green, barely-visible orange, and a different hue of blue spikes at the same timeframe for non-small-wriggler entities) at the ~0.4 time stamp which is ~24 minutes. Agricultural science production failed at the ~14 minutes marker. Between those time markers, I most likely walked back to the base or idled at the centralized factory. Both activities happened while watching a movie, so I missed the exact moment it started failing.



I believe we have reached the limitations of what the Factorio community can work to solve the root cause of this mystery Gleba factory failure.

After eliminating all impossible stuff, a novel, unknown issue or bug is the only reasonable scenario left.


I am happy to share the save game after it happened directly to WUBE. Unfortunately, I do not have a save game from before the issue occurred.

[XT-248]

See my previous post about a sudden burst of spoil out of nowhere.

There's some detail you might miss about nutrients, spoilage and biochambers. Spoiled nutrients can accumulate invisibly during normal operation in a separate spoilage slot in addition to the regular temporary trash output slots. They can accumulate till there is one full stack (200) of them. Only then, if the 201th spoilage is created by a spoiled nutrient, the machine blocks until the spoilage is output.
If a biochamber gets not so fresh nutrients or stalls intermediately for a short amount of time, so nutrients spoil, they accumulate in a separate trash slot. It can happen this slot isn't being emptied immediately but instead the machine continues working as soon as new nutrients get inserted. For example, in one production line I set the output inserters to use spoilage priority and grab "freshest first". This left spoilage resulting from nutrients in place as long as there was regular output, and since the machine was continuously producing output fresher than spoilage, spoilage was never extracted until the slot was full.
Might perhaps be the cause of your failure.

I wanted to grab "freshest first" to get seeds from yumako and jellynut mashing. Without that, I only got the mash and never the seeds until a full stack of seeds accumulated. Since the seeds don't spoil, "freshest first" got me seeds first, then mash, then spoilage. But since there was always new mash in the output slots, any spoilage was never removed.

You are almost there but not quite 100% on the same page.

Take a look at my most recent Gleba factory ( the one that ran for 10 hours flawless with horizontal belt layout ) and pay close attention to the rocket fuel production, especially the five bioreactors with rocket fuel recipes and productivity tier II modules, and the number of rocket fuel being produced/consumed in the production chart ( consumed 3 per minute and keep this number in the back of your mind as we go along that went toward electric energy production).

I have calculated in-game and using factorio lab (third-party calculator) how much rocket fuel five bioreactors with productivity tier II modules can produce is about ~62 per minute.

Link: https://factoriolab.github.io/spa/list? ... Wfhjt&v=11

The right four bioreactors are all full of spoils in the input slots because 5% ( 3 divided by 62 is 5% ) is less than one bioreactor partially running.

We all know how bioreactors' input slots can hold items that completely spoil but are blocked from being removed by bioreactors with rocket fuel in the outlet slot. As soon as the spoil item appears in the outlet slot, a dedicated long-handed inserter filters to only spoil items; the dedicated inserter takes it out and places it north of the row of rocket fuel bioreactors.


It's almost as if I already took into account that bioreactors will always have trouble with items that expire without anybody helping me out. I am fine with item spoiling in the input slots for rocket fuel production lines because I plan to support Gleba with rocket fuel as the primary electric/energy source via boilers or heat towers. I am also planning to potentially have at least three rocket silos that will need ~36 rocket fuel per minute. So, I expected the rocket fuel production to oscillate between full 100% running and low-activity modes.


The previous design, which ultimately failed, also considered removing spoil as an integrated feature in the overall design. You seem to overlook the extensive planning that went into those Gleba designs.

Why is it quite difficult for people to understand that I am anything but a person new to Factorio? And I really don't need help, but thank you anyway.

We are all new to Gleba's spoilage mechanics and its intricate details. We all need to explore new methods to deal with that. All your (and my) thousands of hours played are irrelevant. Get off your high horse.

*Facepalm*

Telling me to dismount my horse will not change what actually occurred on Gleba and how it led to me not having fun while troubleshooting.

See my example of the Agricultural Science Pack for 10 hours in my previous post.

With a few more strategically placed speed beacons, you could achieve vastly more output with vastly less footprint. You're transporting too much spoiling items over too large distances. You even store nutrients - what a waste. It spoils. Instead, create nutrients on the spot, feed the nutrient biochambers with their own nutrients, and kickstart them with a spoilage-to-nutrient assembling machine which turns off as soon as there are nutrients > 0 in the nutrient biochambers.

I'm not yet ready with my complete Gleba factory, but the science-related modules are this.
The first one produces bioflux, a certain amount of nutrients for various independent modules not shown, and other yumako/jellynut byproducts. It kickstarts from whole fruits (the farms run with electricity only) and spoilage-to-nutrients. It's a 2-level kickstart. First it kickstarts yumako mashing, then yumako mash to nutrients, and this finally enables jellynut mashing and the first bioflux chamber, so the real bioflux-to-nutrient production starts.

And this is the science production.
It's supposed to be directly plugged behind the bioflux production. It has its own nutrient production, since it uses direct insertion due to the high nutrient throughput not feasible for belts. It just needs a few nutrients from the first step to start its own nutrient production.
A small gimmick is present in the bottom left, it's a keep-alive for a single pentapod egg in case something goes wrong with bioflux supply or stuff stalling. As soon as the nutrient machines get empty, a single egg is put into a chest and refreshed every 10 minutes with nutrients from spoilage and put back once the regular nutrient machines start again. During keepalive, any pentapod eggs are expunged into the spoilage exit belt to keep pentapods appearing from egg spoiling. Only the eggs within the chambers will stay and spoil, but I limit their number. I thought about recipe changing to expel them as well, but didn't find the time yet. And pentapod egg production doesn't really need production modules, the effect is minor.

If it comes to performance, this is what it created during my development. The spikes are from tests when I removed supply, electricity or deliberately let the factory stall.
I guess 639/min with about 95% fresh science packs is more than the huge production line you showed. 2nd image has ~50 modules and 170 belts, 1st image has 100 modules and ~220 belts. Both together exactly 20 beacons, which is one rocket stack.

I don't want a smaller footprint factory on Gleba based solely on its being physically smaller. Especially since physical space is not a restrictive factor on Gleba due to how Gleba fauna focus on attacking the agricultural towers (source of spores) and not the factory itself. The only exception is being triggered by a hostile structure (turrets defending agricultural production line).


By downsizing, I meant going from ~349 agricultural science packs per minute down to ~200 per minute or less (to match other science packs are at ~200 per minute). Or making changes to the overall design, potentially reducing idling bioreactors in a way that lets me remove a few bioreactors from the design (see example below).

Bioflux bioreactors in my agricultural science production are overkill and sit idle a bit too much. I might cut the entire length by half of the agricultural science packs production and move half of the pentapod-eggs/agricultural-science bioreactors above the flux bioreactors, effectively cutting the number of bioflux bioreactors by half.


The reasons for wanting to downsize the Gleba factory include but are not limited to the following reasons: to not over-produce agricultural science packs unnecessarily, experiment with different yields and the time it takes to build them up, to keep the number of imports (both quantity and variety) low, and to keep the entire layout simple as possible so that I don't have to go "Wait what was supposed to be here?" in middle of doing an actual Gleba boostrap session.

ps. as far as I see, the Gleba general bootstrap is this:
- import an assortment of intermediates
- create 2 biochambers
- create a yumako farm with 1 agricultural tower
- import heating towers
- create seeds and artificial soil to make a proper farm, as well as a huge amount of spoilage (2-3 chests full)
- create a jellynut farm with 1 agricultural tower
- create seeds and artificial soil to make a proper farm
- create a preliminary pentapod egg factory
- create a bunch of biochambers with imported ingredients
- start a bioflux production line
- start 2 bacteria production line to get iron and copper ore
- create iron/copper processing with a few foundries (with that ship from Vulcanus, also import a bunch of green belts)
- create a mall to be independent of imports
- create the rest of the factory from stuff produced locally
- start science production

I will modify your list slightly to align with how I envision doing Gleba.

- import intermediate materials and finished products including but not limited to: the necessary raw material to build a rocket silo right away, enough material to start building a rocket or two, construction-bot/logistic-bot/roboports, bootstrap energy infrastructure, weapons (tank/armor-suit/turret/otherwise) to clear out a large area around the agricultural towers and keeping them safe, etc.
- Starting working on unlocking Gleba's unique recipes and bioreactors can be done while searching for a centralized location that is not too far from both fruit farmable areas for roboports network coverage.
Start the early Gleba bootstrap factory (cargo landing pad, rocket silo, roboports, energy infrastructure, etc.) at the centralized location. This should take care of the crafted 500 nutrient and all crafted bioflux unlockables.
- Clear out the area around the two agricultural tower locations before the spore gets too large.
- Use the gathered pentapod eggs from clearing to bootstrap the pentapod egg production.
- Finishing up the last of the incomplete Gleba Factory with constantly incoming imports from Nauvis or a permanent orbiting space platform. Only parts that are in constant need locally have a shopping mall setup (bullets, rocket ammo (coal/sulfur from space platform), rocket turrets, bioreactors, repair kits, future expansions to production lines, etc).
- Export Agricultural Science Packs and Bioflux to Nauvis and leave Gleba (possibly for another world).
- Future plans that happen remotely while the player is away: Artillery-turrets + artillery shells + radars to keep agricultural towers safe, as an example.


Also, the step that depends on Foundries and/or green belts requires visiting Vulcanis first, and I may or may not even do the worlds in that particular order.


Smelting iron/copper locally, using foundries, on Gleba requires an external steady source of calcites.

One option requires me to complete the Gleba factory bootstrap and spend 2k agricultural science packs to unlock calcite as a source from the orbiting Gleba space platform. At this point, I no longer need the iron/copper to be produced locally.

The other requires visiting Vulcanis first and unplanned export/import route between Vulcanis and Gleba.


Importing iron/copper plates solves far more issues than having non-continuous local bacteria production lines. I might temporarily have some iron or copper production locally (from jelly or yumako mash) with stone furnaces (made locally and using local sources of burnable fuels). The advantage of doing it this way, with the temporary bacteria setup, is that it deliberately creates more spoil that can supplement the nutrients from spoil to bootstrap the Gleba factory without having a steady production of bioflux.

Also, I plan to export agricultural science packs before the Gleba factory is completed (see rocket silo + enough materials to bootstrap a few launches in the first step). Your way of doing things requires more potentially unnecessary initial setup on Gleba.


When I look at the necessary Gleba factory setup to produce blue circuits and light density structures locally to Gleba, it requires sulfurs (biosulfur recipe), plastic bars (bioplastic), and either locally bacteria-produced or imported iron/copper plates. Furthermore, to craft all of the necessary ingredients: blue circuits, and light density structure would require no less than 48 assembler tier-II, which is almost a full rocket launch by itself. Never mind, those secondary items, such as the following items but not limited to: inserters/belts/power-poles/power-infrastructure/otherwise, and the rocket launches to import the raw ingredients or completed secondary items to Gleba.

I plan to have ALL of those infrastructures already built (upscaled to support all worlds as needed) and local to Nauvis before going to Gleba. So why should I move/relocate them to Gleba? Increase the risk of provoking spore-induced attack waves (from increased fruits consumption)? More time to clear out the area around Agricultural towers? Introducing more potential failure points from being non-continuous production for various end-products?

[mmmPI]

I believe we have reached the limitations of what the Factorio community can work to solve the root cause of this mystery Gleba factory failure.
After eliminating all impossible stuff, a novel, unknown issue or bug is the only reasonable scenario left.
I am happy to share the save game after it happened directly to WUBE. Unfortunately, I do not have a save game from before the issue occurred.

This sounds like a description of a bug in the player's mind. The most likely cause of the failure is a bad design, but you only posted a screenshot and no save game, pretending "gleba need be changed because you don't understand what happened in 'this' situation".

[Shulmeister]

But how do you explain the cherry picking of barely related complaints written by players with 3-4 hours of play if it's not trolling ?

Amongst those when you read points such as : "the ennemy i haven't faced because i rage quit before would probably be too strong".

What's the point of copy pasting this here and calling it a valuable feedback ?

I think we can explain it by a lack of understanding, someone was frustrated about its Gleba setup failing and decided to search on google every post that also had people complaining and posted them links only from their title. Now if one person doesn't understand why its setup is failing, following the same reasonning, it's also possible to suppose this person doesn't understand when the links are not related. Thus leading a player to post a bunch of cherry picked links that seem to be a collection of rookie mistake and argument later on something different that was in the link posted. That's why I called it a bad example, but that doesn't invalid the feedback that some player need help on Gleba because they are stuck, even if their explanation on how it happened are not making any sense and they don't provide any savegame only some vague ramble about how it's impossible to understand why their system fail without providing the system.

You say it's trolling, but consider the case where the player had made a mistake in its setup because it was tired and wanted to relax and not torture itself with some logic problems. You can't expect this player to also understand the cause of the problem and explain it rationnally here. Otherwise the player wouldn't have made the mistake that had its setup failed in the first place. We are talking about someone who may not be familiar with space age, despite claiming "thousands of hours of gameplay", the expansion is quite new, it's probably baseless claim. If they wanted some help they would post on gameplay help, but my guess is that they jut want other people to express empathy, like "oh yeah you're right this must be a bug" even you think it's just user mistake. You seem to be willing to solve problems a bit too much, sometimes people just like to complain !

[mmmPI]

You say it's trolling, but consider the case where the player had made a mistake in its setup because it was tired and wanted to relax and not torture itself with some logic problems. You can't expect this player to also understand the cause of the problem and explain it rationnally here.
...
You seem to be willing to solve problems a bit too much, sometimes people just like to complain !

Yeah and say they don't need help it's the game that need to be changed because so many people are making different unrelated rookie mistake, and then proceed to ask for help to solve a setup that is only partially shared but still used as a proof of previous claims.

I don't want a smaller footprint factory on Gleba based solely on its being physically smaller.

I understand this is a videogame also for kids and kids throw tantrum and you need to be patient to teach them things x).

If you want a smaller footprint factory based on something else than its footprint you don't want a smaller footprint factory.

If the factory need to stop for some time say 50% of the time it's turned off, then the time during which it will produce science packs, it will need to do so at 2x the speed of the other science pack to keep up with the same average consumption.

The benefit of this approach is to have a better freshness on the science packs overall at the cost of bigger production facility that is turned on/off.

It makes no sense to be willing to have a factory that stops its production sometimes to try and have a better freshness on average while also trying to have a factory that is downsized as if it were going to work 100% of time.

[aka13]

As a fellow Gleba disliker, I tend to disagree, that it is hard to debug a Gleba factory. I'd say it's just that it is the first factory after oil, which can fail by running long enough.
I'd say, as soon as you get the concepts going, it's fairly reasonable. The only couple of times where it did annoyingly break were the patches where there were changes, what is getting recycled, and what burned.

[mmmPI]

I have seen some players complaining that mining drill don't have filter and that when they put mining drill on mixed ore patch sometimes it create a deadlock, so when it comes to making a system that fail, i think players can achieve so even earlier than oil, just with the burner drill !

Same players complaining that you need to use pump that use electricity to split water, but you need electricity to use pumps, and as such you can fail a system even before getting access to research !

It's often the case that those cases are not illustrated with save games, or that suddenly it worked after trying again, magic, new patch, most likely, very seldom it was user mistake, almost never one could say, and even less it is the case that the user will admit it, so it can give a misrepresentation i suppose.