Gleba has killed the game for me.

[Junorus]

I like gleba gameplay. But exporting science was problematic for me. My space platforms are not optimized yet.

[credomane]

As much as I dislike spoilage I can't help but look at the data prototypes and come up with stupid ideas. haha.

You can totally setup multi-stage spoilage. Haven't tested it though.

Got the idea after seeing https://mods.factorio.com/mod/everything-spoilage on the mod portal and taking a look at the code for it.

Have a MK3 Assembler spoils into a MK2 then a MK1 then a plate. Granted this isn't for vanilla but it would be a new level of dislike to have to manage multiples of spoilage/"fermenting" in modded play. Totally see pyanodon's or Arch666Angel taking advantage of this, if it works.

[shelmak.gc@gmail.com]

As much as I dislike spoilage I can't help but look at the data prototypes and come up with stupid ideas. haha.

You can totally setup multi-stage spoilage. Haven't tested it though.

Got the idea after seeing https://mods.factorio.com/mod/everything-spoilage on the mod portal and taking a look at the code for it.

Have a MK3 Assembler spoils into a MK2 then a MK1 then a plate. Granted this isn't for vanilla but it would be a new level of dislike to have to manage multiples of spoilage/"fermenting" in modded play. Totally see pyanodon's or Arch666Angel taking advantage of this, if it works.

You can handle waste on a very easy way using bots, if you use requester chests, there is an option to enable them to "trash" any item that is not on the request list, so bots will automatically go to remove spoilage from there. If you use active (purple) chests to drop your end products, bots will take care of them. (You can even use the requester chests as buffer chests on the middle of the lines by setting a request for hundreds of the wanted items and they will automatically reject any spoilage that enters there)

You can also wire the requester chests to the logistic network if you want to stop production when a quota is met (and also disable the machine, but better just stop requests so the leftover items are consumed and don't spoil)

About farms, you can also use bots, just put a requester (for seeds) and active chest (for product) per tower, then put a storage (yellow) chest on some location and put inserters to remove all material stored in there and belts to transport all to your base. As you use active chests and there is nowhere to put the items, they will fill the yellow chests with everything, even spoilage.

When it reaches your base you either clasify all ot you store it on a purple chest so the bots take care of it. Make sure to not connect the farm logistic bot network to your main logistic network so the bots stay on the farm doing their work and do not travel km over the map if something saturate or you get without energy.

If you end up installing that mod, this would also work for this scenario, but the system would saturate very heavilly with that huge ammount of spoilage if all items can spoil lol... better to start burning all crap asap on millions of heating towers to get rid of all of it.

[aka13]

designed by and for hardcore players

There is nothing hardcore in spoilage. In the current version It's an age old mechanic in the simplest form, without any external influences, timer on an item. In ONI, which I enjoy playing a lot, there are also adjacency considerations, temperature and gas/liquid the item is immersed in. Imagine, that there are also freezers, and other things for dealing with spoilage.

When I go into ONI, I go into a spoilage-first game, and it would be strange to try and remove spoilage from it. Also, imagine, ice "spoils" there into liquid water as well, and water can freeze, and all kinds of other interesting "spoilage" mechanics.

With Spoil Age introduction, suddenly all endgame rotates around very simplistic, boring spoilage, with very simplistic solutions to it.
You either produce all the time, and void excess, or you don't produce all the time and keep a couple of things on a tight "upkeep".
The latter being not fleshed out, since you can not detect need for science packs, or need for nutrients for the biters.
There is nothing challenging in it, it's just slightly different gameplay, which you can only really play one way.

I - personally - matter of my own taste - don't find "produce all the time and void" an interesting gameplay challenge, and a lot of people feel that way. There are also a lot of people who do enjoy it - more power to them!
But in the end it's simply a matter of taste/opinion, nothing about "hard" or "hardcore".

I guess I take it so emotionally, because I was hoping for a different endgame for space age, and I have been waiting for it for too long, since the times when rocket launches were added. It's like if Valve would release HL3 - no matter what they will do, a lot of people will be disappointed, because too much time passed, and too much happened behind closed doors after HL2.

[Tinyboss]

Have a MK3 Assembler spoils into a MK2 then a MK1 then a plate. Granted this isn't for vanilla but it would be a new level of dislike to have to manage multiples of spoilage/"fermenting" in modded play. Totally see pyanodon's or Arch666Angel taking advantage of this, if it works.

I love how much I hate this.

[Tinyboss]

I guess I take it so emotionally, because I was hoping for a different endgame for space age, and I have been waiting for it for too long, since the times when rocket launches were added.

Totally valid not to enjoy every new mechanic in the expansion--they added a ton! I haven't been terribly entranced with Vulcanus--I killed the one worm for a tungsten patch, then set up the minimum to get the science done and make drills, foundries, and green belts, and have been leaving it alone since.

I think each planet can be done in the same way. Agricultural science has a super simple recipe, and you can reduce the spoilage hassle a lot using bots and logistics. Just tick "trash unrequested" on literally every requester chest, use purple chests everywhere you'd use a red, have a spoilage-filtered inserter pulling from every building into a purple chest, and set up some spoilage requester chests unloading into heating towers. That gets you most of the way there.

[JackTheSpades]

Having finally escaped Gleba recently, I've come to the same conclusion that was mentioned above. I went from hating it to not liking it.

My three main grievances with Gleba now are:

• You can't turn your factory off.
  I made a thread about this myself but because of the pentapod eggs you can't ever really turn the factory off. The eggs need to be recycled with Nutrients which themselves spoil so you need to have a constant stream of fresh resources coming in to keep your eggs alive. This in turn drives spores and evolution which drives attacks.
  Crafting and recycling Biochambers is definitely possible but feels like a massive overhead. I wouldn't want to eliminate spoilage entirely but there should absolutely be a way to store eggs.
• Nutrients everywhere.
  Someone in this thread mentioned that Biochambers just feel like the burner age with extra steps and I half agree. Mainly because everything requires a Biochamber which requires Nutrients. The logistic challenge of removing spoilage from all assemblers and belts is actually rather interesting but even so having to hook up the same Nutrients to EVERY. SINGLE. BIOCHAMBER. feels a bit dull.
  I think it would be more beginner friendly if there was a type of Nutrient with less Yummy (Fuel) Value that didn't spoil to get started with early production and one headache less. Perhaps there could then be a third type with a much higher Yummy Value but shorter shelf life. That way the weak Nutrients could be used for slow and steady production while the strong Nutrients would be used for moduled and beaconed production.
• Spoiling Science.
  This is, bar none, my biggest problem.
  It's a complete paradigm shift to how I and many others play Factorio. I am personally the type who plays slow and steady. I don't much care to build massive factories on each planet. If I get a trickle of science that is good enough for me and I'll just rotate through what I research... Not with Gleba though. It is extremely punishing if you don't have good interplanetary shipping setup and you need large scale production if you want to make the most of your space ships going back and forth. (Or go even larger and build your entire research on Gleba)
  Not only does the science spoil but it also becomes less useful.
  I've been babysitting my science production for HOURS to unlock all the stuff I needed before leaving and for me this science represents a forced change in how I get to play the game that I don't enjoy.
  
  I wouldn't care as much if science made from half spoiled ingredients just turned out "half used up" but having it half spoiled itself, which in turn makes it only half useful and it continues to spoil... just no.

Ultimately, while certain things have grown on me, like the copper and iron bacteria cultivation with intentional spoilage, the science and the general unfriendliness towards beginners is what bothers me.
As is, it clashes completely with any form of slow and steady play style.

[Tinyboss]

because of the pentapod eggs you can't ever really turn the factory off. The eggs need to be recycled with Nutrients which themselves spoil so you need to have a constant stream of fresh resources coming in to keep your eggs alive. This in turn drives spores and evolution which drives attacks.

I bet you could abuse the update interval on the selector combinator's random input function to make eggs on a 14 minute timer, making only as many nutrients as needed from spoilage in an assembler. I bet it takes very few solar panels and accumulators to run that assembler.

It wouldn't work forever, but it would work for a LONG time with a chest full of spoilage. 960 nutrients running the breeding recipe barely four times an hour would go a long way.

And no harvesting so no spores.

EDIT: Never mind, there are 30 nutrients needed for breeding, so it wouldn't last as long as I thought. Less than 8 hours on a chest of spoilage. However, you could harvest a single yumako tree as needed, and those take an hour to spoil, so with prod modules everywhere, the spore production could be kept very minimal.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
Anyway, what I am currently more annoyed with is because I am somewhat production limited still I constantly have to do some "tech-juggle" where I switch back and forth between research that requires agri packs and one that doesn't to keep the research going all the time.

I wish there was a better way to automate that. :X

I am juggling Purple / Yellow / Fulgoran science on Vulcanus, and set up programmable speakers warning me when they get too low - then I just move that research to the back of the queue and let the next one take over.

My biggest problem is that I don't want to experiment.

On any other planet I can build something, try it out and if it doesn't work I tear it down again.
On Gleba, I can do that and then be left with a bunch of spoil and wasted time/spores that allows the enemies to evolve.

I understand that throughput is the name of the game here but it feels like you can't slowly build your way up to it since stuff will just spoil or worse... hatch.

My problem with Gleba is the combination of the new mechanics with an evolving, aggressive enemy.

The combination means that you are actively punished for trial and error testing. This makes every choice made on Gleba stressful in a way it isn't on any other planets. Even though enemies evolve elsewhere, at least if you're making pollution you're going to have something to show for it. If something went wrong on Gleba, you just have a ton of spoilage and substantially stronger enemies. The ability to literally go backwards is uniquely frustrating—it gives the same sense of "pressure" that you get in a roguelike.

I can't get anything set up because I have to get everything working before I even test it, and with so many new mechanics that's challenging.

[...]
Everywhere else in factorio you can/do build incrementally; not Gleba it is all at once or you get spoilage hell. Everywhere else your factorio can idle for various reasons (over production, shortages, rebuilding, biter induced destruction) without major repercussions, if any at all. Do that on Gleba and it is straight to spoilage hell for you! Do anything wrong on gleba and it is straight to spoilage hell. Every time you find yourself in spoilage hell you have no idea what went wrong or where or even when because it is all ruined.

Gleba doesn't teach you anything. It punishes you for every little mistake. Of all the thousands of hours and different mods I'd played over the year none of them have punished you for a mistake. Some mods might be punishingly hard (pyanodon's mods for example) but I don't ever remember being thrown back to square one because of a mistake.

Warptorio might be the only exception to getting thrown back to square one but that often comes from your own personal greed and staying longer than you can defend.

You totally can take it slow : don't plant more Yumako / Jellystem trees that you can handle.

This reminds me of players that aren't used to v1.1 with hard biter settings, and think they can outproduce them.
Then they are stuck because they have wasted all their ores on ammo vs blue biters... if that doesn't count as «going backwards», I don't know what is.
And don't get me started on losing one of the super-expensive pYanodons buildings to biters...

Meanwhile, and unlike biters, pentapods don't even attack your base, only your treefarms !

[...]
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.
[...]

The clue is (too much) spoilage on your belts. Wube specifically said they made it that way so that players can figure out what went wrong.

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.

Not everyone has to finish a game. (Typically, most players give up in its first quarter.) In fact the only time I bothered to launch a rocket before SA was during a pYanodon's game where it's required to get yellow science. Otherwise I was pretty happy with nuclear missiles / artillery to call it a game.

[...]
because of the pentapod eggs you can't ever really turn the factory off. The eggs need to be recycled with Nutrients which themselves spoil so you need to have a constant stream of fresh resources coming in to keep your eggs alive. This in turn drives spores and evolution which drives attacks.
Crafting and recycling Biochambers is definitely possible but feels like a massive overhead. I wouldn't want to eliminate spoilage entirely but there should absolutely be a way to store eggs.

If it's about that, then it's a microscopic amount of spores and evolution.
I'm up to 0.54 evo : 95% of which is from time, 3% from pollution, 2% from spawner kills. (Granted on DeathWorld Marathon, but still !)

Mainly because everything requires a Biochamber which requires Nutrients. The logistic challenge of removing spoilage from all assemblers and belts is actually rather interesting but even so having to hook up the same Nutrients to EVERY. SINGLE. BIOCHAMBER. feels a bit dull.

Everything doesn't, a lot of these recipes can also be made in regular assemblers. You're deliberately playing on hard mode if you do (except, arguably, for seeds, but productivity modules are another option).
And I did decide to use Biochambers everywhere I could, but it doesn't seem like you have to, if you don't feel like it.

[*]Spoiling Science.
This is, bar none, my biggest problem.
It's a complete paradigm shift to how I and many others play Factorio. I am personally the type who plays slow and steady. I don't much care to build massive factories on each planet. If I get a trickle of science that is good enough for me and I'll just rotate through what I research... Not with Gleba though. It is extremely punishing if you don't have good interplanetary shipping setup and you need large scale production if you want to make the most of your space ships going back and forth. (Or go even larger and build your entire research on Gleba)
[...]

Is shipping the higher tier sciences to Gleba that bad ?
Science is very compact, I've been already doing it with Fulgoran => Nauvis orbit => Vulcanus and Spacer in Nauvis orbit => Nauvis => Nauvis orbit => Vulcanus.
And all with a single dinky spaceship that can't even survive on Gleba orbit forever and that needs like an hour to refill its ammo !
And that's with ×4 science costs !

Liftoff Bio-Base

liftoff_Gleba_base.jpg (871.69 KiB) Viewed 667 times

This can work without any circuit conditions too, I just have them set up to not needlessly waste Mash/Jelly on the «backup bacteria» if that isn't needed.
Modules also were added fairly late, they're optional.
Note the sustainable eggs.
Offscreen : some accumulators and solar panels, the two treefarms.
Only thing missing is automating getting rid of excess seeds.

I landed with less than one stack of : red belts, red undergrounds, solar panels, accumulators, electric furnaces (all of the former remaining from space platform too large auto-requests), conbots.

To the East is the regular factory (and stone mining), electrically separated by an automated switch that makes sure the biofactory always has 100% power.

After I plopped the rocket silo, I considered making a much better bio-powerplant (the metal-factory was running quite low on power at that point), but I had to rush off to Fulgora, which had run out of scrap to mine, so I brought in a fission power plant (and a stack of fuel) from Nauvis.

Overall, really like how unique it is, if a bit mind-bending (in a good way).

Ending up with the above of course required quite a lot of experimentation and failures (hence the nearly 50% evolution from time alone (with the ×3.75 DWM penalty) when I left).

Pentapods

This being DeathWorld (albeit Marathon), I was scared to drop on an unknown life-heavy planet, so I picked it last, and went in with Power Armor Mk2. So attacking nests wasn't exactly hard, though I did end up tweaking my loadout by swapping the single Personal Laser Defense to a second Discharge Defense... and then never even used other weapons. (The combat bonuses from eating Gleba foods were very appreciated though !)

Otherwise they seem even more passive than biters in expansion and attacks, though that's probably because of me misremembering early Nauvis because of the current Evo mismatch : 92-93% on Nauvis, 0-54% on Gleba.

And of course they only attack the treefarms.

I think I love the unique design of enemies even more !
(And amazing job on the art all around, including music, congratulations !)

Still, to people with Glebanxiety : a reminder that autosaves exist, their frequency and number can be configured, and *nix OSes have the great non-blockning saves feature to boot !

[MeduSalem]

[...]
Anyway, what I am currently more annoyed with is because I am somewhat production limited still I constantly have to do some "tech-juggle" where I switch back and forth between research that requires agri packs and one that doesn't to keep the research going all the time.

I wish there was a better way to automate that. :X

I am juggling Purple / Yellow / Fulgoran science on Vulcanus, and set up programmable speakers warning me when they get too low - then I just move that research to the back of the queue and let the next one take over.

I did something similar with the programmable speakers as well. Definitely one of the most annoying things about Space Age.

So annoying actually that during the past week where I had no time to play I didn't miss playing the game because today 30min barely back into the game the frustration with the tech juggling hits all over again and after re-arranging the research queue like the 50th time in the campaign already I felt like "meh" and I shut down the game just now.

I hope they fix it with a QoL improvement eventually. Because otherwise I will have to use a mod eventually (I already looked but haven't found a suitable one yet). Because really, I cannot stand it anymore. It is tiring me out. Currently I have no motivation to play. ^^

I mean, in any campaign I eventually get the feeling "why am I doing this pointless grind" (which I get about the endless research in general), but when I also get sticks thrown into my way too then I call it a day.

And the irony is, that I haven't even dropped down to Aquilo yet (which I wanted to get into this weekend) and feel that annoyed by it. ^^

[MisterDoctor]

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).

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.

ok yeah, evolution will happen, but it happens with time already too.

thing is that the enemies are not as bad as they seem since they attack your farms and not your base. just don't build anything valuable at your farms and at worst all you will have to replace is a couple harvesters and some belts. for me since walls are not effective I don't think, I used radar and covered my entire spore cloud in radar coverage so that I could keep it clean from enemy nests and then I had almost no attacks. on top of that, lots of gun turrets with yellow ammo are good enough to defend from most things including medium stompers. the only point where I got stuck was that I could not take out more than one medium stomper on foot with just a rocket launcher and once there were lots of medium stompers I had to race for the spidertron. but once you get spidertron and enough rockets you are mostly home free.

[Danjen]

I like the idea of Gleba, the concept and design is fun. The execution is horrible. I understand the mechanics and just cannot get things flowing right without excessive loops which just creates tons of spoiled nutrients because my machines are full.

The only time I made any progress was handfeeding my machines and babysitting the science. Evolution is at 60% due to time spent and I still dont have any fruit automated

[J-H]

At this point I don't have enough spoilage to fuel biochambers and my pentapod egg production died as a result.
I'm not seeing any spore effects, but I'm also not producing a ton yet.
I think I'm going to rely on nuclear or solar power and as few biochambers as possible.

I finally got Bioflux up and running.

It's unfortunate how much is locked behind agriscience though.

[Apthorpe]

designed by and for hardcore players

There is nothing hardcore in spoilage. In the current version It's an age old mechanic in the simplest form, without any external influences, timer on an item. In ONI, which I enjoy playing a lot, there are also adjacency considerations, temperature and gas/liquid the item is immersed in. Imagine, that there are also freezers, and other things for dealing with spoilage.

When I go into ONI, ...

Maybe you cannot empathize in this case, but perhaps you can sympathize? Isn't this like a Dark Souls veteran claiming the game is not hardcore, since the vanilla difficulty for them is almost trivial after hundreds of hours? A player new to Dark Souls, particularly one who has not looked up guides online, is still likely to find it a very hardcore experience.

There are a lot of Factorio players, myself included, who never encountered a spoilage mechanic in Factorio until Gleba. I'm glad Wube included it and have made Gleba memorable and unique, particularly for the uninitiated, but it has also featured a combination of frustration and draining which has inclined me to step away for breaks far more frequently than I am wont to do in Cracktorio. I can see this changing, and the potential rewards of Gleba are rumored to be great, but so far it has been the least enjoyable of my starting planet experiences.

And even if it were not and I loved every second of Gleba, I could appreciate at least in theory the frustration and allergic reaction a not-insignificant number of players are likely to have when they first come to Gleba, facing time pressure and spoilage and paradigm shifts which are not easy or pleasant for everyone to adapt to. There will be players who probably never enjoy it and interact with it to the minimum extent possible. And to those who would argue, 'Just use mods, dummy', there are a lot of players who prefer to stick to vanilla and take umbrage at the idea of resorting to mods. You can argue that's irrational, stubborn, etc., but that's how some people feel.

I am very interested to what degree the devs anticipated that Gleba would be a controversial planet. It has provoked a negative reaction from a significant segment of the community. I think this will lessen w/ time, as people become more accustomed to its difficulties and learn how to better exploit its potential, but the growing pains of Gleba shouldn't be dismissed just because not all of us can empathize with them.

[Dixi]

I still hate Gleba, but managed to create agricultural pot production there.
I used less production approach, with more imported things, including nuclear reactor, and all rocket parts import, with a cheat of slow spoiling time. This works ... almost, to make an automated pot production. But whole impression is that Gleba is more troubles then fun.

[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).

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.

ok yeah, evolution will happen, but it happens with time already too.

thing is that the enemies are not as bad as they seem since they attack your farms and not your base. just don't build anything valuable at your farms and at worst all you will have to replace is a couple harvesters and some belts. for me since walls are not effective I don't think, I used radar and covered my entire spore cloud in radar coverage so that I could keep it clean from enemy nests and then I had almost no attacks. on top of that, lots of gun turrets with yellow ammo are good enough to defend from most things including medium stompers. the only point where I got stuck was that I could not take out more than one medium stomper on foot with just a rocket launcher and once there were lots of medium stompers I had to race for the spidertron. but once you get spidertron and enough rockets you are mostly home free.

On the spoiler part, I've had enemies stomp trough my base to get to a a farm on the other side. So while they target your farms, they can come from all sides.

I also had my Bleba base deathspiral into complete spoiler hell after running smooth for 5 hours. And I was away on the ice planet. Bots couldn't fix the issue, so I had to fly back trying to fix the issue. Which turned out to be two pieces of spoilage in a filterer splitter jamming bioflux output and those stupid stack inserters that are useless for anything that spoils and I missed a spot where I put them.

Those stack inserters, yes, you unlock them on gleba, but, if you use them for anything that spoils you will have a bad time. As soon as something spoils in their hand they are "dead", waiting for more spoilage to pickup. I just only ship them out to vulcanus now, where they are awesome.

[angramania]

I like the idea of Gleba, the concept and design is fun. The execution is horrible. I understand the mechanics and just cannot get things flowing right without excessive loops which just creates tons of spoiled nutrients because my machines are full.

The only time I made any progress was handfeeding my machines and babysitting the science. Evolution is at 60% due to time spent and I still dont have any fruit automated

If you can't find a way to automate Gleba it doesn't mean developers have done "execution is horrible". Many players automated it successfully and in different ways.
Loops and some logic are necessary if you do not use bots. But tons of spoiled nutrients are optional. If your biochambers are full of nutrients then just add more biochambers(eggs production will be happy to devour it all) or swap efficiency modules with production/speed ones. On Gleba it is better to overconsume then overproduce.

[Panzerknacker]

So far it looks like Gleba is the best new planet so far, posing a real challenge and fun gameplay mechanics while the other planets lack that.

[angramania]

I still hate Gleba, but managed to create agricultural pot production there.
I used less production approach, with more imported things, including nuclear reactor, and all rocket parts import, with a cheat of slow spoiling time. This works ... almost, to make an automated pot production. But whole impression is that Gleba is more troubles then fun.

It is quite fun as starting planet via Any Planet Start mod. Maybe you should try it someday. Ability to import could prevent you from accepting Gleba's ways.

[BlueTemplar]

At this point I don't have enough spoilage to fuel biochambers and my pentapod egg production died as a result.
[...]

Consider using a different nutrients production recipe ?

----
Depending how easy it is for you to raid for eggs, I would leave automating egg production to last.
(But be sure to have enough other materials to craft all the biochambers beforehand.)

[...]
On the spoiler part, I've had enemies stomp trough my base to get to a a farm on the other side. So while they target your farms, they can come from all sides.
[...]

I would be curious to see which kind of layout could possibly have caused this... sounds like a bug (or maybe overproduction ?)