Gleba has killed the game for me.

[fredthedeadhead]

What I did was get a bio chamber making rocket fuel ASAP. I still use rocket fuel as my primary power source. It doesn't take much to make a single bio chamber. If you had the resources to make furnaces then you could have easily made an automated rocket fuel setup. You say you have trouble finding burnables, but on Gleba that just doesn't make sense to me since literally everything is burnable.

It really makes sense, but I can't see how to do this in the early game. At least not without sitting around bored for hours waiting for the resources to suddenly start rolling in!

Yes, you can manually harvest fuel, but that is quickly burnt and because there's not enough seeds, the factory shuts down again. Everything rots and it's back to square zero.

[aka13]

BTW there is no pollution on Gleba, only spores from harvesting Yumako and Jellynut.

I appreciate your deep insight into the game mechanics. I assumed, that anyone interested in the thread would be able to draw parallels between yellow pollution and red pollution, without having to explicitly name them.

[Merry76]

The key to gleba isnt to fight the spoil. It is to live with it. You plan a Bus? Great. Dont forget to include a sewer lane into it, where the spoil (and only the spoil) goes. Keep it flowing, expand if you produce more spoil than your lane can handle (if you do it right, it will not overtax a blue belt for very long). Frequently pipe fast rotting stuff (like nutrients, that go on the bus, and will permanently spoil all the time) into the sewer lane with filtered split inserters. End the sewer (after you created Sulfur and carbon from it) in a heating tower that burns it all. Create a bit of power from it while you are at it. Mostly power your factory with rocket fuel in heating towers (I add solar, because I am a miser - and a rocket fuel not burned is a rocket fuel saved). You could go nuclear, of course. Personal preferences...

Loop the nutrients in the bus, not the jumako, jellynut and Bioflux. Do not place Mash or Jelly on the bus. That stuff is fast spoiling, and needs to be consumed in your modular elements.

Place stuff that consumes alot of jumako, jellynut and Bioflux at the "end" of your bus - especially if it results in "unspoilable" stuff like Sulfur, Lubricant and Carbon.

Also, stop playing Gleba like any other planet. Take some lessons from fulgora with you: the belts are not to be filled 100%. Gleba punishes you if you do. Do not think "I can create a Bioflux factory module that has 8 BioChambers producing Bioflux fed by 10 Yumako Mash producing ones and 4 jelly producing ones". Think 5mash/2jelly feeding 5 Bioflux Chambers (one on each lane).
Across the (Bulk) Inserter that feeds the fast rotting mash/jelly to the BioFlux chamber, place a (fast) inserter that removes spoil onto the sewer lane (or a sidearm of it that leads to the sewer).
If one of those modules isnt enough (wich probably is about right), place a second/third etc. one. Do not expand it directly, it will spoil inside the module, creating you tons of fun - dwarf fortress style.

Create eggs right behind the Bioflux generating modules, from freshly made nutrients. If you create eggs from half spoiled nutrients, they will be "pre spoiled" something fierce, and hatch accordingly. If you generate them from nutrients that came out of relatively fresh bioflux, the results will be neat and fresh and will not spoil for a long time. Place some gun turrets (or lasers, but I find gun turrets obliterate wrigglers perfectly) around your egg/science module.

Dont put anything in boxes that spoils and you dont want it to. Bacteria are fine, and seeds dont spoil (so can be picked up by logistic bots).

Following this, you can build a biofactory that doesnt stop, and just keeps on running until the stompers come. And that is something I havent figured out, because they do not come at the moment (My perimeter is about 5 chunks bigger than the spore cloud, so they only ever migrate to rebuild nests, which i patrolled/killed preemptively so far). If I am in my spiderbot, even big stompers are just targets that require me to hold down the fire button a bit longer...

[fredthedeadhead]

Much as I like many mods, these feel more like cheats TBH, but each to their own.

That's such an interesting thing to hear! I'm really curious why adding more resources could be close to cheating. Several people have said that in mid-game Gleba seeds and spoilage are in abundance. Is it cheating to have too many seeds later on in the game? Why would it be cheating to have a reliable way to get seeds at the start?

I'm genuinely curious, because I think the balancing and progression in Factorio is fascinating, and I certainly wouldn't want to make an overpowered mod.

All I can say is that without my the mod, Gleba is absolutely boring. I had to wait and wait and wait and I got nowhere. With the mod, I have enough resources to start making a crappy base and then slowly improve it. Later, when I have a better grip on the mechanics, I'm sure the mod won't be useful any more, but that's exactly the point.

why on earth do people not take tech with them then complain it is a struggle to get going. Some like that fresh struggle on each planet, some dont. The game lets you decide if you want that or whether you want to take the bits for a large base with you as a quick start.

I did take some tech with me.

To reiterate, there are two perspectives: one is that Gleba is solvable (e.g. bring in equipment from other planets to avoid the inherent problems with Gleba), the other is from a gameplay perspective, and Gleba fails because it dumps too many concepts at once, requires a lot of sitting around and waiting, adds unnecessary time pressure, punishes mistakes, and does not provide an incremental way of learning, improving, and adapting. You have to get the factory right first time (either by somehow knowing external equipment is required), or be reset to zero.

[Merry76]

Also another tip that really helps: bring a tank. No, seriously. Bring one, and then when you see the first pentapod, shoot it with the main turret (small ones should be insta killed)

I had one roaming my drop area about 4 chunks to the south, where i needed to agri farm. Tank solved it in one shot.

[doktorstick]

I spent a bit longer "solving" Gleba because I went circuit crazy. I progressively enable more and more nutrient consumers as production comes online. And similarly, I turn on the products (like science or carbon fiber) in the same fashion. One of the main mechanisms is by enabling/disabling requester chests. This is to prevent spoilables from being split across too many inputs and rotting.

For the other solutions:
- no on-site construction of non-Gleba products (I skipped the bacteria cycle)
- nuclear power
- purely bot based w/ trains moving the fruit from the plantations to the factory
- spaceships that "request" Gleba products always deliver materials to cover their launches
- single spidertron with explosive rockets (rockets are delivered by science ship)

It's not 100% hands-off. The production is, but when an alert goes off that one of the gun/rocket turrets at the plantations has fired, I swap to Gleba and path the spidertron to push back nests. Even the largest stompers pop with explosive rockets. This happens infrequently enough that it isn't too much a bother, but I cannot run Factorio as an idle game.

[aka13]

I spent a bit longer "solving" Gleba because I went circuit crazy. I progressively enable more and more nutrient consumers as production comes online. And similarly, I turn on the products (like science or carbon fiber) in the same fashion. One of the main mechanisms is by enabling/disabling requester chests. This is to prevent spoilables from being split across too many inputs and rotting.

For the other solutions:
- no on-site construction of non-Gleba products (I skipped the bacteria cycle)
- nuclear power
- purely bot based w/ trains moving the fruit from the plantations to the factory
- spaceships that "request" Gleba products always deliver materials to cover their launches
- single spidertron with explosive rockets (rockets are delivered by science ship)

It's not 100% hands-off. The production is, but when an alert goes off that one of the gun/rocket turrets at the plantations has fired, I swap to Gleba and path the spidertron to push back nests. Even the largest stompers pop with explosive rockets. This happens infrequently enough that it isn't too much a bother, but I cannot run Factorio as an idle game.

Nice, I went with a similar concept, where unless there is a platform in orbit requesting stuff, neither flux nor science packs are produced, and only one very slow egg breeder is used for the upkeep.
Care to share your designs?

[Nemoricus]

Why would it be cheating to have a reliable way to get seeds at the start?

You start off with a reliable way to get more seeds from the fruits you've harvested, which is processing the fruits with productivity and not letting them spoil.

To reiterate, there are two perspectives: one is that Gleba is solvable (e.g. bring in equipment from other planets to avoid the inherent problems with Gleba)

Building up from scratch on Fulgora, Vulcanus, and Gleba makes the gameplay slower. But you never *need* to bring equipment from the other planets to do so. I think that, in general, it's more fun if you're bringing in the infrastructure with you for any of those planets, since you get to skip the problem of bootstrapping basic infrastructure production and start working on the planet specific problems right away.

Gleba fails because it dumps too many concepts at once

I do tend to agree with this, though. I went into Gleba with all the knowledge from the FFF posts, so I already had an idea of what I needed to do. But that's not a reasonable expectation for a new player. I frankly don't remember when or if the tips and tricks for the world popped up, either. Definitely something that could have been overlooked.

requires a lot of sitting around and waiting

This one I'll also agree with. If you just harvest a few trees and try to build up from those, it'll take quite a while to build up more. And the start of Gleba is a "You need seeds to make seeds" situation, since seeds are used to plant the trees *and* expand the soil that you can grow them in.

I ended up harvesting every tree I could find in the nearby area to speed up the process.

adds unnecessary time pressure

I was surprised by how lenient Gleba was in that regard. The spoilage timers were never really a particularly big deal.

punishes mistakes, and does not provide an incremental way of learning, improving, and adapting.

This is definitely true. If fruits spoil, that's lost seeds. If you don't use productivity in the fruit processing, it's all but certain you'll run out. Pentapod eggs hatch into hostiles.

All of it is manageable, when you know what you're doing, but you don't know what you're doing if starting Gleba blind.

I wonder how Gleba would do with a recipe to turn a bunch of fruits into guaranteed seeds and a big pile of spoilage. You're still going to have to deal with the seeds that come from proper processing, but it would simplify the start and make building up seeds faster.

[adam_bise]

BTW there is no pollution on Gleba, only spores from harvesting Yumako and Jellynut.

I appreciate your deep insight into the game mechanics. I assumed, that anyone interested in the thread would be able to draw parallels between yellow pollution and red pollution, without having to explicitly name them.

Woops my bad I missed that you were harvesting trees. I think that is kind of a trap, harvesting the trees for power directly. Because it would cause you to be attacked much more than making rocket fuel from jelly and only using the trees for processing.

[adam_bise]

What I did was get a bio chamber making rocket fuel ASAP. I still use rocket fuel as my primary power source. It doesn't take much to make a single bio chamber. If you had the resources to make furnaces then you could have easily made an automated rocket fuel setup. You say you have trouble finding burnables, but on Gleba that just doesn't make sense to me since literally everything is burnable.

It really makes sense, but I can't see how to do this in the early game. At least not without sitting around bored for hours waiting for the resources to suddenly start rolling in!

Yes, you can manually harvest fuel, but that is quickly burnt and because there's not enough seeds, the factory shuts down again. Everything rots and it's back to square zero.

I know I dropped to Gleba completely empty handed. I spent probably too much time just gathering resources and manually putting spoilage and wood into boilers. But I had no idea what I was doing so I was learning as well. I just stared at the recipes trying to understand how it all works. It never actually clicked until I set up a belt from the ag towers to bio chambers and started processing and sending seeds back to towers on a belt.

The first thing I would do is setup ag towers, belts to and from bio chambers for processing, bio chambers for rocket fuel for power, and boilers and steam engine for both power and getting rid of spoilage.

If you burn the fruit from ag towers then you will have a seed shortage and make more spore pollution.

Eventually you will have too many seeds and will need to use an overflow splitter to burn off the excess.

[Khazul]

Much as I like many mods, these feel more like cheats TBH, but each to their own.

That's such an interesting thing to hear! I'm really curious why adding more resources could be close to cheating. Several people have said that in mid-game Gleba seeds and spoilage are in abundance. Is it cheating to have too many seeds later on in the game? Why would it be cheating to have a reliable way to get seeds at the start?

I'm genuinely curious, because I think the balancing and progression in Factorio is fascinating, and I certainly wouldn't want to make an overpowered mod.

All I can say is that without my the mod, Gleba is absolutely boring. I had to wait and wait and wait and I got nowhere. With the mod, I have enough resources to start making a crappy base and then slowly improve it. Later, when I have a better grip on the mechanics, I'm sure the mod won't be useful any more, but that's exactly the point.

Because in the end it aint that hard and there seems to be something you are missing and will forever miss using mods to get around it. But your choice. I took the fact that you are posting here about this as a desire to know the in-game way through it. If not, my mistake.

why on earth do people not take tech with them then complain it is a struggle to get going. Some like that fresh struggle on each planet, some dont. The game lets you decide if you want that or whether you want to take the bits for a large base with you as a quick start.

I did take some tech with me.

To reiterate, there are two perspectives: one is that Gleba is solvable (e.g. bring in equipment from other planets to avoid the inherent problems with Gleba), the other is from a gameplay perspective, and Gleba fails because it dumps too many concepts at once, requires a lot of sitting around and waiting, adds unnecessary time pressure, punishes mistakes, and does not provide an incremental way of learning, improving, and adapting. You have to get the factory right first time (either by somehow knowing external equipment is required), or be reset to zero.

Some things worth thinking about - they may be obvious, but sometimes a reminder helps:
Bio stuff doesnt spoil at source - ie on its tree in farm or in it spawner when it comes to biter eggs. Agri tower can be disabled by circuits to stop them picking when stuff is already in a box or on a belt. Pickers can be disable by circuits for spawners. If you dont want spoilage, let it stay where it stays fresh. Belts can be read in entire belt hold mode (I assume you know this, but just in case) so you can easily know what is on a belt or what is in a box. For logistics requester boxes can be disabled, use active providers to get stuff out of the way ASAP. Again - you probably know all this, but sometimes a reminder can help.

When it comes to heating towers, the temperature can be read via a circuit. Only stick stuff into them when the temp is about to fall below 500C. The heat exchanger generates steam. Stick a tank out for the steam and a circuit to read the level. Only stick fuel in the burner when steam is low. For these two conditions together you will need a decider combinator on temp or steam amount controlling the insert(s) that feed the heater. Then you find the heater doesnt need a lot of fuel.

[Khazul]

Also another tip that really helps: bring a tank. No, seriously. Bring one, and then when you see the first pentapod, shoot it with the main turret (small ones should be insta killed)

I had one roaming my drop area about 4 chunks to the south, where i needed to agri farm. Tank solved it in one shot.

When in doubt, get a bigger gun, no such thing as overkill - just open fire and reload

[Merry76]

I wonder how Gleba would do with a recipe to turn a bunch of fruits into guaranteed seeds and a big pile of spoilage. You're still going to have to deal with the seeds that come from proper processing, but it would simplify the start and make building up seeds faster.

The biggest downside of Gleba is that the production screen is totally useless when it comes to your Agritowers: It shows only their number, not the amount of "plots" they service (or how many trees you have in the range of your agri towers). It shows you how many trees there are, but then it counts every tree in the wild, which is utterly useless.

Get counting by hand, or wing it i guess. Not nice.

Seeds stop being a problem as soon as you mash all fruits with biochambers. I usually have a buffer chest full of seeds that fills the (long) conveyor belt that goes to the farms, and burn the rest.

[Merry76]

Some things worth thinking about - they may be obvious, but sometimes a reminder helps:
Bio stuff doesnt spoil at source - ie on its tree in farm or in it spawner when it comes to biter eggs. Agri tower can be disabled by circuits to stop them picking when stuff is already in a box or on a belt. Pickers can be disable by circuits for spawners. If you dont want spoilage, let it stay where it stays fresh. Belts can be read in entire belt hold mode (I assume you know this, but just in case) so you can easily know what is on a belt or what is in a box. For logistics requester boxes can be disabled, use active providers to get stuff out of the way ASAP. Again - you probably know all this, but sometimes a reminder can help.

When it comes to heating towers, the temperature can be read via a circuit. Only stick stuff into them when the temp is about to fall below 500C. The heat exchanger generates steam. Stick a tank out for the steam and a circuit to read the level. Only stick fuel in the burner when steam is low. For these two conditions together you will need a decider combinator on temp or steam amount controlling the insert(s) that feed the heater. Then you find the heater doesnt need a lot of fuel.

This is especially important when you consider that the agritower instantly replants after harvesting. The chance that it switches off between harvest and planting is extremely slim, and you loose at most 1 planting spot. What works best is that you dermine your fruit consumption rate, and choose a spot where you want your fruits backed up to (lets say 2 chunks from your agribase) and readout if there are fruits in that spot. If there are none, let the agritower harvest - fruits will arrive with delay (we assume you use at least blue belts - so with 5.625 tiles per second) and switch the tower off again. You should now have some sort of "pulse" that feeds your factory with fresh produce.

I usually drop a stick of rocket fuel into the heating tower when it is under 520 degrees. It will quickly convert this into 250 MJ of heat and switch off again. No waste, just happy steam turbine powered action. I produce so much Rocket fuel that I can export it to Vulcanus and Nauvis for logistic reasons

[aka13]

Woops my bad I missed that you were harvesting trees. I think that is kind of a trap, harvesting the trees for power directly. Because it would cause you to be attacked much more than making rocket fuel from jelly and only using the trees for processing.

Yeah, you gotta start really small, and not build a mall really, until you have the rocket fuel going. But since not having a mall at all is kinda tiresome, IMO it is easier to ship in a nuclear plant until you reach that point.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]

Look how small a successful self sustaining gleba base can be

12-01-2024, 16-45-08.png

This is very far from small. Players that still have trouble understanding how Gleba works shouldn't be using more than one machine for recipe (goes for any Factorio chain of recipes, but even more so for Gleba).

----

[...]
1. Don't burn spoilage in the heating tower, but use it all in the spoilage -> nutrient recipe (assemmbler only) This way your base does not rely on nutrients from bioflux, which can cause a base failure if there is not enough nutrients to keep the bioflux nutrient cycle going. And use productivity modules.

Using this for backup (with a stockpile) : great !
Using this for most of your spoilage : I guess it might be simpler, but this is very ineffective...

2. Build enough Agri towers in the beginning. I only had like 2-3 Agri towers going on for both march and jelly, which was not enough. As you can't make soil yet, you have the rely on the natural spawned soil, as that's limited too, due to terrain generation, it's easy to not farm enough jelly and mash.

the solution is to go in baby steps on gleba untill you understand all the relationships of product economies.

Yes, but once you're using more than one agri-tower for each
(heck, in my experience, you might have to be careful not to let it plant too many trees...),
you're not in the baby steps mode any more
(and will probably have to deal much more with the complication that are the wild pentapods).

----

[...]
1. Add 'spoilage' patches to the Gleba surface (maybe a forest died and rotted). These can be mined manually, or by mining machines.

A bunch of Gleba's 'trees' already give spoilage when harvested.

Here's yet another crappy Gleba experience:

- I find there's some bugs encroaching on my border.
- I go and kill them.
- Neat, I have some pentapod eggs. I should make some biochambers while I have the chance.
- Bummer, I don't have enough iron plates to make any.
- My base doesn't have enough power to run the furnaces.
- Okay, so I should go and gather some burnables.
- This takes some time while, because I have to go far away to manually mine trees, because I harvested the closest ones, because I KEEP running out of power, because my tree farm doesn't work, because I don't have enough seeds.
- I run out of time, so the pentapod eggs spoil, so the effort was completely wasted.

Oh well.

Sure, and you won't make the same mistake twice. Just like you won't make the mistake twice of making a huge unprotected mining outpost on Nauvis.

----

[...]
I would recommend that maybe it's better to not use the heating tower early on, its a bit of a trap. Yes, it has 250% efficiency, but it actually also consumes the input even if you draw no power. At low power draw, the heating tower is incredible inefficient! So early on, with a small base/lower power drawn, normal boilers and steam engines will be more efficient, and prevents you from burning everything into oblivion. (Unless you are really trying to get rid of something ofcourse.)
[...]

As you say in that last phrase, if you use boilers instead of heating towers, this is also a potential trap : you might end up with spoilage backing up all the way into your production.
Besides, depending how you set up your base, you might end up consuming more power than spoilage gives you, so this won't be an issue.

----

[...]
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to explain the solution. It's a shame it appears there is only one
[...]

[...]
When I have to resort to asking for help (which is not what I want to do in a puzzle game, I want to solve the puzzle myself), I get contradictory advice (which is it: biochambers are required, or assembly machines? The furnace is great, or it's not?)
[...]

Do you not realize how these two are related ?
(If there is one rule, it's «do not let fruits spoil», but even with this you get some leeway if you end up with ~+50% (or more) productivity.)

The game doesn't provide enough primary resources to be able to experiment.

I think you've already said that before, so I guess we'll just have to disagree about that.

[...] Gleba fails because it dumps too many concepts at once, requires a lot of sitting around and waiting, adds unnecessary time pressure, punishes mistakes, and does not provide an incremental way of learning, improving, and adapting. You have to get the factory right first time (either by somehow knowing external equipment is required), or be reset to zero.

You could say all of these about Nauvis too, and in fact new players have said these about pre-SA Factorio.
(Though the «too many new concepts at once» issue has drastically improved now (0.17 stable +) that new players don't have to figure out at the same time fluids and multiple recipe outputs.)
And, yes, Gleba goes harder on these, but it's also not a starting planet.
(See also : some other players complaining that Vulcanus / Fulgora are too easy.)

[...]

requires a lot of sitting around and waiting

This one I'll also agree with. If you just harvest a few trees and try to build up from those, it'll take quite a while to build up more. And the start of Gleba is a "You need seeds to make seeds" situation, since seeds are used to plant the trees *and* expand the soil that you can grow them in.

I ended up harvesting every tree I could find in the nearby area to speed up the process.
[...]

And you've just shown how you actually don't have to, by giving another option.
There's a lot of things to do in Factorio, and even more so when exploring a brand new planet for the first time.
(And in the worst case scenario you could still spend some waiting time remotely improving Nauvis and/or whatever other planet you've already unlocked.)

[angramania]

All I can say is that without my the mod, Gleba is absolutely boring. I had to wait and wait and wait and I got nowhere.

General rule of Factorio - if you had to wait then you do something very very wrong. There are always tasks to do.

from a gameplay perspective, and Gleba fails because it dumps too many concepts at once,

From gameplay perspective Gleba is best of three planets because it dumps too many concepts at once. I do not understand why people bother buying expansion if they do NOT want to discover new ways.

requires a lot of sitting around and waiting, adds unnecessary time pressure, punishes mistakes, and does not provide an incremental way of learning, improving, and adapting. You have to get the factory right first time (either by somehow knowing external equipment is required), or be reset to zero.

It requires a lot of running from start, not waiting. It provides incremental way of learning but can do nothing if player stubbornly reject it. Reseting to zero is not problem at all - just stop waiting and harvest more trees, Gleba have unlimited number of them. Actually Nauvis is more punishing - additional resource patches are guarded by enemies. If you have wasted starting iron and do not have enough equipment/ammunition to clear nests - you are stuck. On Gleba you have unlimited iron/copper/plastic from starting territory. Both Gleba and Vulcanus require killing enemies to get specific resource but it is much easier to kill several pentapods than one demolisher.

[MisterDoctor]

From gameplay perspective Gleba is best of three planets because it dumps too many concepts at once. (emphasis added)

/thumbsup

[fredthedeadhead]

I tried the suggestion of processing fruits into mash/seeds inefficiently and then the result to power the more efficient biochamber. I was impressed at first, and I thought this was a sustainable solution, and it was over producing seeds. Unfortunately after several hours and 60k generated products, it seems to have died. So, my impression is there's no way of reliably producing seeds.

[Nemoricus]

There's two ways to improve this:

1. If you put productivity modules in the assembler, it would be able to sustain seeds on its own.

2. If it was laid out so that the assembler only processed fruits if the biochamber wasn't running, the biochamber's innate productivity bonus would have supported sustainable seed production.

That productivity bonus is *critical* for ensuring that the seed supply doesn't decrease over time. It can come from modules or the biochamber's innate bonus but it needs to be there.