I would appreciate some help on... Gleba

[MeduSalem]

When putting my agri science to use back on Nauvis, I wonder whether I should prioritize the more spoiled ones first, or the fresher ones. Since inserters have an option for that I figure it matters somehow?

Fresh packs give more science. But while they're being processed the other packs may spoil completely while in storage.

And if you use up the more spoiled ones first, the fresh packs become spoiled too.

If they are far from spoiling yet...

Like lets say if you have a pack that is 15 minutes from spoiing and another one that is 20 minutes from spoiling and you would only have 1 lab and you would have to make a decision which one to process first and which one to process 2nd.

Then it does not matter which order you process them in because as you noticed... both spoil at the same rate while waiting for the other to finish. So the order in which they are done is exchangeable because no matter in which order you'd process them in they would have gone through the same amount of total spoilage once you processed through them both.


In an "ideal" world, the optimal solution to the issue would be... have as many labs as you actually have science packs to process. Then all can be done in parallel and none have to wait and spoil while waiting for another. But obviously that is not what you can do practically and there will be a trade-off somewhere with some unavoidable loss in science packs from packs becoming less fresh while sitting on a belt/chest.

My guess is that it doesn't make a difference for the science you get out of it, if the science value is linear with freshness. But if you take the fresh ones first, and the spoiled ones spoil in storage, at least you get more spoilage items out of this process.

That is actually an interesting observation.

I would say if you are starved for science packs (aka more labs than you have packs to process) then it would be more efficient to process even the almost rotten ones to science. And actually make those a priority so get a least a tiny fraction of science out of it instead of... well.. nothing. ^^

But if you are starved for labs to process all packs in a decent time then it might actually be viable to filter the most rotten ones out to get some spoilage from them instead (if you want that) because as you noticed, you will lose the freshness on the packs anyway even if you wouldn't.

I am sure someone will put more thought into this and come up with some arguable viable "cut-off" values for freshness where it might be worth filtering items out that are below.

[Ranec1]

To me it comes down to two concepts: Pull demand and small runs.

Pulling demand focusing on always having more demand than supply. If you over produce you will always have spoilage. This is different from the common pull method on Nauvis where you always oversupply as empty belts lead to idle machines. I have so many inserters that stop upstream when I do not need something further down the line. As starting the process to become stuck on the last step may waste all those inputs.

As stated in other posts you have to leverage items with longer spoilage, like raw fruit and bioflux, and avoid long runs with things like nutrients, jelly or mash. An hours quite a long time for most things.

Random related tip, you do not need many agriculture towers for a long time. I have three of each type and rarely dip into the second one. The better recipes give so much output you do not need a huge number.

[Daid]

I've just managed to "beat" the initial hurdle of Gleba yesterday and now sending out science. It took 11 hours... but some of that was spend just remote managing other planets and setting up a supply ship.

I shipped in 2000 red belts, 200 underground belts, 200 blue inserters, 100 assemblers, 50 construction bots, some solar panels and 100 electric furnaces. Guess who forgot to ship power poles, it was me! Also didn't bring miners, which was a mistake. Shipped in big miners later.

Stone

Start with stone mining ASAP. You want landfill, tons of it. Fill that swamp. Fill it good. Half of my base is build on swampy area to keep it close together. Without the landfill it would have been a huge mess to fit things. I also shipped in cliff explosives after a while, but those are less important then the landfill.

Just drop some solar panels with some miners directly into a factory to produce landfill. It's inefficient and slow, but you will need as much of this as you can.

BURN!

Now, after a while, I discovered the main thing how to beat Gleba. BURN. BURN EVERYTHING. Spoilage? Off to the burners. Initial wood you gathered, burn it for your initial power. Extra eggs? You guessed it, you burn them. BURN BABY BURN! If you dislike Gleba, think about that you can just burn it. Most stuff is actually burnable on Gleba.

Overproduce nutrients and just burn it as it spoils. It does not matter. You never want to be short of this stuff, as it's the lifeblood of your factory, so you better over produce and burn then running short.

Don't even think about the waste of power you have, don't try to generate electricity from it, it does not matter. Stop thinking about efficiently using everything. You have a dedicated power setup for power (likely with rocket fuel powered burner+steam turbines)

Eggs

After I have I managed a steady flow of nutrients (burning them if they spoil) I setup a single bioreactor to continuously produce eggs, and setup an inserter to burn off any above 5 in the chest. This continuously refreshes the freshness level of these eggs, never dropping below 14 minutes. If my flow of nutrients drops for any reason, I have 15 minutes to deal with it, and there are a few turrets standing by in case this goes really wrong. With only 5 eggs, it should be easy to kill them off before any damage is done.

This chest with 5 eggs are my "seed" eggs. My science production is producing it's own eggs and burning off the excess if they produce excess, and kill off all eggs if the flow of bioflux stops for some reason (by disabling the inserters that put eggs back in). After the bioflux is restored, I can just request a seed egg to restart production. This is done with a disabled requester chest checking the contents of all bioreactors (if eggs == 0, enable requester chest)

Enemies

I have not had much trouble with the natives yet. Except that the very first attack was a small stomper, which my personal laser defence took care of. Everything after that has been tiny ones. I'm not sure how you would deal with a stomper if you just landed with nothing...

[J-H]

Yeah, I found about two trees for each so far. They're really far apart, and since I was using bots to mass-deconstruct because I couldn't find anything, I'm not even sure what they look like.

[studlyed]

My suggestion for Gleba, and this worked very well for me.
Power is primarily solar/accumulators.
Recycle all spoilage into nutrients and your carbon fiber setup.
Bio flux also turned into nutrients to fill the missing required nutrients. Put a limiter on the inserter for bioflux -> nutrients to limit the amount of nutrients in the logistics. I keep about 1k in the logistics at any given time.
Use bots to transport nutrients. Every building that needs nutrients gets it from the logistics. Don't belt it, it expires too fast.
Keep the amount of requested nutrients per building to a minimum, most of my requesters is one stack.
Have inserters filter out spoilage from every building/chest/end of belt onto a belt dedicated for spoilage, for my base it's about 1 1/2 filled blue belts on my factory, that is prioritized into carbon fiber setup and then into the assemblers that convert it back into nutrients.
I have a burner setup that only burns excess eggs and wood (at the beginning), which I have set to only request when the logistics have > 20 eggs (very rare). I have 5 egg makers, and 3 research makers. I use 3 full jellynut and yumako planters that are belted. FYI, green belts can make it so you have maximum areas for plants.

Seems pretty good so far, no backups after about 100 hours of running. I have 500 logistics bots (only 200 are usually used at max). I put down 450 construction. For defense I use rocket and gun turrets, no laser, rockets shoot further.

[NineNine]

For defense I use rocket and gun turrets, no laser, rockets shoot further.

It sounds like you haven't experienced medium stompers yet...

[oneiwily]

I know this is probably old but .. Gleba is mainly waste management .. meaning everything can spoil at any time and you need to work in mine.

here are some design tips.
1. use circular belts around biochamber "factory" to feed it with nutrient.
2. efficiency module are incredible on biochamber because it reduces the consumption on nutrient by up to 80%
3. try to create "mini" factory that produce 1 thing with x imports..
4. bots .. especially active provider chest are important to dispose spoilage.
5. circular belts can use splitter to eject waste into active provider chest.

remmber bio chamber has 50% productivity .. so you need to get rid of access seeds as well

[Jay_Raynor]

Some things I noticed to make Gleba work with belts:

1) Plan backwards from your target products that use organic inputs. There's not too many you need directly in relation to biochamber-specific:

• Flux
  Rocket Fuel
  Plastic
  Carbon Fiber
  Lubricant
  Metals cultivation
  Pentapod egg cultivation
  Biochambers
  Agriculture Science

2) You want your power plant running on rocket fuel as a baseline and spoilage excess when available. Carbon fiber takes a ton of spoilage to make which can lure you into a trap of not having any power fuel if you rely on spoilage as a power source.

3) Recyclers from Fulgora are your friends. They can happily dispose of excess spoilage and power if your heating tower's aren't doing the job. They also make 2.5 spoilage for every nutrient and can even kick out pentapod eggs recycling biochambers if you don't want to setup a turret-guarded production site at the moment.

4) Direct insert jelly or mash where it's needed and your life will be easier. The only product that needs both fruits directly is flux. All others combine flux with one of the two fruit products.

5) A belt-based system for biochambers often needs a minimum of four supporting belts: split input (fast/bulk), nutrient input (long), product output (fast/bulk), spoilage (long). You can add seeds to the spoilage output inserter/belt and use a filtered splitter to manage them.

6) Don't transport nutrients long-distance (belt, bot, or train). Transport spoilage and flux, use a Spoilage>Nutrient ASM to feed a Flux>Nutrient biochamber that feeds the immediate machines nearby.

[Ranec1]

I also constantly add a few things to the "read contents" of the bioflux chambers.

1. Do not insert more bioflux unless it closer to empty. Some recipes only need a tad of nutrients and it will over fill and waste most of them by default.

2. Request nutrients when empty. This solves the major bootstrapping problem. I usually have one machine hooked up to a roboport reading requests. The only requsts for nutrients are bootstrapping, so not frequent. You can then covert a bit from whatever you have available, e.g. spoilage, bioflux, etc. I usually do these with a non-biochamber as the productivity bonus doesn't matter and avoids the bootstrap cycle.

[Nidan]

4) Direct insert jelly or mash where it's needed and your life will be easier. The only product that needs both fruits directly is flux. All others combine flux with one of the two fruit products.

Bioflux is also the only product where the freshness of the fruits matters. Except for bacteria and bioflux, none of the products spoil. (I'm not sure whether the freshness impacts bacteria generation, but the very next thing you should be doing with those bacteria is to use them in their cultivation recipes, which resets the freshness.)

But even with a little bit of belting, I get ~95% bioflux with a belt-only Gleba base.

[Jay_Raynor]

4) Direct insert jelly or mash where it's needed and your life will be easier. The only product that needs both fruits directly is flux. All others combine flux with one of the two fruit products.

Bioflux is also the only product where the freshness of the fruits matters. Except for bacteria and bioflux, none of the products spoil. (I'm not sure whether the freshness impacts bacteria generation, but the very next thing you should be doing with those bacteria is to use them in their cultivation recipes, which resets the freshness.)

But even with a little bit of belting, I get ~95% bioflux with a belt-only Gleba base.

Yup. Long distance belting, bots, or even trains for fruit, spoilage, and flux. Short distance belting for nutrients and fermenting bacteria. Direct insertion for jelly, mash, and seed/continuation bacteria.

[Jay_Raynor]

4) Direct insert jelly or mash where it's needed and your life will be easier. The only product that needs both fruits directly is flux. All others combine flux with one of the two fruit products.

Bioflux is also the only product where the freshness of the fruits matters. Except for bacteria and bioflux, none of the products spoil. (I'm not sure whether the freshness impacts bacteria generation, but the very next thing you should be doing with those bacteria is to use them in their cultivation recipes, which resets the freshness.)

But even with a little bit of belting, I get ~95% bioflux with a belt-only Gleba base.

Yup. Long distance belting, bots, or even trains for fruit, spoilage, and flux. Short distance belting for nutrients and fermenting bacteria. Direct insertion for jelly, mash, and seed/continuation bacteria.

[BeBoxer]

(which just happens naturally when you still build something or there is not enough demand yet)

My super simple technique for this case is to have a circuit disable the agri towers when I'm working. I have a combinator wired up to them and the towers only activate when I have the combinator put out a 'P' signal. That lets me basically pause the harvesting while I work on rebuilding things. I get some spoilage for a while but it's manageable. Then once I think I have things built up the way I want I turn everything back on. I haven't figured out a way to keep eggs going though so that's one downside. I need to go find some fresh ones when I turn it back on.

[R060]

First I thought the heating tower is the universal solution. But It just doesn't do the job. Once it reaches 1000°C it just stops working and sometimes does not accept any more input. Actually it even got damaged for some reason because of it.

That's impossible. Heating tower consumes fuel even if it is reached 1000 °C, even if you don't draw any heat from it. Either create a new post to file a bug and upload save or really check again what is you are doing wrong.

If your issue is just that 16 MW consumption of the heating tower is not enough (which is "16MW / 250kJ = 64 spoilage per second"), which I highly doubt, or you're not loading it fast enough even with green inserters, just build another one. It will most likely pay for itself in terms of power. And don't use the "spoilage to nutrients" recipe anywhere else except as a backup for "yumako mash" and "yumako mash to nutrients" in biochambers (the first one because otherwise you will loose seeds, and the second one just to get free stuff out of thin air, you're anyway can just burn all of it for power later).