I recently began my first Space Age playthrough, after delaying for a while because I didn't have the time to dedicate to it (and I knew it would take over my life). Since I experienced Gleba now, I wanted to express my feelings about the planet and how much I love it. I think it's so impressive that such a planet exists in this game, with an experience that is so wildly different from vanilla/1.0 Factorio. (For the record, I haven't been to Fulgora yet and I managed to stay pretty spoiler free.)
My first reaction to this planet was frustration and confusion about the spoilage mechanic, I really didn't understand how to make things work correctly and I had to keep trying to start from scratch and failing. Then I realized that in some ways I was prepared for this by dealing with asteroid chunks - both economies interact with feedback loops in a way you don't get much in Factorio before. Once I started focusing on optimizing the feedback loops, things really started to click! The real joy began when I unlocked the power of yumako mash... then I was up to my ears in nutrients! And finally I could make artificial soil! (I wanted that so badly.) From there, everything quickly became so automatic, I mean in terms of my understanding of how to create things on the planet.
For a bit of context, I am a very nature loving person, and as much as I have loved Factorio before, I always secretly longed for a planet such as Gleba. I think you really nailed it with the atmosphere and feeling of the planet. (The soundtrack and not just on Gleba is really exceptional, every time I swap location I am sad to hear the music end.)
Now I can just be sucked into spending all my time on Gleba (even just to stare at it idly), I enjoy too much watching these delicious fruits be turned into to so many different things. I would love if there were more recipes, but already I am very fulfilled. I am really amazed by how different this planet is from everything I have experienced on Nauvis and Vulcanus. It seems like this world should not be possible alongside Vulcanus, they are almost polar opposites I feel, but somehow the team has found a way to make this reality. (I enjoyed Vulcanus so much btw, what a power trip.) I also feel that Gleba asks you to interact with belts in a very new way, it has stretched my creativity in specific ways it hasn't been before with this game. So easily can a belt, or one lane in a belt, turn entirely into spoilage. Circuits didn't prepare me for this! They could sit forever and never rust a bit... Finding solutions (and turning it all to a benefit in the end) has been a lot of fun and has reinvigorated my love for belts (which was already quite healthy!).
Anyway, I just wanted to gush for a bit. Thanks Wube. Gleba is so good.
Gleba!
Re: Gleba!
You should try to eat them if they look good, right ? What could go wrong ?Gemma wrote: Thu Nov 20, 2025 8:25 am I enjoy too much watching these delicious fruits be turned into to so many different things.
Check out my latest mod ! It's noisy !
Re: Gleba!
I enjoy Gleba now, but my initial frustration with it was based on a single fundamental error:
Bots.
After Nauvis -> Fulgora -> Vulcanus, I was using a lot of bots. So I initially started Gleba by sending down a bunch of stuff, and then laying down a bunch of assembly machines with requester and passive provider chests to try to get things moving.
It was a disaster.
Factorio is a deterministic game, but bots don't operate in a deterministic way from the player's perspective; you simply can't predict what request they're going to fulfill next. I was running around hand-stuffing machines while pleading with my bots to keep biochambers fed and move things before they spoiled, while my bots sailed on their merry way moving the first thing that caught their roving eye, regardless of need.
Belts, not bots, are the deterministic way to build a system: Belts are always FIFO (first-in, first-out) in their default state. I had to set the bots aside (other than letting them fulfill my personal requests) and focus on belts to get Gleba moving.
The other aspect is self-priming. It's not enough to start a smoothly functioning system on Gleba. If your system backs up or runs dry and everything spoils, can the system restart itself, or will you have to take a rocket there to fix it?
This is why there are two iron bacteria recipes, for example. The main one is of course iron bacteria cultivation, taking in 1 bacterium and giving you back 4. But what if your iron backs up and all your bacteria spoil to iron ore? Now your production is dead in the water.
So at the beginning of your production line, you have a single assembly machine running the recipe that takes 6 jelly and gives you 1 iron bacteria 10% of the time. That's a terrible ratio, but all you need it for is to produce that single iron bacterium to prime your main line again. Leave this in place and you won't have to fly back and hand-feed iron bacteria to your biochambers ever again.
Kovarex enrichment is basically circular. Recycling to increase quality certainly is. But strictly speaking neither of these is necessary to finish the game, and anyhow neither of these breaks down if it backs up and halts. So there aren't any required self-sustaining time-sensitive recipes on other planets.
This may be why Gleba is so hard for players to grasp. It really is a new way of thinking about what makes a successful automated system.
By the way, for those still having trouble, try this: Go down to Gleba and take nothing with you, other than a contingent of construction bots. Try doing everything on Gleba from first principles. I've done this a couple of times and it makes a huge difference in grasping how Gleba is meant to work.
Bots.
After Nauvis -> Fulgora -> Vulcanus, I was using a lot of bots. So I initially started Gleba by sending down a bunch of stuff, and then laying down a bunch of assembly machines with requester and passive provider chests to try to get things moving.
It was a disaster.
Factorio is a deterministic game, but bots don't operate in a deterministic way from the player's perspective; you simply can't predict what request they're going to fulfill next. I was running around hand-stuffing machines while pleading with my bots to keep biochambers fed and move things before they spoiled, while my bots sailed on their merry way moving the first thing that caught their roving eye, regardless of need.
Belts, not bots, are the deterministic way to build a system: Belts are always FIFO (first-in, first-out) in their default state. I had to set the bots aside (other than letting them fulfill my personal requests) and focus on belts to get Gleba moving.
The other aspect is self-priming. It's not enough to start a smoothly functioning system on Gleba. If your system backs up or runs dry and everything spoils, can the system restart itself, or will you have to take a rocket there to fix it?
This is why there are two iron bacteria recipes, for example. The main one is of course iron bacteria cultivation, taking in 1 bacterium and giving you back 4. But what if your iron backs up and all your bacteria spoil to iron ore? Now your production is dead in the water.
So at the beginning of your production line, you have a single assembly machine running the recipe that takes 6 jelly and gives you 1 iron bacteria 10% of the time. That's a terrible ratio, but all you need it for is to produce that single iron bacterium to prime your main line again. Leave this in place and you won't have to fly back and hand-feed iron bacteria to your biochambers ever again.
Kovarex enrichment is basically circular. Recycling to increase quality certainly is. But strictly speaking neither of these is necessary to finish the game, and anyhow neither of these breaks down if it backs up and halts. So there aren't any required self-sustaining time-sensitive recipes on other planets.
This may be why Gleba is so hard for players to grasp. It really is a new way of thinking about what makes a successful automated system.
By the way, for those still having trouble, try this: Go down to Gleba and take nothing with you, other than a contingent of construction bots. Try doing everything on Gleba from first principles. I've done this a couple of times and it makes a huge difference in grasping how Gleba is meant to work.
Re: Gleba!
Should I merge this thread and the other Gleba thread (viewtopic.php?t=118565)? I feel a discussion "glaba good" and "gleba bad" in the same thread makes sense, especially seeing some posts in the other thread are in the "gleba good" category.
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.
Re: Gleba!
I don't see a benefit to mixing the positivity of this thread with the negativity of that one.
Re: Gleba!
Please don't merge this thread. I never posted in that other thread because of its inherent negativity and toxicity, instead I used the other now forgotten "good" threads about Gleba, because I have only good things to say about Gleba.
For me it was a pleasure to start with Gleba after my 1st planet was Vulcanus, because it includes multiple challenges, or puzzles, to solve all at the same time in the correct order. Genuine puzzles previously not in the game. Vulcanus wasn't bad, it was just a straightforward and easy task.
You have to make proper use of the tools you're given. You cannot just put a belt here, an inserter there, and it works somehow. Bots are included in the tools you're given: they're the best tool to carry unwanted stuff away. In connection with an inserter and active provider chest, they're the invisible hand that can pull that spoilage off that belt or machine. My garbage collection is 100% bot based. I have belt loops of course, but to remove and carry away spoilage, I use bots. To ensure timely delivery you need belts of course. Because of short spoiling time and huge amount of throughput, you should even use direct insertion in some cases, for example nutrient supply for pentapod egg breeding or jelly/yumako mash supply for bioflux production.
Having realized this, I had a rough outline how the science production on Gleba should look like and the rest just falls into place.
The other thing, the thing that comes first, is what you should do after you landed on Gleba for the first time. There is a sequence of things you need to do all in order to bootstrap, and you should spend some time to think about that. You're guided by the automatic tech unlocks, but usually you don't realize this is a guide. I somehow cheated this, because I practiced bootstrapping in /editor mode to see what to do first and what to do next. It also includes crafting and shipping additional stuff from Nauvis that becomes available after you left for Gleba (heating tower). And to avoid creating a too big preliminary factory, it helps if you just ship all the ingredients for biochambers from Nauvis including much landfill (although landfill isn't supposed to be shipped, which can be seen by its small rocket capacity).
Finally, Gleba is the planet where tweaking production with circuits has real benefit. For example initiating production by creating nutrients from spoilage. Its essential to start the whole factory, but you should disable it once the "real" nutrient production is running. But you shouldn't deconstruct that machine to be able to restart any time later if something gets wrong. My Gleba factory has a web of circuit wires to tweak and micromanage production in almost all locations - they're there to keep buffers small (to avoid spoiling too much items) and to help keeping pentapod eggs alive in case of nutrient shortage.
And to control on demand fruit harvesting, I use circuits. Not harvested fruits don't spoil.
My most recent addition is a dynamic switch of bioflux to biter eggs as supply for nutrients because of the higher efficiency of biter eggs. Yes, I'm exporting bioflux to Nauvis and importing biter eggs back from Nauvis to Gleba. You need them anyway for overgrowth soil and for productivity modules. And it switches back to bioflux in case biter eggs are unavailable. This recipe switching back and forth was much fun to make. Ok, you can just increase bioflux production, but in case of low demand you create heaps of spoiling stuff you have to get rid of. Biter eggs are more easy to handle - if they hatch, you just shoot them.
For me it was a pleasure to start with Gleba after my 1st planet was Vulcanus, because it includes multiple challenges, or puzzles, to solve all at the same time in the correct order. Genuine puzzles previously not in the game. Vulcanus wasn't bad, it was just a straightforward and easy task.
You have to make proper use of the tools you're given. You cannot just put a belt here, an inserter there, and it works somehow. Bots are included in the tools you're given: they're the best tool to carry unwanted stuff away. In connection with an inserter and active provider chest, they're the invisible hand that can pull that spoilage off that belt or machine. My garbage collection is 100% bot based. I have belt loops of course, but to remove and carry away spoilage, I use bots. To ensure timely delivery you need belts of course. Because of short spoiling time and huge amount of throughput, you should even use direct insertion in some cases, for example nutrient supply for pentapod egg breeding or jelly/yumako mash supply for bioflux production.
Having realized this, I had a rough outline how the science production on Gleba should look like and the rest just falls into place.
The other thing, the thing that comes first, is what you should do after you landed on Gleba for the first time. There is a sequence of things you need to do all in order to bootstrap, and you should spend some time to think about that. You're guided by the automatic tech unlocks, but usually you don't realize this is a guide. I somehow cheated this, because I practiced bootstrapping in /editor mode to see what to do first and what to do next. It also includes crafting and shipping additional stuff from Nauvis that becomes available after you left for Gleba (heating tower). And to avoid creating a too big preliminary factory, it helps if you just ship all the ingredients for biochambers from Nauvis including much landfill (although landfill isn't supposed to be shipped, which can be seen by its small rocket capacity).
Finally, Gleba is the planet where tweaking production with circuits has real benefit. For example initiating production by creating nutrients from spoilage. Its essential to start the whole factory, but you should disable it once the "real" nutrient production is running. But you shouldn't deconstruct that machine to be able to restart any time later if something gets wrong. My Gleba factory has a web of circuit wires to tweak and micromanage production in almost all locations - they're there to keep buffers small (to avoid spoiling too much items) and to help keeping pentapod eggs alive in case of nutrient shortage.
And to control on demand fruit harvesting, I use circuits. Not harvested fruits don't spoil.
My most recent addition is a dynamic switch of bioflux to biter eggs as supply for nutrients because of the higher efficiency of biter eggs. Yes, I'm exporting bioflux to Nauvis and importing biter eggs back from Nauvis to Gleba. You need them anyway for overgrowth soil and for productivity modules. And it switches back to bioflux in case biter eggs are unavailable. This recipe switching back and forth was much fun to make. Ok, you can just increase bioflux production, but in case of low demand you create heaps of spoiling stuff you have to get rid of. Biter eggs are more easy to handle - if they hatch, you just shoot them.
Re: Gleba!
Gemma I too started out feeling frustrated and confused. For the first time in 8K hours I downloaded a BP to get something going. I spent the next couple of weeks finding and fixing bug after bug in the BP but that is a different story. I was learning how Gleba worked. Next run, I started with nothing and I totally agree Kyralessa nothing teaches you a planet like doing everything the planet's way. On my third run now, and not a single case of needing to cold start, everything is just humming along. I am loving Gleba more and more.
One of my favourite parts of Factorio is how different engineers come up with out of the box solutions, and this one Tertius is genius! I have just been bracing myself to send biter eggs to make overgrowth soil, and now I can't wait. Pure genius!Tertius wrote: Thu Nov 20, 2025 12:33 pm My most recent addition is a dynamic switch of bioflux to biter eggs as supply for nutrients because of the higher efficiency of biter eggs. Yes, I'm exporting bioflux to Nauvis and importing biter eggs back from Nauvis to Gleba. You need them anyway for overgrowth soil and for productivity modules. And it switches back to bioflux in case biter eggs are unavailable. This recipe switching back and forth was much fun to make. Ok, you can just increase bioflux production, but in case of low demand you create heaps of spoiling stuff you have to get rid of. Biter eggs are more easy to handle - if they hatch, you just shoot them.
My own personal Factorio super-power - running out of power.
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Re: Gleba!
The "gleba bad" thread has been going on for over a year. Lets keep this one going longer and put that one to bed!
Re: Gleba!
Something i like with Gleba is how it changes science and make the player need to adapt. You can just let everything spoil when not researching, but you can also turn everything into higher quality material or try to have an on-demand factory, which is much more challenging that on the other planets
Check out my latest mod ! It's noisy !
Re: Gleba!
Up to you, of course! I don't mindKoub wrote: Thu Nov 20, 2025 10:54 am Should I merge this thread and the other Gleba thread (viewtopic.php?t=118565)? I feel a discussion "glaba good" and "gleba bad" in the same thread makes sense, especially seeing some posts in the other thread are in the "gleba good" category.
I didn't feel like posting in a big thread that I wouldn't read and don't know negative it is
(And I don't really visit the forums I only came because I was so happy I had to share it)
Re: Gleba!
Factorio in a nutshell: the game that makes you so happy, you have to share!Gemma wrote: Sat Nov 22, 2025 3:43 am (And I don't really visit the forums I only came because I was so happy I had to share it)
My own personal Factorio super-power - running out of power.