Building on gleba

[println]

I want to preface this with the fact that I am by no means expert or would consider myself even remotely good at factorio. However I feel somewhat strongly about my experience with Gleba and maybe this feedback will be valuable somehow.

Gleba to me generally has a wonderful puzzle and I am all for spoilage mechanics, but the snag I'm noticing is that it supports only a very specific building style - building it in advance or building it fast. I'm a slow player and I generally either build as I go or have long sits looking at a problem this way and that with scope of the problem being limited. First thing I tried is having something like a bus with heating towers disposing of leftovers at the end, but any problem in between would cause fruit to be stopped processing and seeds to dry up. I feel like some dedicated process that allows to increase seed chance at a worse mash/nutrient output would benefit people like me (if there are any that is) and give more room for experimentation while being secure in knowledge that I have a seed stockpile and don't have to run around exploring to find fruits.

It might be a very niche problem or maybe a problem only for a slow newbie, but it was a problem enough for me to log in and write this, so maybe it's a worthwhile topic for discussion?

[ichVII]

The solution I took for that issue is to first build a tiny setup that always processes fruits and mostly burns the non-seed result, so you are left with a slowly piling up of seeds and can just grab some seeds from a chest whenever you need them for whatever reason, be it a mistake or a new build.

I did the same with the pentapod eggs. Have a small slow auto production that voids excess but keeps some fresh eggs around at all times. You can avoid this with a recycler, but you may not have that on Gleba, so this can be helpful.

[mmmPI]

For the seed surplus, it's important to not let the fruit spoil and always process them beforehand, you can have the mash or the jelly spoil, that's ok, you have extracted the seed first. This is to avoid waste, but to build up an actual surplus, you either need productivity module in the chemplant or use the biochambers which have a productivity bonus without needing module.

You can also limit the agricultural tower with circuit, to prevent harvesting of new fruits if you don't need them, or "limit" it. If you have "trees" they don't spoil, and you can harvest them whenever you need them.

[DSL-Exodus]

Something I would also like to add is to not overproduce anything on gleba. Under produce. The last machine on the belt should not be running, it's there to eat the overflow. That way, you minimize spoilage.

Another problem I had is, unless im exporting the research, gleba would seize up, making me have to go there to restart it. Instead I built a ship just for gleba, running research to nauvis even when I dont need it, any that spoils I just end up burning there. Lastly I would suggest making the system a loop, so that there's never a backlog at the end causing problems. Thats the only tangible advice I can think of, my gleba is pretty spaghetti/sushi otherwise, but it works

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I thought I'd include a picture for some context. Ironically my base is seized but when its running it doesn't stop unless research backs up

[Hurkyl]

I feel like some dedicated process that allows to increase seed chance at a worse mash/nutrient output would benefit people like me (if there are any that is) and give more room for experimentation while being secure in knowledge that I have a seed stockpile and don't have to run around exploring to find fruits.

You can actually make a dedicated process yourself: a small factory whose sole purpose is to generate surplus seeds. So it just harvests trees, processes the yumako/jellynut, replants seeds, then sends the mash/jelly off to be disposed of. A heating tower is simplest, but it could be a production facility of some sort if you can ensure that the disposal belt will never back up. (e.g. use a priority splitter so that if the belt would back up it goes to a heating tower solution)

Here is a very minimal demonstration of the idea: (Note that the tower-to-tower inserter is a blacklist on yumako, not whitelist; it's hard to see in the screenshot)

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In reality you'd want to maximize productivity bonuses so that you generate surplus faster, and probably want to use more assemblers and planting spots, since the process is somewhat slow.

This is designed to be a separate, isolated factory, to make it that much harder to accidentally introduce a failstate into the design.

But if you can do it reliably enough for your interests, you really should use biochambers because the +50% intrinsic productivity bonus is a big deal. You can even do it on the yumako side while keeping it as an independent factory since you can use mash-to-nutrients to fuel the biochambers.

You might even try using this as a design principle for your main factory: to try and engineer the fruit/jellynut processing to run reliably no matter what is happening further along in the factory.

[worph]

The best Gleba tip, as someone whose favorite planet it is: Only three items on belts, the rest is inserted directly or transported by bots:
Belt items: Bioflux, Spoilage, Nutrients (in descending order). Try to directly insert nutrients as much as possible.
Always direct insert anything to do with fruits, their lifetime is so short, they should never touch a belt.
Bioflux and spoilage are about the only things that can safely and easily be put on belts.
Raw fruits especially can be handeled best by bots, endproducts too, but belts are fine too if you prefer.

[Hurkyl]

Raw fruits especially can be handeled best by bots,

I actually prefer trains, but with very different paradigm than the 'usual' usage: small loading/unloading buffers, small inventories, more trains making frequent stops that leave shortly after arrival.

Maybe with a lot of bot speed research I might change my opinion, but before that I feel like properly configured trains do the best at reducing buffer sizes and transit times.

[worph]

I always wonder how, after just landing on gleba, people manage to build proper tracks to their trees.
Everytime I bootstrapped Gleba it was the easiest and most straight forward solution to just put down 5-10 roboports in each direction and 8 chests.
In my experience there was never enough space or available ressources to justify a complex (elevated!) rail infrastructure.

Plus, once you put these ~30 buildings down and have them powered by rocket fuel there is really no incentive to build trains for a long time.
And it feels so much cheaper to build the robo infrastructure locally or transport it via space, compared to train stuff.