From what I've seen, there's a lot of variation hidden in "whole factory". It's hard to know how much this is intrinsic to the planet, versus some subset of players having a habit of taking overly large bites and stubbornly trying to chew through it rather than rethink what they're doing.quineotio wrote: Mon Sep 21, 2026 7:31 amBut with Gleba as it's own planet, you kinda need to design the whole factory at the same time. And you can throw on top of it all the new concepts introduced there, like spoilage and soil and seeds and the ag tower etc.
In this context, what "whole factory" means to me is 4 crafting machines arranged to make bioflux, mostly using direct insertion, and hand-fed by dropping yumako/jellynut into boxes while I'm waiting to smelt enough scavenged iron ore to be able to build the transport lines.
I.e. just enough to get a proof of concept of the crafting chain, and then minimally tacking each new recipe as I worked through them.
The few people I've watched try Gleba blind try to set up much larger and more complex factories while they still have absolutely no idea how any of it works.
And this tracks with people I've watched play other modpacks blind; e.g. I once watched a career Factorioer unlock a new building, and then spend probably fifteen to thirty minutes scrounging up the materials to make a dozen of them to lay out in a line, and only then bothering to start looking at what they could do with it.
Even now that I do know the planet, I still make a similar minimal factory because having a reliable supply of bioflux, nutrients, fuel, and seed breeding is pretty convenient while I try to design the 'real' factory I want to make. But for some reason I get the impression this is rather unusual? I often see a lot of revulsion towards the concept of this sort of helper factory.
