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.