Factorio Forums

Tertius wrote: Thu Feb 27, 2025 10:08 am My Gleba factory is full of circuit-controlled machinery to automate and keep everything running autonomously - that's the only criticism I have. People without a mental connection to circuits might face a far bigger challenge than someone who has.

My Gleba production lines have circuits in exactly two places. One controls placing pentapod eggs into the biochamber assembler. The others cascade science packs between rocket silos until the overflow reaches a holding area to spoil.

The latter is essentially unnecessary, but I don’t seem to have had any major problems from minimal circuit use.

My Gleba-/spoilage-related circuits:

• implement auto-start with nutrients-from-spoilage after failure (not used so far, but I used them in map editor to kickstart the whole factory)
• allow just 1 pentapod egg per biochamber for science production, so the eggs have maximum freshness
• keep 1 egg alive with nutrients-from-spoilage and burn all others if there is a nutrient shortage for some reason (also just used while testing, never happened since)
• balancing the bioflux production line, so I need less machines and produce less surplus
• burn rogue pentapod eggs (in case they get into logistics chests) and biter eggs before they hatch
• pull excess spoilage and seeds to burn them
• kickstart and restart bacteria production (this kicks in frequently)
• just in time fruit harvesting (almost no buffer to have the freshest fruits possible. Agricultural science packs have 95% freshness when they enter the rocket)
• manage artificial soil production (allow soil production only if there are enough surplus seeds)
• fire the heat towers for power production with rocket fuel in case the other fuels dry up due to high demand and the temperature gets below a threshold

All in all, runs like clockwork. Was much fun to design.

I feel like the core of the issue here is that the Biochamber does not have enough to utility off Gleba.

It has some utility on Nauvis, and Bio-Oil Cracking is neat on Vulcanus and theoretically usable everywhere, but falls off outside of coal liquefaction and there aren't enough uses for biochambers to justify the interplanetary nutrient logistics network biochambers demand.

The grab bag is neat — I've found early spidertrons quite nice for dealing with demolishers on Vulcanus for instance — but biochambers feel like a missed opportunity. Especially for how in-depth they are.