Factorio Forums

For me, I appreciate how Gleba completely turns the game on it's head, requiring a completely different approach to factory design.
To get fruit from the farm to my base, currently I'm using a daisy-chain of Longhanded inserters, since that is the fastest way to move from point A to B, at the cost of energy and low throughput. This maximizes the amount of freshness left on the fruit when it reaches the base.
Different components have different shelf-lives, so factory design needs to account for this by keeping resources in more stable forms for long-distance shipping. For example, the two fruits have shelf-lives of 1 hour, but their immediate products, jelly and mash, each have very low shelflives. Bioflux, on the other hand, has the longest shelf-life on Gleba at 2 hours, therefore it is most efficient in terms of spoilage to keep resources as bioflux. Nutrients have a VERY low shelf life, so a nutrient-distribution system to your biochambers needs to be fast, with very low buffer capacity. In practice, this is inserterchains. Generally, inserter chains are much better than belts on Gleba for most resources. I use inserter chains for repopulating cycling-recipies (eggs and iron/copper bacteria).
Also on Gleba, the circuit network is more than just your friend, it's completely essential. They made a lot of changes to it which make it a lot more usable, especially on Gleba.

Sir_Zorg wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 7:20 pm Gleba completely turns the game on it's head, requiring a completely different approach to factory design

Yeah, to me it feels like one of those instant death stealth levels in otherwise fast paced action games, completely negating most of what I love about this game. Thankfully there are mods this (in my opinion) catastrophically bad design decision.

Seeing all the problems people have had with Gleba was kind of validating. I think the direction the devs want to take with Gleba is fascinating but it is definitely still rough. There are already mods out there trying to play with different balance changes that I will check out once I'm done with my pure vanilla run of SA (I've got my eye on Gleba Reborn and Biochemistry). I think Gleba and the mechanics it introduces in particular might actually have the most potential for mod-based content.

Personally , the issues that i have with Gleba is there is nothing that Gelba does better than the other planets. Most people will only visit, make science and do the bare minimum and leave. Which is understandable but a lot of lost potential. There are numerous ideas that I had been contemplating for the 70 hours that Ive spent on Gleba, namely making it the planet of efficiency. You should be rewarded for making bases as small as possible.


Advanced Bacteria Culturing= Bacteria+ large amount of Nutrients (Bioflux as fuel)
Reasoning- Bacteria is frustrating. A lot of items require bioflux, but nothing uses it as a fuel besides biter spawners. leading to the only option being nutrient loops and the BF->Nutrient recipe. Makes it less painful to start on Gleba as well because the cost to getting high ore yields is heavily subsidized from space. Lower the yield as result from +3 to +2. Makes good use of the stack inserter technology researched on Gleba.

Reinforced Walls= Wall + CF + Steel + Gleba Pressure.
-Another use for higher tier carbon fibre, maybe add the option so that the local wildlife get obstructed slightly while crossing over it.

Quality seeds grow faster- 5% or something gain in growth speed per level- Spore spread late game means large swathes of areas dedictaed to defence. Gleba should be about efficiency rather than just slap another factory down and call it good. Faster growth means more fruit per unit/sq

Bionutrients- Bioflux+Nutrients+Gleba Pressure- Late game nutrient delivery through piping to biochambers- a full pipe sorts both nutrient and spoilage input and has spoilage percentage which reduces the crafting speed of the biochambers until at 80/20 spoilage ratio, the biochambers stop working. leading onto a Nutrient filtration from which uses ammonia+bioflux to remove contamination. This spoils when not being used (Like 25% spoilage and 75% spoilage combining to make 50% spoilage) and takes the spoilage from the biochamber making a solid filtering system very important. Makes using biochambers on other planers easier and more involved logistically.

Adding the tip that nutrients recycle into spoilage at 2.5x. This isnt obvious and a very handy tip for making carbon.

option to use biolabs on gleba using bioflux instead of Electricity( The key being using on nauvis is more efficient somehow)

Option for single module slot in Ag Towers to encourage efficiency module use by increasing spore count. Late game when the efficiency doesnt matter and defences are solid can you upgrade to Prod-

Upgrade the amount of soil for overgrowth- Use 10x artificial instead of 2 to get 5 overgrowth leaving the recipe otherwise intact. Landfill is very important for Gleba and getting it is an absolute slog. Just a small area can require a few thousand overgrowth to expand. Alternatively, change the biter eggs for the unprocessed fruit.

Otherwise its just ramblings of a man whos hardstuck on trying to make Gleba work and has had to restart his Glegabase for the hundredth time because the belts have stacked 100k spoilage into whats meant to be a small throughput belt

The steam achievements speak 1000 words about gleba.

Visit Vulcanus: 5.0%
Research with metallargics: 4.4%

People who landed on vulcanus and didn't finish it this run or in the future = 1 - 4.4/5.0 = 12%

Visit Fulgora: 4.3%
Research with electromagnetics: 3.8%

People who landed on fulgora and didn't finish it this run or in the future = 1 - 3.8/4.3 = 12%

Visit Gleba: 3.8%
Research with agriculture: 2.9%

People who landed on gleba and didn't finish it this run or in the future = 1 -2.9/3.8 = 28%

Visit Aquilo: 1.8%
Research with Cryogenics: 1.5%

People who landed on aquilo and didn't finish it this run or in the future = 1 -1.5/1.8 = 17%

That gets even more pronounced when you consider fulgora/vulcanus have tangible benefits even without research whereas gleba basically doesn't.

I actually found the factory building of gleba fun and interesting (well, minus the first hour of "how the hell do I even plant crap" type stuff), but you have to admit, one planet solely responsible for stopping over a quarter of players from finishing the game says there's just objectively problems with it. All that effort put into making aquilo interesting kinda doesn't pay off if a lot of people don't even get to visit it.

fencingsquirrel wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 6:31 pm but you have to admit, one planet solely responsible for stopping over a quarter of players from finishing the game says there's just objectively problems with it.

There is lie, big lie and statistic in service of liers. Let me lie in your way. We can see that only 5% of players have visited vulcanus, so 95% have not made it through Nauvis. Nauvis is clearly the worst planet and should be redesigned.

Well, I'd say nauvis comes out to

Research steam engine: 22.9%
Research with space: 7.4%

People who started the DLC but didn't "complete" Nauvis 1-7.4/22.9 = 68%

That said, this is true of the start of any game/dlc, people immediately lose interest for various reasons. A more accurate approach would be to look at the spread of research.

Steam: 22.9%
red: 22.1%
Green: 18.9%
Military: 13.9%
Chemical: 13.8%
Production: 9.7%
Utility 8.9%
Space: 7.4%

blah blah blah

So as they get more invested in the game, they're less likely to drop off.

Inn any case, this is all meaningless. My comparisons in the previous post are 100% valid because this represents the people invested in the game enough to visit a planet, and the proportion of those completing said planet. 28% simply gave up on gleba after having played the game up to that point, more than double the other two starter planets.

Edit: Actually bringing this up does kind of bring up an important point. That actually IS a lot of people saying to hell with the DLC. While people making it to production, etc, mostly kept playing, I think a lot of people didn't like that you had to play 10+ hours on average to even reach the DLC content and stopped playing almost immediately, the game could really use a quickstart DLC option that starts you out with space science/logistics unlocked, and a heap of items and bots and en volution factor of about 0.7 or something. But that's a bit of a derail to the topic. And with these things it's hard to say. Maybe some of those are people who bought the game and DLC as a bundle, which would give more sensible dropoffs.

fencingsquirrel wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 7:16 pm Inn any case, this is all meaningless. My comparisons in the previous post are 100% valid because this represents the people invested in the game enough to visit a planet, and the proportion of those completing said planet. 28% simply gave up on gleba, this is not true of the other planets, even aquilo lmao.

No, no, no. You have said "planet solely responsible for stopping over a quarter of players" not "planet solely responsible for stopping over a quarter of 3.8% players who visited Gleba or 1% of all players". Huge difference.
But I can continue doing it your way. Gleba is hardest of three but 2.9% still have finished it and only 1.8% have visited Aquilo. So what have stopped 48% of brave Gleba's conquerors? Problems on Vulcanus and Fulgora after Gleba? Difficulties of space platform design? Or maybe Gleba is so good that there is nothing more interesting after it?

That actually IS a lot of people saying to hell with the DLC.

Or just say to hell with vanilla and added their favorite QoL mods? Especially when more and more mods were ported to 2.0.

That's a fair point about the mods, I forgot this game disables achievements with mods for some reason. Although I would expect most people would have just immediately downloaded their mods again.

Your comparison actually doesn't work, however.

For one thing, I only care about showing how gleba straight up, inarguably, causes more than double the dropoff of the other two planets. Vulcanus and fulgora are unexpectedly virtually identical (~12% each).

For another, visiting aquilo requires conquering all three other planets and researching it, a far larger task and would result in more dropoff than completing just one planet.

Anyways, I'm not really interested in convincing you personally, I think I've made the point to the developers and also just wanted to make a funny point.

fencingsquirrel wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 6:31 pm The steam achievements speak 1000 words about gleba.

This is a great point, the numbers tell more than whoever is screaming the loudest! I am curious to see what/if the dev's will change for Gleba in future patches given how controversial the planet is.

Interesting stats, sure would not have expected that big of a difference.
I wonder if/what 2.1 will do with gleba. I still have not had the urge to touch SA after reaching Aquilo, uncontrollable gleba-nauvis logistics are still the biggest factor right after general annoyance of Gleba.

fencingsquirrel wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 6:31 pm The steam achievements speak 1000 words about gleba.

Of course, Steam players are a self-selecting population. I would argue that Steam players are less invested in Factorio than non-Steam players, There's no need to install Steam unless you're playing a whole lot of games, and I doubt a lot of people can invest hundreds of hours into Factorio while playing others games, as well. And I doubt that many people are mega-basing with a Steam version of the game, because of the performance hit of both Steam itself, and having to play with Windows.

So, it would make sense to me that people who play Factorio via Steam are less invested in the game than other players, and would be more likely to stop playing one things got a little bit complicated.

There is no reason not to install steam, especially seeing how you can buy the game directly from the devs, and still enjoy steams comfort.
It's an opinion thing, not an indicator of anything. Of course, it would be way nicer to have stats across all platforms, but that's not gonna happen

Also: https://www.factorio.com/galaxy
A LOT of people have already finished the game. A lot.

Well, when you consider space age sold over a million copies and you pan around a bit on that map, that actually means almost nobody beat this game proportionally o.o. Which isn't necessarily bad if a sandbox game has a lot of content.

aka13 wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 9:16 pm There is no reason not to install steam, especially seeing how you can buy the game directly from the devs, and still enjoy steams comfort.
It's an opinion thing, not an indicator of anything. Of course, it would be way nicer to have stats across all platforms, but that's not gonna happen

It depends on your preferences. I like having a Recent Documents menu that works and a UI that doesn't get degraded by random changes every 3 months, so I'm running an OS that Steam has dropped support for.

fencingsquirrel wrote: Sat Jan 25, 2025 11:04 pm Well, when you consider space age sold over a million copies and you pan around a bit on that map, that actually means almost nobody beat this game proportionally o.o. Which isn't necessarily bad if a sandbox game has a lot of content.

Some of that may be time related. It took me something like 150 hours in game to reach the end, that was probably close to three months of calendar time during which I was spending a pretty good sized chunk of my (admittedly limited) free time playing. We're only around the leading edge now of people with around my level of time commitment even having had enough time to reach the end of the game.