Factorio Forums

(I know that this amounts to a complete rework of Gleba and I'm sorry)

TL;DR

"Bioclay", a spoilable Gleban product which the bioreactor can make into any basic recipe with no other ingredients.

What ?

Conceptually, Bioclay is a mass of special bacteria and fungi with a rich suspension of copper, iron, silicates, sulfur and organic matter, which can be induced to form itself into structures made up of those elements. (Once formed, the bioclay sheds excess material and dies, so the final product is a normal and non-spoilable.)

In game, you make Bioclay by combining a Gleban-only product - call this SCOBY - with the requisite other ingredients in some form. Once created, the biochamber can use Bioclay as a single-ingredient recipe to craft anything which could be made of that set of components (so almost all Nauvis recipes, but nothing which uses uranium, titanium, etc). It also can not be used to craft other organic Gleban things, and using it to craft research packs or explosives are a maybe.

This makes Bioclay a *massively* simplified way to craft most of the core essentials - assemblers, power poles, inserters, etc, can all be made in the biochamber from Bioclay. This insane simplicity and versatility is balanced by a few huge drawbacks:

• Spoilage - SCOBY could only be made on Gleba, and both it and Bioclay would spoil. Anything using Bioclay would thus be on an umbilical cord to Gleba
• Efficiency - Bioclay recipes require enough Bioclay to have the equivalent of enough of each of their raw materials. (e.g., it might take 1 iron and 1 copper plate to make 1 unit of bioclay; crafting something which required 100 copper plates and 1 iron plates would cost 100 bioclay, thus wasting 99 units of iron vs. if you'd done it the old fashioned way).
• No stacking production bonuses - by skipping all the intermediate stages, Bioclay recipes cannot benefit from long production chain productivity module bonuses, making them still more inefficient

This would come with a rework to how Gleban industry works and is unlocked:

• On first visiting Gleba, the player would mine Hardened Bioclay, which could be easily re-constituted to Bioclay for immediate use. Deposits of hardened bioclay would be very small and rare, and scale poorly with distance, making this only a temporary measure.
• As technology and industry unlocks on Gleba, the player can work backwards thru the production chain that leads to Bioclay - initially being able to synthesize it from less limited resources, and finally being able to make it in industrial and/or renewable quantities.
• Other recipes would combine SCOBY with other forms of raw material to make Bioclay, making it economical to export only the lightweight SCOBY and add the bulky ingredients later, with stuff harvested in space/on other planets.

Why ?

I feel like Spoilage is the coolest challenge in the game, but it needs some equivalently cool benefit to make it worthwhile - and not just "Once you 'beat' spoilage you get a non-spoilable benefit", but something which you may want to integrate thru your factory.

At the same time, it feels like there's a constraint on "Just add more powerful bonuses" - with the new production options from Fulgora and Vulcanus + quality bonuses, factories are pushing limits where just piling on another faster, more powerful and efficient process wouldn't be impactful (or might break the game.)

Bioclay does not push that constraint, because it's *less* efficient, not more - but simpler. The versatility of Bioclay may make it very useful for some specific applications, but without pushing the "biggest numbers possible" limits. A player probably wouldn't want to recreate their entire production line out of bioclay, but it might be worth keeping a spidertron loaded with bioclay able to 3D-print up a blueprint to order, or to feed a little bioclay everywhere to make odds and ends, or to provide defensive walls with bioclay and a circuit setup to auto-replace destroyed buildings.

The best use of bioclay, however, would be to speed up the initial phase on a new planet - making Gleba much more attractive as a first world, because then you could use Bioclay for future planets. Being able to ship SCOBY (possibly making bioclay in space with asteroids, possibly on planet with normal resources but simplified processes) would greatly speed up getting a new factory started, without having to know in advance what you need your space platforms to send.