Factorio Forums

I am having difficulty understanding how to deal with this planet.
At the start I didnt even know what to do since I couldn't find iron or copper ores anywhere.

Over time I got a little bit the hang of things and thought soon I will be able to thrive, once I understand how to build a factory there, but apperently this toke more time and effort than I first assumed.

First attempt was just trail and error with the recipes. Just having a 3 biochambers lie around and me using the engineer as a runner/human-logistic-bot to move stuff around them.
Second attempt I tried to do a bus from left to right like on Navous but then realizing how spoilage works made me rethink this approach.
Third attempt was trying loops, each product was suppose to have a loop but this got messy.
Now I was trying to use SR-latches to time arrival of products with nutrient preparation, but apparently I couldnt understand the circuit logic.

I struggle to find out how to approach this. I tend to the idea of the SR-latches but I think the common/used solution is something else I am missing.

any high-level strategy or help for fool-safe approach?

Get really drunk and try it again. Your factory won’t work any better, but it is more fun than doing it sober.

Most Nauvis belt-based factories are based upon the principle of “fill a belt lane with ingredients or products”. This is a bad idea on Gleba; it just creates more Spoilage that has to be burnt.

Only harvest Fruits when you are low on Intermediates - they don’t start spoiling until picked by the Agricultural Tower. Use the fastest belts (or bots! they can move really fast) to move the fruit to the factory. Just-In-Time manufacturing of Products using direct-insertion between machines seems to give the best results, especially with short-lived items like Pentapod Eggs and Mash. You can use belts for stuff like Bioflox and Nutrients, but make sure they all lead to a (Circuit-based) dump mechanism to send Spoilage towards a burner consumer - Heating Towers will continue to burn fuel even at 1000C. Don’t worry about a mismatch in Production ratios for intermediates - what matters is that the crafting never stops - just dump the extra onto a Burn belt.

You can try with actual robots instead of doing the human logistic bot in the first approach you mention, they can run to multiple places faster than just one engineer

You need to make sure the ( logistic) system always has some minumum amount of certain items, like bacteria, nutrients or eggs, the easiest way is to make machines that alwayss produce.

And then you need to also make sure you don't have the excess production turn into spoilage and clog the system, the "easiest" way, is probably to burn every leftover in heat tower, those can still burn anything even if they are already at the maximum temperature.

Using blue chest and "trash unrequested" is a very powerful feature to request nutrient and prevent the chest from clogging with spoilage.

You can also limit many machines according to quantities in the logistic network, like agricultural towers, to try and limit the (necessary) overproduction for the machines that are always running to be throttled when their full production isn't required.

You can import most material from another planet if you want to make it easy for yourself, including nuclear or solar power, for "fool-proof" approach.

You probably would have a better time for fiddling with the science if you have a modular armor with shield and personnal laser defense.

eugenekay wrote: Thu Mar 12, 2026 11:59 pm Get really drunk and try it again. Your factory won’t work any better, but it is more fun than doing it sober.

Most Nauvis belt-based factories are based upon the principle of “fill a belt lane with ingredients or products”. This is a bad idea on Gleba; it just creates more Spoilage that has to be burnt.

Only harvest Fruits when you are low on Intermediates - they don’t start spoiling until picked by the Agricultural Tower. Use the fastest belts (or bots! they can move really fast) to move the fruit to the factory. Just-In-Time manufacturing of Products using direct-insertion between machines seems to give the best results, especially with short-lived items like Pentapod Eggs and Mash. You can use belts for stuff like Bioflox and Nutrients, but make sure they all lead to a (Circuit-based) dump mechanism to send Spoilage towards a burner consumer - Heating Towers will continue to burn fuel even at 1000C. Don’t worry about a mismatch in Production ratios for intermediates - what matters is that the crafting never stops - just dump the extra onto a Burn belt.

Thanks, sounds like solid tips. I was currently using only yellow belts (even on Navous) since I thought they are cheaper and much easier to make, but now I realized they actually just require a bit more gears. I also liked the just-in-time manufacturing idea. I incorperated it already a bit but I'll check what production chains I can set up with it too, previously I was moving jelly/mash onto belts before loading it into bioflux production (see pic related below) but now you made me realize I could just load them directly into the biochamber.

I haven't touched eggs yet, I got scared enough from the "you attract attention" achievement. my evolution factor on Navous got really high (>0.8 now) and me destroying their nests willy-nilly was what brought me to that spot and I was cution from repeating the same mistake on Gleba so I tried to not interact with the wildlife beside the initial eggs for the biochambers. I guess I will have to destroy another nest soon when I start going for science but I am still trying to figure the basic production chains first.

Also, I'm happy to hear circuits are recommended since I was really doubting if doing circuit-based designs are the way to go.

mmmPI wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2026 12:17 am You can try with actual robots instead of doing the human logistic bot in the first approach you mention, they can run to multiple places faster than just one engineer

You need to make sure the ( logistic) system always has some minumum amount of certain items, like bacteria, nutrients or eggs, the easiest way is to make machines that alwayss produce.

And then you need to also make sure you don't have the excess production turn into spoilage and clog the system, the "easiest" way, is probably to burn every leftover in heat tower, those can still burn anything even if they are already at the maximum temperature.

Using blue chest and "trash unrequested" is a very powerful feature to request nutrient and prevent the chest from clogging with spoilage.

You can also limit many machines according to quantities in the logistic network, like agricultural towers, to try and limit the (necessary) overproduction for the machines that are always running to be throttled when their full production isn't required.

You can import most material from another planet if you want to make it easy for yourself, including nuclear or solar power, for "fool-proof" approach.

You probably would have a better time for fiddling with the science if you have a modular armor with shield and personnal laser defense.

1. My main struggle right now is to figure how to set up the nutrients system, as I understand a good way to make it is with biochamber from bioflux, right?
thing is you need nutrients in order to make nutrients from bioflux, and I struggle to understand where to get these nutrients from. its not that I dont realize few options, but its hard for me to understand which path to go in - every time I decide, I start making a design and mid way regret and change to another design, and I work on that, and then realize it also has flaws, so I go for another one... and so on. its kinda like choice paralysis so Im just looking for a reliable/easy-to-set-up way. I am attempting this build now -
The white arrows (marked '1' & '2') are where the fruits come from. I create the nutrients by first creating initial starter amount from spoilage (since its the start of the chain and I dont have nutrients there yet) -> feeding into biochamber with bioflux to create a larger amount -> sending it to the rest of the factory, creating flux and sending some of it back.

I thought about skimming a bit and putting it on hold like I do with the bioflux but it means the nutrients for the next cycle will have to wait for the bioflux of the next cycle to arrive. This takes time and nutrients have short spoilage time. and then I need to take into account what happens if the nutrients spoil by the time the bioflux arrives... my head hurts thinking about it xd

2. I cant import resources from Navous rn since my ship got destroyed very short time after planetfall.

I attempt to not relay on bots too much, for few reasons (e.g want to figure out how to do stuff from scratch).

Edit - eugenkay I implemented your idea with the 'just-in-time manufucturing' and tried it out and now its much more smooth and less spaggeti-like. That was a great tip (pic related)

I had success with a bus based base, but the bus only moves fruits, bioflux, spoilage and seeds (going backwards).
Along the bus every station makes an intermediate product and also produce the mash, jelly and nutrients it needs.
Everything that reaches the end of the bus is burned or thrown into recyclers, you must not clog the bus.
Agri tower always overproduce to keep the bus well filled.
Bots just help here and there, few combinators are needed.
You can scale up pretty big this way.

Pay attention to convert fruits to jelly/mash before destroying them to recover the seeds

Making nutrients: I start with a stockpile of spoilage. Once the chest is full, spoil can go to be burned in a heating tower (or eventually redirected to make carbon), but that chest gets filled and stays filled as my emergency restart kit. This stock feeds an assembler making spoil into nutrients. This is the worst recipe, so it only gets used if there is no other way to make nutrients. I keep it simple, a wire reading (hold all) the nutrient belt, and enabling the assembler when nutrients drop below a threshold like 100 nutrients. You may also want to limit it by checking that there is fruit on the belts so these nutrients don't spoil waiting for fruit.
There is a recipe to make nutrients from mash. Some people like it, I skip straight to nutrients from bioflux. I direct insert bioflux to make nutrients, which go on a belt to be used first to feed the nutrients biochamber, then the bioflux biochamber, then the jelly and mash biochambers for the bioflux, then whatever else needs nutrients for fuel.
Gleba science takes pentapod eggs, and the pentapod egg recipe takes a lot of nutrients. Rather than trying to use a belt of nutrients, I use a belt of bioflux, with dedicated bioflux to nutrients biochambers feeding the egg biochambers. I find this very convenient as I then have a nice belt of bioflux to pair with the belt of eggs feeding my science biochambers.

You seem to struggle with starting and stabilizing a base, and in general find a direction.

Some things to keep in mind:

• don't let fruits spoil. Harvest only what you can use. Don't keep a stock. Always create mash/jelly from fruits to get seeds. You can let the mash/jelly spoil but make sure you process every fruit to not lose the seeds. Use a biochamber for processing, even better with productivity modules, to get a surplus of seeds.
• nutrient production: to start nutrient production, use an assembling machine with the nutrients from spoilage recipe. Use this to feed a biochamber with yumako mash from yumako and another one with the nutrients from yumako mash recipe. Now you have enough nutrients to stop the nutrients from spoilage machine and feed your starting factory with these 2 biochambers. Add a 3rd biochamber with jellynut to jelly. Now you have both mash and jelly and can start producing bioflux, but priority is to stabilize power production and your fruit farms!
• If your platform is destroyed and cannot bring supplies from Nauvis, go to Nauvis with remote view and build another one. You don't need physical presence. Build a new platform remotely, load it with supplies (for example iron, copper and steel plates, as well as landfill, assembling machines, heating tower, pipes, heat exchangers, steam turbines, 1-2 offshore pumps).
• Establish planting seeds with agricultural towers and automatic harvesting of fruits
• burn surplus mash/jelly in heating towers for heat, then produce energy with heat exchangers+steam turbines. The jellynut fruit and its products (in the end: rocket fuel) are for burning and energy production.
• produce artificial soil to fertilize your farms and be able to seed more plants.
• use biochambers wherever a reicipe allows it. The integrated 50% productivity is essential with keeping resource demand low. Additionally, add productivity modules into the biochambers. To make up for lost speed due to the productivity modules, add beacons with speed modules.
• Once you have energy and stable farming, you can start bioflux production and use the nutrients from bioflux recipe. A bioflux production line is the 1st of the 4 big components of a proper Gleba base.
• Once you have bioflux and nutrients from bioflux, you can craft and cultivate bacteria to get copper and iron ore. This is the 2nd component of a proper Gleba base.
• The 3rd component of a proper Gleba base is agricultural science pack production. It requires bioflux to craft nutrients to cultivate pentapod eggs, and it requires bioflux and pentapod eggs to craft science packs.
• The 4th component of a full Gleba base is production of all the other recipes required for universal production: plastic, rocket fuel, lubricant, low density structures, carbon, carbon fiber.