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Before upgrading to 2.1, Gleba would get the occasional stomper raid that my turrets could easily deal with. Since upgrading, I seem to get a horde of giant stompers coming and destroying my base roughly every minute. I know 2.1 added some new growth mechanics for enemies, and I appreciate wanting to make them a bit more challenging, but this is rapidly ceasing to be fun. I have taken out many stomper nests near my base, and more keep appearing, and they keep coming and destroying things before I have time to rebuild. I am having to completely neglect all of the other planets and focus full-time on personally defending Gleba from my spidertron. Nauvis now has no function other than to produce rockets to ship to Gleba, and I can't even think about expanding my defenses because they keep coming and stomping my production lines and power infrastructure before I can even get new defenses up.

I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

In 2.0, there was a semi-common bug that would cause pentapods to just stop expanding. They had available chunks to expand to, but they just didn't. This gave many people (including myself) that pentapods are bad at expanding or had been pushed back too far to expand. No, it turns out it was just a bug.

Now that 2.1 has fixed it, you need to actually control territory on Gleba like on Nauvis. Which artillery does a good job of. Toss in some stationary Spidertrons to absorb the attacks from those artillery barrages, and you should be good.

Just make sure to station defenses well past your spore cloud.

I ha

Alfonse215 wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 3:15 am I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

I have certainly considered and would like to do that. But you will note that both rocket and railgun turrets require carbon fiber, which requires yumako, which requires a very well-developed supply chain on Gleba. After stompers destroyed my base on Gleba while I was trying to sort out some unrelated issues on Nauvis, I returned to personally oversee the rebuilding of my base, and after the third time a stomper hoarde came, blew past my defenses, and completely demolished my base again even with me there in my spidertron to try and slow them down, the last of which you can see in the attached screenshot, I eventually gave up and evacuated Gleba. I couldn't produce rockets on Gleba because all of my bioflux was going to copper and iron bacteria, and every time that started to get going, the base would get stomped again, so there was nothing left for sulfur. I was importing huge numbers of rockets from Nauvis to the point where Nauvis was doing little else but building rockets (both the ammo and spacegoing variety) to send to Gleba. It still wasn't enough in the end. I have no idea how I am expected to build better defenses on Gleba when the very materials I need to make those defenses are the things the stompers keep destroying.

Supplies:

Tesla Turrets, Artillery, Power(Nuclear Reactors, Fusion Reactors if you got them), Gun Turrets, Missile Turrets, Laser Turrets, Repair packs, Roboports, construction bots; in order of importance.
Bring all of it from outside.
Best to produce ammo and missiles in space. Time to upgrade your ships, if they can't support that.

Target priorities:

• Tesla Turrets: Stompers first, then strafers, fire at will
• Missile Turrets (normal): Strafers first, (then stompers, then rest) -- check for friendly fire
• Missile Turrets (explosive): Strafers ONLY -- wouldn't recommend, friendly fire
• Gun Turrets and Laser Turrets: Wrigglers first, then whatever else you struggle more with (stompers / strafers)
• Artillery, you can manually give it ammo, to limit how many attacks you provoke at the same time.
• Mines can be added as much as possible, just make sure to avoid friendly fire.
• Forget walls.

Preparation:

Do not plant, harvest or process any fruit AT ALL. STOP. Only those things provoke attacks.
Maybe wait for your pollution to dissipate more.
Setup a tiny bridgehead. Just a Cargo Landing Pad and as much of the above mentioned defenses as you can muster.

Offensive:

Make sure to keep the Artillery shells coming and keep the power online. You can even ship in rocket fuel if you cannot safely place reactors where they don't get stomped immediately and produce power by burning the rocket fuel with heating towers.
Use artillery to clear out the closest nests.
Try to only ever get attacked by one nest at a time, so micromanage the artillery (i would just give it ammo manually or on a timer, every 1-2 minutes).

Once you have cleared out most of the nests neraby and survived the ensuing attacks, you should expand your perimeter, so that you have a safe inner area. Tesla turrets really are your friend here, as well as gun turrets and missile turrets.

Expansion:

At this point you really need to start producing mad power, to support your tesla turrets and bot networks.

Only now can you start working with fruit again. And I would recommend: Keep the fruit production as low as possible. Start with one agricultural tower for each fruit. And only harvest when you used up your fruit.
I can usually keep my "pollution" cloud very small in the early game, while still producing enough to grow a base and get some science out.

Good Luck and take screenshots for us!

TV4Fun wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 2:12 pm I ha

Alfonse215 wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 3:15 am I see a lot of nests that are very close to your farms. You're researching railgun stuff, so you're definitely post-Artillery. Have you considered using some on those nests?

I have certainly considered and would like to do that. But you will note that both rocket and railgun turrets require carbon fiber

I didn't quite make that clear. I meant "using some artillery", not railguns or rocket turrets. You can import that directly.

TV4Fun wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 2:12 pm , which requires yumako, which requires a very well-developed supply chain on Gleba.

You can make quite a lot of carbon fiber (and Ag science) off of just 3 Yumako farms with good prodding. You've got way more than that.

It's a bit counter-intuitive, but productivity modules on Gleba do what efficiency modules do on Nauvis. Because spores come from harvesting trees rather than construction, the fewer trees you need to harvest in order to produce X amount of stuff, the less spores you produce. Productivity modules therefore reduce spore generation on Gleba, so long as you are only using the minimum number of farms for your production.

worph wrote: Tue Aug 11, 2026 2:35 pm A lot of good things imo, +1

I think your hearts in the right place. My version isn't much different:

I would focus on low power cost solutions, because the assumption I have (based on a 2.0 to 2.1 game I have) is that you essentially have an ambush condition. The pentapods essentially get the drop on you because you can only cover so much ground so fast. And in 2.0 it was viable to run without turrets. But that meant you had lower power requirements too.

It has to be understood that any fix will take at least ten minutes under those conditions and likely more like a few hours. And imo, the stuff Alfonse suggested looks like the end goal. Just needs a good opening.

So my operations playbook would be to triage immediately by cutting power lines and production to essentials on Gleba. Science going down is acceptable.

I would try and get a shipment of carbon fiber off Gleba onto Nauvis, because carbon fiber->missile turrets-> spidertrons is also an option. But the focus is for triage, stop losing turf in at least one place. And that's going to be the first two hours of my life if pentapods get on top of me.

I would also be looking at any transport going to Aquilo and thinking about whether or not I could convert the explosive to rocket production into land mine production. In comparison to losing a ship or a save, I need a ship going back and forth from Vulcanus anyways, so I'd go so far as to take the missile turrets off an Aquilo transport and use a bulk normal rockets + gun turrets to make firebase (assuming my yumako mash production was truly dead; this is a desperation move). And then put artillery behind that. We are talking about using 6 and 12 packs of gun turrets with post win damage upgrades, to target stompers and wrigglers. And walls of mines like 4-8 deep to kill the initial thrust of a vengence wave or give a box of spidertrons an idea of where to show up.

I'm going to try and get a pattern of 2-4 fire bases like that to cover the most important parts of my base. Which is orbital operations, power generation, and lowest priority an artillery complex. I would gradually shift artificial coal and explosives onto Gleba after I had a secure foot hold because the planet scales better than a space platform imo, and because I run mining ships. If my back were absolutely against the wall I'd be using rocket fuel from space for power even.

So does OP know how to squad up spidertrons and about the new patrol feature? Because a spidertron fires chainlinked rockets. A normal turret doesn't. And my general rule of thumb is that 4-5 spidertrons at once tends to kill everything. This won't be a solo fix to the problem, but showing up with 4 x 5 chain linked rockets is a lot different than showing up with 4x1 rockets. Shift+left click causes them to follow a unit. That can be another spidertron that you run off a remote to be in two places at once or hold the line. This frees you up to run a tank with uranium explosive ammo or a rail rifle. Just remember you collect pentapod eggs in your pockets if you go on foot.

Anyways, that's my opening. Keep in mind during the buildup you can tank steam. And make a version of the Space Exploration umbrella battery, one rocket fuel of steam at a time. But that all comes down to how you can work the surface. The pentapods don't like cliffs, but they will travel over them. So that's a consideration too.

I'm really looking forward to an update on this one.

It stinks and they do like it.
Perhaps be more efficient with "that which that stinks".

Okay, so by popular demand, I landed on Gleba with a whole bunch of artillery. The first thing I noticed was that the arrogant bastards had built a nest right exactly where my main yumako farm had once been. A quick strike from artillery convinced them to withdraw from that area.
I established a core defensive perimeter with artillery and tesla and rail turrets and my few remaining rocket turrets right around my main power production infrastructure. The stompers did not take kindly to this. They made a solid effort at a fight. But eventually they were repelled. My construction robots made a valiant effort to rebuild the factory in spite of the stomper onslaught. And I started using artillery to systematically eliminate the stomper egg rafts, starting with the nearest ones and gradually moving further away. Regular stomper attacks still continued. I continued to reclaim my yumako farm, bit by bit. With the immediate threat out of the way, we began the hard work of rebuilding defenses. More to follow.

I had established only very basic perimeter defenses, and the pentapods had built very close to my base, so the next step was to get them further away with heavy use of artillery strikes. During this time, Aquilo also had a minor issue with a few extra barrels. As I placed more systematic defenses, I in my spidertron and the few popup defense installations were all that stood between the stompers and my nascent base. We were going through rockets and artillery shells very quickly, so I had to make regular very large shipments from Nauvis. I created a blueprint I called the Gleba Wall, a regularly spaced interval of substations and tesla turrets, backed by a solid wall of laser turrets with a back row of accumulators. A problem my defenses had kept running into was that, while on Nauvis, biters and spitters rarely directly attacked power transmission infrastructure, on Gleba, stompers took them out almost immediately, and as soon as one substation was stomped, everything past it would lose power as well. I tried to address this with lots of redundant power poles, but this only temporarily slowed them. The accumulators gave each section of wall its own measure of independence, so it could continue firing long enough to destroy any immediately surrounding enemies, even if its neighbors had already fallen. Later revisions would also add a minefield in front of and around the turrets, which gave a quick boost of damage to anything that approached too closely. Whenever practical, I like to keep the stomper shells around, as a warning to the others. I ended up having to substantially expand Nauvis's production capacity just to be able to make enough rockets to supply all the shipments to Gleba. A problem I ran into in expanding my defenses on Gleba was that I was frequently limited, not my turrets, but by landfill. I had to substantially increase stone production to get enough to fill all the land my wall required. I had to restart my stone train ahead of schedule and open up many more stone patches.

I had to separate out the parts of my power grid specifically associated with generating power (burning spoilage, feeding it into heat towers, all that fun stuff) from the rest of the grid, give it its own accumulator, and only open up the rest of the grid when accumulator charge, steam reserve, and heat pipe temperature all reached a certain point. Otherwise the whole rest of the factory that the construction robots were diligently rebuilding was quickly draining my power generation dry before it could get itself going. To start with, I supplemented with nuclear power flown in from Nauvis.

We gradually built walls around all of the important locations. Eventually, we got a perimeter all the way around our base. It took a lot of work
But Gleba is mine again

Very interesting read and thanks for the update!

But I couldn't ignore some things that struck me as odd, maybe you find some of this helpful.

1. Other planets bonuses: I noticed you are already on Aquilo, but you seem to have a giant base on Nauvis. If it was me, and I had to bring so many ressources to Gleba, I would do it from Vulcanus. Any reason you didn't do this?

1.1 Fusion: Similar logic to using nuclear over fusion. Why not use fusion, if you are on Aquilo anyway?

1.2 Same thing here, you have been to Fulgora and Vulcanus. You should use the Foundry and EM-Plants wherever possible.

2. Wall of laser turrets: That wall of laser turrets is probably doing it's job, but it's way over spec'd once you are just maintaining that perimeter. Gleba is not great with power and those turrets draw a lot that would be much better used by your tesla turrets. You really shouldn't underestimate how useful normal gunturrets are against Wrigglers, and they are cheap to run.

2.1 Target priorities: I think I didn't see any turrets with target priorities. This is one of the single best things on Gleba. Missiles -> Strafers. Tesla -> Stompers. Gunturrets -> Wrigglers. This alone should allow you to use substantially less defenses overall (and less power, and less ressources due to wasted rockets)

3 Gleba factory inefficiencies: Turning spoilage into nutrients should be the absolute exception. I have a single assembling machine on the entire planet that can make a couple of nutrients of production halted for some reason, so I can restart everything else. Using biochambers defeats this purpose because you now need nutrients again.

3.1 Things that spoil quickly on belts. I would always direct insert jelly and yumako mash. From one biochamber to the next. I never put that stuff on belts. A bit of it is carried by bots to make stack inserters, but that's it. It spoils just way too quickly.

4. Artillery: From the screenshots I couldn't figure this out entirely, but I looks like you are sending artillery shells up with rockets. Do not do this. Produce them on the planet. I suggested last time to produce them on the space platform, only if the planet itself is too inhospitable.

Very interesting all in all. Best of luck going forward. I could give you a few more pointers if you are interested.

worph wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2026 11:15 am 1. Other planets bonuses: I noticed you are already on Aquilo, but you seem to have a giant base on Nauvis. If it was me, and I had to bring so many ressources to Gleba, I would do it from Vulcanus. Any reason you didn't do this?

Nauvis is where I have the biggest factory and where I had set up my trade hub. Before I was forced to abandon it, I was using Gleba as a trade hub and my factory there was rivaling Nauvis for size. When I abandoned Gleba, I moved all the trade routes over to go between other planets and Nauvis, and set it up as a hub, gathering materials there and bringing them to Gleba in one go. I guess I could have made the shells on Vulcanus, but Nauvis where I was using them most of the time, and I didn't want to have to refactor other planets too much before retaking Gleba

1.1 Fusion: Similar logic to using nuclear over fusion. Why not use fusion, if you are on Aquilo anyway?

I was still in the process of building my factorio on Aquilo when the Gleba apocalypse happened. I had some fusion, but not a lot, and was facing a severe shortage of carbon fiber and its derivatives, so I was very much having to ration my supplies. I did eventually bring fusion power to Gleba, but I wanted to be careful not to make it overly dependent on supplies from outside. Gleba especially tends to have a lot of unstable equilibria, and once it starts to lose power, it can easily turn into a cascade failure that starves the whole factory, so it is important to have a decent chunk of it powered from locally available materials. Fission was easy enough to import from Nauvis and plug into my existing heat pipe infrastructure, fusion took a bit more setup, and I wanted to make sure I had some properly secure land area available to it, as any reactors or generators I lost I would not be able to replace.

1.2
grafik.png
Same thing here, you have been to Fulgora and Vulcanus. You should use the Foundry and EM-Plants wherever possible.

I honestly felt dumb the first time someone suggested using a foundry somewhere other than Vulcanus, as it had not occurred to me before then that I could use each planet's specialized building on other planets, and I had built my whole factory on Gleba without considering this. Refactoring my Gleba metal pipeline to use foundries rather than furnaces is now high on my to-do list, but my current factory is rather densely packed, so it will take a little rearranging.

2. Wall of laser turrets: That wall of laser turrets is probably doing it's job, but it's way over spec'd once you are just maintaining that perimeter. Gleba is not great with power and those turrets draw a lot that would be much better used by your tesla turrets. You really shouldn't underestimate how useful normal gunturrets are against Wrigglers, and they are cheap to run.

I used to have a wall of tesla turrets, but tesla turrets use almost as much power when idle as laser turrets do when shooting. Laser turrets' idle drain is quite small by comparison. The biggest threat to my base has been from stompers, which gun turrets seemed to do little to stop, and which tesla turrets alone aren't quite enough for.

2.1 Target priorities: I think I didn't see any turrets with target priorities. This is one of the single best things on Gleba. Missiles -> Strafers. Tesla -> Stompers. Gunturrets -> Wrigglers. This alone should allow you to use substantially less defenses overall (and less power, and less ressources due to wasted rockets)

That is a good suggestion I will give a try. My previous generation of defenses proved inadequate against giant hordes of stompers, and the current version seems sufficient to have stopped everything so far.

3 Gleba factory inefficiencies:
grafik.png
Turning spoilage into nutrients should be the absolute exception. I have a single assembling machine on the entire planet that can make a couple of nutrients of production halted for some reason, so I can restart everything else. Using biochambers defeats this purpose because you now need nutrients again.

I agree. This is the far end of my assembly line that takes all of the spoilage generated by my factor and turns it into carbon to turn into power. I need nutrients to do that, and because of the 50% productivity bonus, it is still more efficient to use biochambers to do this than assemblers. This line has a single assembler at the start turning spoilage into nutrients to power the rest of the biochambers. This makes it a self-bootstrapping system. I have had to restart my factory on Gleba numerous times due to resource starvation, and the current version is designed to be robust against that. Once my factory was secured and the construction robots had rebuilt enough of it, it required very little intervention from me to get going, and a large part of that was because all of the spoilage left over from the previous shutdown was quickly routed through here and turned into power. Most of the rest of my factory is fed by nutrients from bioflux, with a little bit of nutrients coming from yumako to get the bioflux line started. The spoilage line is a last resort.

3.1
grafik.png
Things that spoil quickly on belts. I would always direct insert jelly and yumako mash. From one biochamber to the next. I never put that stuff on belts. A bit of it is carried by bots to make stack inserters, but that's it. It spoils just way too quickly.

That's a nice way to do things. I use belts. I use turbo belts almost exclusively for spoilable things and have all the spoilable belts arranged in circuits—everything on the main bus has both a supply line and a return line. Keeping everything moving minimizes the potential for spoilage and what does spoil is quickly filtered out onto its own belts. When the factory is working well, spoilage is minimal and most of the power is generated from rocket fuel and jelly. When the factory is not working well, the spoilage is turned into extra power.

4. Artillery:
grafik.png
grafik.png
From the screenshots I couldn't figure this out entirely, but I looks like you are sending artillery shells up with rockets. Do not do this. Produce them on the planet. I suggested last time to produce them on the space platform, only if the planet itself is too inhospitable.

Very interesting all in all. Best of luck going forward. I could give you a few more pointers if you are interested.

Yes, if I could produce things on the planet, I wouldn't have needed to wage a full scale military campaign to retake it from the pentapods. I did eventually build an orbital factory platform around Gleba, but all of my existing infrastructure is pre-2.1, so I wasn't set up to do inter-platform transfers, which meant I wouldn't have been able to support a factory platform around Gleba without the infrastructure to launch regular rockets from the surface. Now that is what I do.

TV4Fun wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2026 12:49 pm

2.1 Target priorities: I think I didn't see any turrets with target priorities. This is one of the single best things on Gleba. Missiles -> Strafers. Tesla -> Stompers. Gunturrets -> Wrigglers. This alone should allow you to use substantially less defenses overall (and less power, and less ressources due to wasted rockets)

That is a good suggestion I will give a try. My previous generation of defenses proved inadequate against giant hordes of stompers, and the current version seems sufficient to have stopped everything so far.

If there is one thing to take away from this is target priorities. That ties directly into my other point:

TV4Fun wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2026 12:49 pm

2. Wall of laser turrets: That wall of laser turrets is probably doing it's job, but it's way over spec'd once you are just maintaining that perimeter. Gleba is not great with power and those turrets draw a lot that would be much better used by your tesla turrets. You really shouldn't underestimate how useful normal gunturrets are against Wrigglers, and they are cheap to run.

I used to have a wall of tesla turrets, but tesla turrets use almost as much power when idle as laser turrets do when shooting. Laser turrets' idle drain is quite small by comparison. The biggest threat to my base has been from stompers, which gun turrets seemed to do little to stop, and which tesla turrets alone aren't quite enough for.

Tesla turrets are the most important thing against pentapods. If you setup target priotities on those, the teslaturrets will hit them and they will be stunned. Almost perpetually. And stompers are the biggest thread on gleba. You don't even need that many. Just a slight overlap of tesla turrets around your farm.

Do that and set target priorities to [Stomper3, Stomper2, Stomper1] and allow everything else. If you put some gun, missile and laser turrets you will melt anything the artillery can bring to you. Do target priorities, my friend. (Same thing goes for missiles on Strafers)

TV4Fun wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2026 12:49 pm

3.1
grafik.png
Things that spoil quickly on belts. I would always direct insert jelly and yumako mash. From one biochamber to the next. I never put that stuff on belts. A bit of it is carried by bots to make stack inserters, but that's it. It spoils just way too quickly.

That's a nice way to do things. I use belts. I use turbo belts almost exclusively for spoilable things and have all the spoilable belts arranged in circuits—everything on the main bus has both a supply line and a return line. Keeping everything moving minimizes the potential for spoilage and what does spoil is quickly filtered out onto its own belts. When the factory is working well, spoilage is minimal and most of the power is generated from rocket fuel and jelly. When the factory is not working well, the spoilage is turned into extra power.

I also use belts almost exclusively on Gleba. I think you misunderstood. The main point here is that even if everything is already on belts, putting jelly and yumako mash on a belt is bad.
Yumako Mash spoils after 3 minutes. (180 seconds)
Jelly after 4 minutes. (240 seconds)

Every bit of freshness lost carries over into EVERYTHING else (bioflux -> science / nutrients -> eggs -> science).

If the yumako mash is on a belt for 18 seconds, you now AT LEAST lost 10% freshness on your science. Probably much more. I consistently produce >95% freshness science. Usually around 96% - 97%. This means that a lot more of it makes it to nauvis and i need much less of it. Same wit all the intermediaries.

Fruit, Bioflux and everything else is perfectly fine on belts. It's the best way even. But just taking mash/jelly out of the machine, onto a belt and back into another machine is inherently inefficient and I always judge peoples gleba setups by this one thing. Are they inserting mash/jelly directly. Because once you do, it is clear that you understood/graduated this planet, imho. You should really give it a try. Everything else can/should still be belted.

worph wrote: Tue Sep 08, 2026 1:36 pm You don't even need that many. Just a slight overlap of tesla turrets around your farm.

That is exactly the defensive setup I had before I was completely curbstomped by a giant horde of stompers as seen in my first screenshot. In order to ensure my restored Gleba base remained secure, I decided I needed a stronger perimeter than that. Now other than the occasional "your turrets are engaged with the enemy" notification, pentapods on Gleba are a non-threat.

I won't mention target priorities for the 5th time now. Well... whatever. Good luck.

Love the screenshots and the play-by-play for the battle.
Your "/evolution" is probably already near maxed out, so efficiency arguments at this point are kinda moot, but even at a very late stage improving efficiency can help you out I think:

• Laser turrets suck on Gleba, because pentapods have very high "laser damage" resistance. It is not an even trade between tesla-turret and laser-turret (you are looking at the electricity required to power them, but not at the damages they do to those enemies). Tesla turrets emit "electric damage" type that pentapods have no resistances to. Any other turret type will be better (more efficient) than laser turrets. Wiki
• Feeding jelly to the heating towers is spore-inefficient to produce electricity. 1GJ of heat energy from jelly will require ~50 spores (from jellynut tree harvesting by the agriculture towers). If instead you produced rocket fuel from the biologicals: same 1GJ of heat energy (from rocket fuel) will require ~9 spores (from fruit harvesting) -- and that's before adding any other productivity bonuses (with productivity modules) on the rocket-fuel production recipe chain.

Emit less spores to accomplish the same "work", base becomes more efficient, pentapods will evolve slower and they'll reduce in frequency/size of attacks.

I would be optimizing my electric generation around rocket fuel for the heating towers, and deleting all the laser turrets (replace with tesla-turrets and rocket-turrets, etc).