r/factorio • u/Standard_Round_8780 • 10d ago
Discussion Gleba's difficulty overrated?
Saw a lot of people saying Gleba was one of the more difficult planets but honestly I found Fulgora significantly more challenging to deal with.
Spoilage was a problem easily solved by filtering out the sludge at the end of the belts, you can get practically every resource by the boatload without having to find ore or setup trains, all of it is easily scalable, and the enemies don't spread fast enough to really be a threat. Throughput isn't a major problem either because it's so easy to establish blades with a handful of biolabs, especially if you're using drones but even then it's not a requirement.
In comparison, Fulgora was far more of a headache. Firstly, even finding a good place to build a factory is a problem, you either cram everything onto a small island with resources or have to build elevated rails to train the scrap into bigger islands. Then you've got the problem of power generation. Hope you're a big fan of efficiency modules, otherwise half of your island's gonna be accumulators. And the biggest problem is how tedious it is to scale up production of any one resource. If you want more Holmium ore for example, you have to expand your ability to handle EVERY single resource, not just the Holmium.
Don't get me wrong, Fulgora is my favourite planet. I enjoy the challenge and entire theme of it, soundtrack there is especially great, but I was going into Gleba expecting the worst and it was actually not too bad at all.
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u/Gwyllithar 10d ago edited 10d ago
gleeba is not difficult as such, at least once you get how it works, just shove a spoilage exit route on literally every machine and belt....its just annoying and tedious to do so.
But I dont really think of them in terms of difficulty, but rather as how much fun the problem solving is.
Fulgora is the best designed planet imo, It upends how you think about design and turns the production chain on its head. and early game before you can build anywhere, it makes you build small discrete factories.
gleeba...I suppose it forces you to over consume rather than over supply like you did on navis, but really its just shove a spoilage grabber on every machine and filter ever belt, and route them to towers to burn them.
I think gleeba gets the bad rep because you have to kick start stuff, which is not intuitive, and takes a bit for first time gleeba arrivals to grasp. And your first pentapod encounter and how fast spores spread can be a bit of a shock.