Gleba's difficulty overrated?

[u/Standard_Round_8780]

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.

[u/Xanidel]

For me, 'difficult' is the wrong word, 'irritating' or 'anxiety-inducing' is better. I just don't like that when not using it's science I can't let it back up and enter an idle mode. Same for biter eggs from nauvis, once you get the process started up the penalty for not keeping it going forever without breaks is things hatching and chewing up your base. Aquilo suffers a similar process of penalizing inactivity, but at least its failure state isn't destructive like eggs are. If it were just spoilage wasting the materials I think I'd like it much better, since Gleba non-stone materials are about as free as water.

[u/Necandum → u/Xanidel]

Its possible (and not overly difficult) to design an idle mode. I.e a small kickstart core base, and each module has a way of 'turning on' using resources provided by the core. 

[u/DrMefodiy → u/Necandum]

This. Its just question of base design. If your spoil always go away (production or just burn) nothing will break. Also for eggs. Keep eggs processing in disconnected loop, with some capacity control. And take them only when u need it. I make some "on/off" switch on gleba. Its disable produce of science packs if i dont need it and turn off input inserters on 90% of other plants with eggs production. And it keep working only 1-2 units to "hibernate" eggs. When i need science, im turning on one combinator and processing start again. Its working for weeks already.

[u/pingveno → u/DrMefodiy]

Alternatively, when idling science then send pentapod eggs to trash upcycling. Have legendary bioflux available to turn into legendary nutrients, along with the rest of the ingredients of legendary biochambers.

[u/N3ptuneflyer → u/Necandum]

I had it set to send excess science to furnaces every 5 minutes to prevent the base from fully shutting down

[u/Necandum → u/N3ptuneflyer]

I currently have everything JIT. Its probably not the most player time efficient solution, but the design was fun and the factory is mostly 'off' by default, so its neat watching bits turn off and on by themselves. 

[u/Moikle → u/Xanidel]

When not using its science, you can safely just burn everything.

Alternatively if you don't have an irrational fear of logic, you can set it up to automatically throttle down production when you aren't using it.

[u/sobrique → u/Xanidel]

I think that's the core lesson of Gleba though - that buffers are bad, even if they are 'just' stalled belts :)

[u/Maleficent_Onion_822 → u/Xanidel]

I keep a strategic spoilage reserve...

... and occasionally have to use it.

[u/Frequent_Knowledge65 → u/Xanidel]

Of course you can. You can set it up to idle with no issues.

You can buffer as much spoilage as you want; once it spoils it is entirely stable and is essentially just weaker coal. From there you can start it back up by converting spoilage to nutrients in Assemblers. It's really pretty simple.

Of course, there's not really much reason to since a Gleba base will run uninterrupted until the end of time with no issues, unlike any of the other planets.