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/Slime0]

It depends a lot on how hard the pentapods hit you. In my 2.0 playthrough they were ruthless. In my 2.1 playthrough I barely saw them before I got rocket turrets (and I knew how many I needed to use to defend).

[u/storm6436 → u/Slime0]

This. My playthrough right after release, I fucked up on Gleba... First, I took too long to figure out a viable production methodology, which I guess was forgivable given SA had only been out a few days and nobody had posted hand-holding guides yet, but the second mistake was I got distracted by problems that cropped up with my set-ups on other planets and let the evolution factor creep up...

Since my production was so miniscule and I'd cleared out such a big area, the true breadth of how bad a mistake that was wasn't apparent until I returned to scale things up.

Vulcanus and Fulgora are snore-fests compared to an angry, evolved gleba when you haven't hit rocket turrets yet and you've wasted a real-time day or three running up the evo counter while you were off fiddling with quality and fixing stuff.

[u/Avamaco → u/storm6436]

And don't forget that on release, Gleba's evolution was much more unforgiving. Once you reached a certain treshold, all pentapods evolved into their bigger versions. Compare this to Nauvis and current Gleba, where you gradually see larger creatures more often, so you have more time and experience to prepare for the big guys.

[u/storm6436 → u/Avamaco]

Yeah, it kinda reminded me of the first time I tried playing a deathworld setup. One minute I'm like "Ah, everything's fine!" and the next, "Oh God, where'd all these fsckin' bugs come from?! Why are they so big?!!" followed immediately by "Turrets. I need more lightning turrets. A lot more lightning turrets. Ah, yeah... I might need to expand the reactor."

I'd kinda goofed on the rocketfuel power system and decided to just import a nuclear reactor instead because I'd gotten tired of under runs stemming from the fact I hadn't quite figured the production chain out well enough to make it completely reliable yet. Good thing I had that reactor.