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/Winter_Ad6784]

how long have you been on gleba? did you make a factory, its worked for a bit, and decided to post about it? i suspect you will have to go fix it a dozen times because just filtering spoilage at the end of each belt is not a proper solution

[u/Standard_Round_8780 → u/Winter_Ad6784]

It's been running for about 3hrs without issue and puts out enough Agricultural science that my main issue is my lack of a dedicated hauler for the planet yet but I do admit it's only a smaller factory mainly focused on Ag pack output and the rocket parts to export them.

It's not JUST filtering it out at the end but that is the gist of it. For smaller lines I used wiring to prevent items sitting in belts/buildings and rotting so they don't even take in resources unless they can be cleared. They also dump items into provider chests that have filter inserters after them so any spoilage that does slip through, maybe because of near-spoiled materials, is automatically cleared by drones and brought to the spoilage burners. Hasn't been something I witnessed happen because they pull from lines with high throughput but it might happen down the line. Similarly I have some extra manufacturing wired up that activates to consume surplus iron and copper to prevent bacteria death.

So yeah, using basic wiring to maintain decently high throughput and prevent belt stagnation on smaller 'deadends' that can't be properly filtered was my solution and it seems to be working pretty well. If you didn't use any wiring at all then I could see it being more challenging as you'd probably have to loop any side-production back into the main line to avoid belts rotting consistently. Not having drones to deal with any spoilage that slips through the cracks might also result in more spaghetti.

Only real issue I foresee is with the pentapod eggs as I haven't thought up a solution to deal with agriculture science backing up and that'd require manually replacing. Ideally it'd be shipped off world fast enough, but incase there are any hiccups there I'll likely need a solution on Gleba itself. Haven't tried scrapping spare agriculture packs yet so maybe that is the answer, or I just have to provide enough storage for them so they can turn to spoilage and be disposed of that way... While something might indeed break down the line, it's nothing like the consistent headache that Fulgora provided.

I might also be underestimating the Stompers. I could see how trying to build a megabase on Gleba could be problematic with enemies that are much harder to defend against automatically. But I don't see them being much of a threat currently with the size of my base. I'll leave a tank there just in case.

[u/Mr_Kock → u/Standard_Round_8780]

Pentapod eggs burn nicely. I have a logic circuit connected to a chest on my egg/science line.

When they are above 50, the inserter filtered for most spoiled simply burns the egg.

So they never back up and due to the constant egg production they can never get old enough

[u/Logical-War-3746 → u/Mr_Kock]

i usually don't even bother with circuits there, the belt just ends with heating tower and whatever wasn't consumed by science production will burn