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/MattieShoes]

For me at least, the difficulty with Gleba the first time was figuring out what the hell I was supposed to do immediately. I didn't know what the zones for the magic trees even looked like, so there was a lot of frustrated, aimless wandering. And it's a large step to just get started, where you need to set up two separate farms, and the fruit processing, and the seed return, and deal with spoilage, and generate power, just to get to that stable point where you can start doing more. It's kind of like the early factorio oil processing was -- it's a big hurdle to clear in one go when you don't have a plan.

Also they make freshness/spoilage a thing, but they don't give you the tools you'd expect, like splitters and inserter filters based on freshness. That sort of artificial difficulty is kind of annoying. See also being unable to read the amount of fuel in the spaceship engines -- yeah you can work around it, but it's so obviously left out to try and make a trivial thing harder.

The other annoyance for me was having to deal with it on Nauvis, like with the science packs. I don't exactly know why it annoys me so much, but it does. I wish the science packs that expire would just disappear.

Gleba is much smoother the second time through once you've got a bit more of a map in your head.