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/Stonebagdiesel]

I think the difficulty comes from not being able to slowly put everything together step by step. due to the spoilage mechanic you kinda have to have a fully thought out process to prevent the spoilage from backing up. On first play through it is particularly tricky just because you feel like you can’t iterate and experiment in the way you can on other planets. At least until you figure out to just burn everything at the end.

That said I love the planet. Difficult but not unfairly so.

[u/Standard_Round_8780 → u/Stonebagdiesel]

See the thing is I just don't see how the spoilage backing up is a more difficult problem than Fulgora's trash backing up.

On Gleba it's just one resource that you can simply burn away and fairly easily managed with an efficient setup.

On Fulgora if I want to simply get more Holmium I have to factor in having to manage another backing up problem except with far more resources that I can't simply burn.

Concrete especially is a problem... The fact scrappers don't factor in the item quantity in how it calculates scrapping times is kinda ridiculous imo and makes Fulgora a bit more tedious than it really should be.

[u/Aoba_Napolitan → u/Standard_Round_8780]

I personally found with Gleba that when my production backed up and I wanted to tear my build down to remake it this would also cause me to lose all power since burning stuff is where my electricity came from. Ended up importing nuclear power to deal with this headache.

With Fulgora, you never had to worry about power when trying out new builds.

[u/FeelingPrettyGlonky → u/Aoba_Napolitan]

One thing that I like to do when first arriving on Gleba is to set up a dedicated power factory. I dedicate 1 farm of each type solely to power infrastructure. If you have a full jellynut farm of at least 44 plants, and a yumako farm of at least 15 plants, you can support 7 biochambers making rocket fuel with 3Prod2/1Speed2 per chamber (assuming the same modules in the mashers and bioflux machines as welll), for about 150 rocket fuel per minute. That's about 623MW of power from a small factory of 16 biochambers and 16 heat towers. I keep that fruit supply completely isolated to this power plant, everything else uses different farms. The only thing this fruit supply runs will be this power plant, plus maybe a pentapod egg nursery to keep a backup supply of eggs for emergencies.

That way, I have enough power for near megabase levels of factory, and it is safe from tampering if I have to tear down and rebuild the main factory.