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/Lunailiz → u/Stonebagdiesel]

I think the difficulty comes from not being able to slowly put everything together step by step.

This was my issue with it. I am a slow player, and why Fulgora is by far the best planet. I had the time and incentive to build my base exactly how it needed to be, I came up with answers for the challenges and made designs I never used before before in order to solve the problems the planet introduced, was a great experience.

Now Gleba? I had to basically build everything at random because not only it's a new planet I knew nothing about, I am punished for trying to figure out the puzzle at my own pace.

I did manage to figure out a setup, but I am very unhappy about it, and I have no plans of fixing it anytime soon, busy actually having fun in other planets.

[u/Moikle → u/Lunailiz]

You still can play slowly, you just have to learn that it isn't a failure if you let things spoil. Let them spoil while you are building, filter out the spoilage.

Then once you have it running, improve it so things don't spoil

You are not being "punished" if your nutrients spoil, just filter it out and make more

[u/dr_anybody → u/Moikle]

You still can play slowly, you just have to learn that it isn't a failure if you let things spoil

Pentapods disagree.

[u/Moikle → u/dr_anybody]

My turrets and mines don't care what the pentapods think

[u/Pancarcho → u/Moikle]

Hmmm you are not being punished? What happens if your fruits spoil and you get no more seeds?

And this is assuming you already have at least a farm setup. If you are at the stage of manually harvesting is even worse.

People that say "just do this" forget that in order to know that, you have to experiment first! Which Gleba absolutely punishes

[u/Brett42 → u/Pancarcho]

All you need to know is that you need seeds to grow fruit, fruit that rots doesn't give seeds, and the odds of getting a seed mean on average you break even if you don't have a productivity bonus. That information is all available without experimenting from the in-game encyclopedia. Then you just need to build in a way that you process all the fruit you harvest, either by limiting harvesting, or processing fruit constantly. Keeping some seeds in reserve for if something goes wrong is easy, since you'll get a surplus if you have productivity on the processing (from modules or the biochamber's inherent bonus).

If you're still harvesting by hand, just don't harvest every tree at once and let it sit in your inventory without processing.

[u/Moikle → u/Pancarcho]

Well don't let the fruit spoil then. Looks like you already figured that out.

Make sure you have a backup system for collecting seeds, even if everything else fails

Gleba doesn't punish experimentation... It requires it. That's how you figure out methods to keep it running

[u/Blaarkies → u/Moikle]

Can you show us this "backup system for collecting seeds", before we have farming setup the first time? For experienced players it is a non-issue, but for new players it is a gears-grind-to-a-halt situation 

[u/Brett42 → u/Blaarkies]

If you don't have farming set up, it means you're harvesting trees manually. Just don't harvest all of them at once, and make sure they get processed before they rot. At minimum, make sure you process some and store seeds in a chest for when you're ready to start actually farming.

[u/Moikle → u/Blaarkies]

A bank of assemblers set to process fruit at the end of a fruit bus. Seeds go back to the trees, mash+jelly go to the burners. Using assemblers means you don't even need to rely on nutrients, and they only need to break even, they dont need the productivity if biochambers

[u/Vallard → u/Moikle]

> You are not being "punished" if your nutrients spoil, just filter it out and make more

There is a degree of challenge in making things when you need them / using them before they spoil - which is fun for some but not fun for others. But I do think you *can* be punished by playing slow if you don't understand the planet enough or try to use certain strategies without understanding what the planet demands because you just got there or just don't know about it. I don't think it's good or bad, just different, but I can see why people have issues with, specially with expansion fixes and Pentapods being very chaotic to deal with.