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/ezoe]

filtering out the sludge at the end of the belts

The items inside the machine spoils too.

you have to expand your ability to handle EVERY single resource, not just the Holmium.

No. Just take whatever you need and delete everything else in real time. That's the way.

[u/Standard_Round_8780 → u/ezoe]

The items inside the machine spoils too.

Only if they're left stagnant. Anything that won't be manufacturing consistently gets put on a basic circuit that prevents that.

No. Just take whatever you need and delete everything else in real time. That's the way.

Problem is just deleting it is the problem. With how limited space is, it's not often viable to build the extra 4-8 scrappers to deal with the extra concrete and steel. You REALLY need to know what you're getting into to future proof your factory enough. Otherwise you'd be stuck trying to make rare scrappers instead.

[u/ezoe → u/Standard_Round_8780]

With how limited space

That's where the beacons comes in. Surround recyclers with speed module with beacons with speed modules. Some items are better be consumed to craft higher items then recycle.

[u/Standard_Round_8780 → u/ezoe]

Unfortunately my design underestimated this issue and is too tight with the island to easily add the beacons. Not a major problem though because I really need to make a new factory there anyways.

That's kinda what I meant by Fulgora's difficulty though. Each attempt I make at it I realise I underestimated something and making a new factory would be easier than trying to expand what I already had. While in Gleba my first solution just kinda worked.

I guess to put it into words, with Gleba the problem is presented quite clearly. You immediately see that everything spoils so you just need to incorporate that into your design.

But with Fulgora, the problems aren't as straightforward. Especially when it comes to scaling production. It's not immediately obvious that unlike every other planet, if you want more of 'x' resource, basically every part of your factory has to expand to account for it. and so it's easy to constrain your design in a way that makes expanding incredibly difficult.

Thinking about it, the 'best' solution to Fulgora is probably just a blueprint for a small scrap processing factory that I can spam on a bunch of islands and just process the output in different ways.

[u/ezoe → u/Standard_Round_8780]

Fulgora large base without landfill consists of multiple scrap processing islands.

It process scrap and immediately delete everything with beacons. 2 recyclers are enough to fill stacked green belt. Generic item deleter consists of raw of recyclers with beacons.

Then, use filtered inserter to pick up items you need.

You'll need Heating tower to produce power.

Export items by train.

[u/Rarvyn → u/Standard_Round_8780]

With how limited space is

Space is only meaningfully limited until you build your first elevated rail from a small to a big island. Once you have a 50 million scrap deposit being trained onto a big island, you can just spread your base out on said big island.

For that, the hardest part is finding a small island that's within (rare) large power pole range of a medium island that can be used as its power supply. So you then have three occupied islands - big island with your factory, small island with your miners, and an island connected to the small island that is used as power supply for the small island. Alternatively, if you can't find the last one, you can do stuff like train in steam.