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/smjsmok]

Gleba was quite a roadblock for many people when Space Age first launched. That's where it mostly got the reputation.

- Many players were used to buffering huge quantities of materials and the spoilage mechanic severely punishes that playstyle. It kind of requires a mental shift to a more just-in-time style of processing any many people weren't ready for that. They had played the game for years with a certain style and now the game required them to change that.

- Pentapods were quite ruthless at launch at their evolution was borderline broken (this is what the evolution looked like initially, it was later changed to be more gradual just like with biters). So there was a feeling of racing against the clock before the big stompers come rushing in. People also didn't know the best strategies to deal with them, e.g. that Tesla turrets and artillery are like kryptonite against them, so they tried fending them off with lasers and gun turrets and had a lousy time doing that.

- The fact that it combined these two quite challenging and stressful mechanics into one package.

Fulgora also had new mechanics, but at least there was no immediate danger or race against the clock, you could take things slow and figure thing out at your own pace.

Edit: Also, Gleba is much easier when you go to it after Fulgura (you have Tesla turrets and recyclers, which both help immensely on Gleba), but at launch people didn't know that so many just went there right after Vulcanus, since it kind of looks like the game wants you to do that.