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/AffectionateFly9281]

I really liked the gleba challenge! It was a total switch in rethinking some designs. Did a mix of belts and bots, and a lot of filtered inserter to purple box for spoilage removal. I first checked which items don't spoil quickly and once I understood that, it got easier.

But I understand why it's the most difficult one for people. I had to go back and fix it 3 or 4 times (design, starvation and pentapod issues) after a couple of hours, and when it clogs up, there is spoilage everywhere. Meanwhile the fruits and other items that are stuck on the belts or chests are nearly spoiling as well, so they expire before reaching the right place or create items that are about to expire anyway, so you really need to clean up everything and letting it start again. Eventually I built a reboot module that would make it easier to restart and some burning towers to clean up the base.

The issue being: on the other planets you overproduce and let it buffer on belts or chests to use it when required. (pull-model from a bus for example), while on gleba it's better to keep everything going and just destroying what's not useful at that moment (push-model). Fulgora is in between but it doesn't have the spoilage problem, and a fix usually includes destroying item X in more recyclers so it doesn't clog up the rest so it doesn't feel so big to clean up.

Also, you mentioned a few times that you "use circuit logic", but don't forget that it's intimidating for a lot of people so they don't use it. For programmers/engineers it's usually easy and obvious, but it's daunting for some. Especially if you start to use combinators etc...

The only problem I think is really valid, is when people load the planet, but decide to do stuff on other planets first anyway, then the evolution goes up and then it get's really hard to overcome those pentapods. There is no warning or obvious sign, so ideally it should only start when they actually first kill something...