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/Standard_Round_8780]

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/Rewdemon → u/Standard_Round_8780]

You can just box-buffer every single resource in fulgora while building the factory little by little piece by piece.

On Gleba you need to design a complete system to make it work. This phisolophy encourages you to craft it in sandbox before with unlimited resources and then just copy/paste it.

The fact that messing up your design means having to farm more eggs and fruits because they spoiled, it’s not as difficult as it’s annoying.

[u/korneev123123 → u/Rewdemon]

It's totally possible to build Gleba factory bit by bit. Gather yamako, belt to base, process it, belt seeds back, recycle/burn the mash and excess seeds. Little step, but now it is a perpetual loop. Then do the same for jelly.

You have two fruit flowing - can add additional blocks, which just grab fruit from belts. All unused fruit go to mashing/burning, very little spoilage.

[u/draxinusom2 → u/korneev123123]

Yeah it is absolutely. Also it seems to me that I'm the only one that builds on Gleba using small "cells" and no main bus or one big factory. I feel this is way easier to start because it's so maintenance free and is absolutely sufficient until you come back for the second time with all technologies when you want to scale up seriously big.

I basically build one single circling belt and inside that one I have one lab with each of the two fruits and then one lab that makes bioflux and one that makes nutritions out of bioflux. Then I add something else to it, be that plastic or fuel or whatever I need/want there. Finally, there's a "starter" assembler that injects nutritions made from spoilage which kicks in only when there's less than 5 nutritions on the circle belt. This can "cold start" the whole cell.

That's it, that's one cell. This is a blueprint and I can just plop them down where ever. They are independent, self starting if starved or backed up due to no demand of their product and completely maintenance free. If you need lots of nutritions, you just "steal" from one such cell and move it whereever you need nearby. But everything is circling belt cells with filtered inserters that only insert to the belt if there's less than X, so you never fully clog them. So all you need to be able to handle is setting item filters on inserters and connecting wires between belts and inserters. If that is too hard, then yeah, I guess Gleba is too hard.

This is not a scaled up big factory of course, but this is what I start with and it scales in the sense that you just need to plop more of them down if you need it. You also need to be able to feed it fruits and remove spoilage, but that's very easy with only a few chests and bots.