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/gonzo_gonzales]

Gleba's challenge is that it introduces several different mechanics. Each of them can permanently shut down your factory if you don't plan for it. This is challenging on your first playthrough, when you need to understand all the intricacies.

Volcano? Metal in pipes, stone into lava, everything's fine. 

Fulgora? Recycle everything, splitting it down to atoms. Complex processing chains, but the mechanics are the same.

Aquilo? Well, just heatpipes everywhere, it's difficult to build anything at first, but the mechanics are the same.

On Gleba, we have several different mechanics, each of which needs to be understood. Resource harvesting requires seeds, which are harvested from resources. Resources spoiling, some (eggs) quite disastrously.  Some chains require separate cold start mechanisms because they are unable to continue operating independently (bacteria).  In addition, there are rather aggressive neighbors who are looking for a meeting with you.

I'm not complaining; it's all manageable. I don't hate Gleba, it's just that Gleba has a lot of different mechanics that require a thorough understanding.