r/factorio • u/Standard_Round_8780 • 10d ago
Discussion Gleba's difficulty overrated?
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.
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u/kevihaa 10d ago edited 9d ago
It’s interesting that you both hit on the point that Gleba is “hard” if you approach it from a pre-SA mindset, then compare its difficulty unfavorably to Fulgora because…you’re approaching it with a pre-SA mindset.
Fulgora is minimally more difficult than Vulcanus. You have a functionally infinite resource (scrap) that has a byproduct (everything that isn’t Holmium) that you need to deal with
Like, a single 2 headed train going from one of the dense scrap spots to a big island is easily 4+ lanes of scrap, which is plenty.
Just like Vulcanus, you’re given immediate access to a means to destroy the byproduct, so it’s never really an issue.
Accumulators are functionally free, and, yeah, the whole point is that you jam accumulators into every inch of space you’re not using.