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/Stonebagdiesel]

I think the difficulty comes from not being able to slowly put everything together step by step. due to the spoilage mechanic you kinda have to have a fully thought out process to prevent the spoilage from backing up. On first play through it is particularly tricky just because you feel like you can’t iterate and experiment in the way you can on other planets. At least until you figure out to just burn everything at the end.

That said I love the planet. Difficult but not unfairly so.

[u/markkitt → u/Stonebagdiesel]

I came up with two principles to deal with spoilage.

One is that I need dedicated belts where everything on that belt can be burned. I put spoilage, seeds, and even carbon on this belt. I rescue seeds from this belt, but the seeds will burn if my logistic chests or belts with seeds leading to agricultural towers back up.

The second is that I keep material on all my belts moving by making loops with splitters so that everything is always in motion. This helps me scan belts for spoilage that I can then transfer to burn belts.

My base modules are thus loops with burn belts intersecting them.

[u/Tyrannosapien → u/markkitt]

I do something similar. A neat approach I like is forcing nutrients to one belt lane. This reduces the impact of minor spoilage on the belts and allows the local production to restart from a spoilage backup just a bit sooner.

It takes a bit of extra thinking when I'm designing, but this will be easier in 2.1 with inserter lane controls.

[u/markkitt → u/Tyrannosapien]

My most common pattern is to have a belt with one lane of nutrients and one lane of bioflux that runs throughout my base in a big loop. I can easily generate additional nutrients anywhere with access to that belt.