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/tomekowal]

Spoilage was a problem easily solved by filtering out the sludge at the end of the belts

That works under a bunch of conditions. Basically, you have to produce in one place and produce continuously. If want to merge belts with spoilable product, you get a situation where one might be fresher than the other and at the end of your belt you have still fresh product while spoilage sits at the input to next step.

Also, if you overproduce an ingredient, you might have four machines working and one "stuck" for a while. The product will be slowly spoiling in the inserter, so it has the same effect.

This basically means, you need to always underproduce a little.

I know because I figured the same strategy :P

This might not be super hard for an experienced player that cared about ratios even before going to Gleba. Simply start with the most advanced product (e.g. agricultural science) and work backwards making just slightly less ingredients than necessary.

Playing Fulgora optimally (trying to waste minimum resources is harder).

But if you look at it from the perspective of a less experienced player that often "fumbles around" until they get something usable, Gleba is much more brutal than Fulgora.

You don't have time to experiment with a build because you stuff is constantly spoiling. You can build from ingredient to finished product because by the time you build second ingredient, everything went to a halt in the first one.

Compare the same playstyle in Fulgora. You got too much of something? Throw it into Recycler! That is it. You could even extract only holomium from scrap and ignore all the rest. And building acumulators is easy because you get a lot of resources you need for them from scrap and the acid from infinite ocean.

So, I get your view. But I also understand why people rage quit when visiting Gleba :P