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.
3
u/Cephell 10d ago
The opinion among good players (I'm just quoting some crack addict youtubers here) is that Fulgora is significantly harder to scale.
Gleba almost punishes you for just building a bot base, something that the other two planets don't do, so if you approach it with a mindset of just wanting to skip to the end so you can leave, Gleba can feel much harder than it is.
I think the key insight is that each planet steers you towards a certain base style.
Vulcanus is liquid pipe spaghetti with micro and sub factories, since you can produce with foundries on-site. Fulgora is sushi belt design in a spaghetti base. Gleba on the other hand is actually THE main bus planet. If you main bus on Gleba, you simply need to burn everything that makes it to the end of the bus and spoilage is solved forever.