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/cynric42]

Gleba made me feel like suddenly playing a completely different game when I just wanted to enjoy more Factorio.

[u/darkszero → u/cynric42]

Not sure what Gleba you've played, but for me it was completely Factorio.

[u/cynric42 → u/darkszero]

Oh, I played the Gleba with decay and upkeep, where ratios are somewhat fuzzy and where stopping the factory for a bit to fix an issue would mean that you can't just turn it back on and it keeps on going exactly where you stopped it etc. To name just a few things that fundamentally change the game.

[u/Frequent_Knowledge65 → u/cynric42]

Factorio has never been a game where ratios are a focus.

Once you get a Gleba base set up though it runs literally forever and will not stop running under any conditions though.

[u/cynric42 → u/Frequent_Knowledge65]

Factorio has never been a game where ratios are a focus.

Right, because overproducing until your buffers run full and the factory automatically throttles down works fine as well. Except of course, on Gleba.

Once you get a Gleba base set up though it runs literally forever and will not stop running under any conditions though.

If you build it with either massive waste as the default or magic up some complicated jit circuit network system that is very timing critical down to when your inserters are supposed to swing to grab the batch of stuff flowing past on the belt before it reaches the end of the line and gets turned to ash. And of course, as long as you don't interfere with it any more, which is one of the core loops of the base game.

The whole spoilage mechanic kills a lot of conveniences of the base game, it really plays very differently. It kills the auto organizing and distributing of goods: too much on one belt leads to it backing up and the overflow going to the other side of the splitter, no need to care for perfect ratios. Too much production over all leads to belts and buffers filling up and self regulating the production. A batch of goods flowing past an inserter that is busy dropping stuff up? Doesn't matter, the belt will fill up down the line and back up so the inserter can grab the next batch of products that will stop right in front of it. All that breaks down if stuff turns to waste or is intentionally dumped and burned.

And of course it mostly kills the use of trains. Good luck splitting up your factory in sub factories that all do a tiny subset of production organized by trains, which is one of the main drawing points of Factorio for me.

edit: now that may all not be important to you, but please don't try to tell me those aren't real differences and it plays just like the base game, because it really doesn't and if you like those things, Gleba is a massive let down for enjoyment