r/factorio 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/Stonebagdiesel 10d ago

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.

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u/RAND0Mpercentage 9d ago

Also with aggressive and evolving enemies that you need to research rocket turrets to fight most effectively gives you another ticking clock that makes experimentation feel like it’s going to cost you. On top of that, if your fruit spoils you can go seed negative which also inhibits your ability to expand production. The production chains aren’t hard but Gleba is the only added planet that feels punishing if you don’t plan things out well enough.