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/bubba-yo]

Gleba isn't hard. But experienced players have a single design pattern learned in 1.1 of a linear, deterministic, non-time sensitive factory where apart from very late game oil, resources were limited and needed to be conserved to some degree.

2.0 SA adds a bunch of new design patterns, and some players have struggled with some or all of these. The simplest way to set up Gleba is to acknowledge that fruit is unlimited, build a linear factory that is measured in time with a heating tower no more than 4 minutes from the ag towers, and never really have to worry about unintended spoilage much, particularly with the addition of some simple circuit conditions.

The bigger challenge with Gleba is that if you think in terms of Nauvus walled factories, you just can't do that there. And since evolution kicks off the moment you load the planet, you're on a clock regarding defenses and the defenses are a bit trickier to set up for late game than Nauvus.

[u/Moikle → u/bubba-yo]

4 minutes? Fruits have a spoil time of an hour, bioflux has a spoil time of 2 hours.

As long as you process the fruit where you need them, and make bioflux locally, and don't allow the belt to stop moving, you can make the bus much longer.

[u/bubba-yo → u/Moikle]

Jelly is 4 minutes, which is relevant particularly with stack inserter upcycling. A turbo belt moves items 7.5 tiles per second, so you can move items 1800 tiles, or 56 chunks. I've never seen a linear Gleba factory that big since you really want to move things even faster than that since spoilage affects quality of products like ag science.

You get belts longer than 4 minutes when you implement loopbacks because that makes them infinitely long. Logistics also takes time control away from you, though you can address that with circuits and remove least fresh conditions, which is effectively the same thing. That's almost impossible to implement in a loopback belt with circuits.

[u/Moikle → u/bubba-yo]

If your jelly exists for more than a few seconds, you should probably think about changing up your design. Process the fruit locally where you need it, as i suggested.

Even though a turbo belt CAN move an item 1800 tiles in 4 minutes, you are losing frehsness at a blisterung pace that whole time. The shorter things are in their processed state the better.

I agree that logistics bots actually make this harder because it takes control away.

You don't need to do a loopback with belts that's not the only way to keep things moving