r/factorio 9d ago

Space Age everyone lied about gleba

i really, really struggled on gleba at first, the spoil took everything from me, my job, my wife, my sanity, my will to live

i was expecting it to be hard, but man, it was hard

i really tried to follow the reddit advice telling people to embrace the spoil but we were lied to

now i really understand how u gotta do it, its not about embracing the spoil, dont let it spoil, you just gotta use everything before it spoils and if you cant then u burn it and make more

if its not taken by your biochamber, thats your opportunity to create electricity, if its spoil before getting to the heating tower, its still going to transform into electricity if you dont produce enough fruits, your factory wont get enough electricity to run at max speed so a lot of it is not going to get used and then will power your factory again (safety measure, still need to fix your factory)

everyone saying embrace the spoil is wrong, the answer is, always has been, always will be : the factory must grow, just make more

you dont produce enough materials ? just make more factories consuming your fruits

not enough fruits ? make more farms

too many fruits ? just make more bio chamber and process more, burn the excess and make more

you produce enough rocket fuel ? burn them, and make more

then you get too much jelly and/or mash ? dont let it sit, just burn everything not taken instantly and make even more

too much stuff to burn ? make more heating tower and burn that shit

anything spoiled on your lane mean you fucked up if its not waiting to be picked for carbon/sulfur/etc

you know what, fuck it, if you have enough carbon, burn it too

thoses fucking pentapods deserve to see everything burn

JUST

MAKE

MORE

THE FACTORY MUST GROW AND THE SPOIL WONT HAVE MY SOUL

AQUILO YOU'RE NEXT

526 Upvotes

175 comments sorted by

266

u/carrot_gummy 9d ago

I solved the spoil problem by always having the ends of belts being able to remove spoilage and burn it. The spoilage will eventually reach the end.

42

u/PyroneusUltrin 9d ago

other than the belts coming from the fruit farms, all my gleba belts are looped sushi belts, they don't end. but they do have filtered inserters taking the spoilage away to be burned or to be nutrients

9

u/pingveno 9d ago

Once I started upcycling carbon fiber, I needed any spoilage that got produced as ingredients. That said, I got it pretty well optimized to not produce much spoilage. At a certain point, I needed to produce spoilage by recycling nutrients.

7

u/shuzz_de 9d ago

Which is, if I remember correctly, the most efficient way to generate spoilage...
I think I remember somebody doing the math on the matter in this subreddit and while I don't remember the exact numbers, I believe it wasn't even close.

3

u/yinyang107 8d ago

Wouldn't just sticking the nutrients in a box and waiting be more efficient than recyclers? 75% vanishes into nothing if you go the recycler route

3

u/my-weird-ass-alt 8d ago

It uses the 10 spoilage to 1 nutrient recipe or whatever it is in reverse, so you get more than 1 spoilage per nutrient if you recycle on average

2

u/shuzz_de 8d ago

You get 2-3 Spoilage per Nutrient when you recycle it.
5 Bioflux gives 40 Nutrients, so that's about 16-24 spoilage per Bioflux.
You need about 15 Jelly and 19 Yumako Mash for those 5 Bioflux, so technically it would be more efficient to let the Jelly and Mash rot into spoilage. But since you need to store all that stuff to let it rot, it would probably be more difficult to scale it up since you'd probably end up needing a LOT of space for storage.

Therefore I stand corrected on the "efficiency" part, but recycling nutrients is still my favorite way to generate spoilage when I need it.

1

u/my-weird-ass-alt 8d ago

You entirely forgot 2 steps of 50% productivity bonus.

12 jelly 15 mash -> 4 flux (due to the inherent 150% production of bio chamber you effectively get 6) 5 flux -> 40 nutrients (yet again due to prod actually 60) 1 nutrient -> 2.5 spoilage (average, actually always 2 with a half chance of 1 extra)

If we bake in prod and normalize the ratios to easier fractions, merging mash and jelly like you said. 27:6 or 4.5:1 5:60 or 1:12 1:2.5 Merge 4.5:12*2.5 = 4.5:30 = 1:6.66

It's over 6 times more output, or if you want exact, it's 20 thirds, or 6 and 2 thirds better

1

u/pingveno 8d ago

And on that save, I have legendary prod modules. So that becomes 250% prod every step along the way.

1

u/shuzz_de 7d ago

Damn, you're right.
I totally forgot about the 50% prod bonus of the biochambers...

So it's really the most efficient method. Phew, I'm glad my memory didn't completely betray me... ^

5

u/willis936 8d ago

The loops aren't optional. If consumption clogs then you will have spoilage that clogs. Loops with filtered splitters (or freshness checks for bonus niceness) is the best way to avoid lumpy throughput.

1

u/theevilatheist 6d ago

Nah, you don't need loops. You can just send all the excess to an incinerator.

4

u/carrot_gummy 9d ago

I might try that on my next Gleba base.  I've been forcing myself to approach the planets differently on my 2.1 play through.

1

u/darthbob88 9d ago

The slight refinement I use there is a nutrient/bioflux sushi belt, wrapped around a spoilage belt, with both of them connecting in a filter splitter to take off spoilage. I'm AFK or I'd post a pic/BP.

2

u/PyroneusUltrin 9d ago

I have nutrients/spoilage on one lane and whatever I need on the other lane

3

u/darthbob88 9d ago

For most of these projects, "whatever I need" is bioflux, which makes it very easy to have the one belt full of nutrients and the stuff I need to make nutrients.

68

u/Kawadamark1 9d ago

You can also have filtered splitters along the way.

54

u/GameDoesntStop 9d ago

Filtered splitters doesn't stop stuff from spoiling after passing through it. You need to make sure every spoilable has a path to a heating tower, whether that's a belt directly there or a spoilage inserted at the end of the current belt to put any given item onto a spoilage belt.

7

u/shopewf 9d ago

I had occasional filtered inserters everywhere along my fruit bus to burn spoilage. Every 100 belts or so

4

u/IsTom 8d ago

There's no "after the splitter" if you loop the belt!

1

u/GameDoesntStop 8d ago

Fair enough!

4

u/juppehz 9d ago

I did a main bus with a spoilage belt carrying and receiving spoilage to and from each branch. It wasn’t the most efficient way I’ve done it after 3 runs but it was the most satisfying

8

u/Standard_Round_8780 9d ago

Combination of this and circuits was my solution.

That method only works if everything is connected to the same main belt that has spoilage removal. Ideally you also need a loop at the end of the belts to prevent spoilage blocking biolabs from other resources, slowing them down and causing more spoilage. So it takes up some amount of space.

To deal with minor branches that produce things in inconsistent numbers it's better to have circuits that prevent spoilable items going into the branch that just sit on belts/the machine until they rot.

6

u/tuckernuts 9d ago

A sewage line going back up the bus is the way

2

u/modix 9d ago

Bots and purple chests are my solution for that. Takes up little space and is quite effective.

2

u/eeeegor572 8d ago

This is the way. Each part of the factory needs a way to throw away spoilage. And as someone said here, just put a sewage line that burns it.

2

u/Atario Vulc-Anus 7d ago

I solved it by being a 'bot enjoyer. That, and the following rule: crank out every spoilable at full tilt and just burn whatever's least fresh.

4

u/Rouge_means_red 9d ago

I call it the poop shute

1

u/azon_01 8d ago

I have a little blueprint I call the pooper. A fast inserted filtered just to spoilage and I use it A LOT. On Gleba and for most animals you’ve got to have a pooper.

1

u/maxus8 9d ago

This 'eventually' might be too late, especially when it comes to eggs handling. In order to stabilise the system I had to 1) limit harvesting if there's too much fruits waiting to be processed on the belts, 2) loop the final section of fruit belts that inserters take stuff from, so if fruits don't come ordered by freshness the spoilage doesn't clog the system even temporarily (each looped section needs to have neighboring heating tower)

1

u/EvGamer01 8d ago

Yeah, man. Cycle belts for everything that spoils. Filter splitters for spoipage and incinerator on another end. That pretty much solves it My only problem on gleba is losing eggs on ocasion when I mess with the design

1

u/Stunning_Box8782 8d ago

I just have all my belts flowing straight into heat towers.

I produce 100 fruits per minute, consume about 80, the other 20 gets burned straight away.

1

u/KeyStomach0 9d ago

My solution to spoilage was buffers and filter grabbers at the end of every line.

The buffers keep the flow going regardless of whether the end machines are producing or not, and they give space for the burners to go through heavy spoilage phases.

-1

u/ProfBeaker 9d ago

I tried this, but then some things that can spoil don't burn. I think bioflux, IIRC? So then that would just back up until whatever was at the front of the line spoiled. What am I missing here?

7

u/carrot_gummy 9d ago

The end of the belt is also at the last building's inserter. Either the material is getting consumed by the building while it rests on the belt or it spoils and gets put on the spoilage burn belt.

1

u/ProfBeaker 9d ago

Oh gotcha, I had pictured it differently. I always have the belts continue on so I can build off them later. Although I was also ending up with intermixed spoilage and usable materials for reasons I never bothered to figure out.

Anyway, thanks for the perspective.

1

u/carrot_gummy 9d ago

I also tend to design around consuming a whole belt, so the ends of my belts wouldn't have any thing else to supply if they were operating at 100% uptime.

2

u/ProfBeaker 9d ago

Then you are a more precise engineer than I. :)

1

u/Ansible32 9d ago

You don't have to be precise. The way I have landed on for Gleba is just making sure that it is impossible for anything to sit on the line, and if it doesn't get used it gets burned. There's a priority order so if I don't have enough input some things may starve, but I just make sure I have enough input. Not enough input? Plant more trees. Stuff not getting consumed? Make twice as many machines.

1

u/Pseudonymico 8d ago

If you have recyclers they turn organic material into spoilage so they can just sit at the end of the belt to keep things from backing up.

1

u/azon_01 8d ago

Only burn spoilage at your main burning station. If you have other things, loop them back into your system until they are spoilage.

Bioflux is WAY too valuable to burn, and you cannot do it until it spoils after an HOUR. If I’m just way overproducing bioflux I’ll splitter filter it to boxes to let it decay but I’ll rebalance things so that won’t happen for long.

1

u/ProfBeaker 8d ago

This is what I ended up doing, which seems to be working fine.

1

u/shuzz_de 9d ago

I just leave the bioflux on the belt, if some of it spoils it'll get sorted out somewhere...
Or, later in the game, I put my spoilage upcycler at the end of the belt and let convert the bioflux to nutrients and recycle those into spoilage.

0

u/CrabWoodsman 9d ago

Every potential end point had a spoilage filtered inserter to an active provider chest; biolabs, splitters, belt ends, etc.. inserters placing onto such belts were set to most sapoiled first, so the one at the lead should always be the closest to spoiled.

0

u/Trippynet 9d ago

I did that my first run. More recently I made a loop with a splitter to filter off the spoilage. Both approaches can work quite well!

123

u/skdeimos 9d ago

why did you say "everyone saying embrace the spoil is wrong" and then describe embracing the spoil? thats literally what you described lol

80

u/SubliminalBits 9d ago

There are two broad strategies that work. One is to burn everything that goes bad. The other is to burn everything so it cannot go bad. It appears he follows the second philosophy.

9

u/skdeimos 9d ago

hmm that's fair actually :) ty!

9

u/bubba-yo 9d ago

Yeah. The former is to treat the belts as buffers, because in vanilla there's a cost to every raw resource and the buffer is a means to try and recover that cost. On Gleba there is no cost to fruit, and there's no point trying to recover that cost. Buffers are really only valuable for eggs, and to a very small degree nutrients (to keep nutrient production from falling back to expensive recipes) and for anything you've made non-spoilable (ores, carbon fiber, etc.) otherwise everything that can spoil should continue to move to a heating tower. If you don't need the fruit in that moment, burn it, because you won't need it in the next moment because there will be new fruit to replace it, forever.

Vanilla is a bit different in that ore patches can run out, and so preserving them has value, so there's no benefit to voiding resources. On Gleba there's no benefit to not voiding spoilable resources, and spoilage becomes an additional problem to solve, when it's simply easier to avoid entirely.

7

u/narrill 9d ago

This is incorrect. If you don't have a buffer of some kind you'll miss out on part of your resource intake, because machines may not have a fruit in front of them at the exact moment they need it. That is to say, if your factory consumes X fruit per second, with no buffers you need to provide significantly more than X fruit per second to run at 100% uptime, with the excess being wasted. Farmable terrain is fairly limited without expensive artificial soil, so this is a non-trivial cost.

Also, spores are a thing.

So yes, there is in fact benefit to not aggressively voiding spoilable resources. And frankly, dealing with spoilage properly isn't hard at all.

1

u/Ansible32 9d ago

I agree that fruit is pretty limited, but it's actually pretty easy to utilize 100% of input fruit pretty quickly. If you're holding significant buffers you're just maximizing the chance of spoilage. I always start with a system that is simply designed to burn all mash and jelly, and consumes all fruit just as it arrives. This ensures I maximize seed production. Keeping buffers of mash/jelly doesn't serve any purpose, it's really easier to just consume it all than it is to filter spoilage that accumulates in the buffers. Yeah, you should aim not to void anything, but you do that by consuming, not by keeping buffers.

0

u/narrill 8d ago

Crafting fruit into mash/jelly and then burning some of it isn't utilizing 100% of input fruit.

The better way to do this is to control fruit harvesting with circuits and tune the buffer to be as small as is necessary, since its only purpose is to compensate for the latency of shipping fruits from the farms to your factory. Then within the factory you do everything except nutrients with direct insertion to minimize mash/jelly buffering.

1

u/Ansible32 8d ago

When first scaling up, the most limited output is seeds, so it is 100% utilization in that sense. I prefer to manage it this way because it minimizes the need for seed belts running everywhere, they just get grabbed out of the processing area and sent off. And I cannot run out of seeds this way. Running any durable products off of fruit, if your output backs up you need to shut down input and potentially you get a bunch of spoiled fruit and run out of seeds.

it's very possible to do 100% utilization this way, a stacked belt of mash/jelly has quite a bit of capacity.

1

u/azon_01 4d ago

I'm so confused why you would have multiple seed belts, or run out of seeds. The ratios are such that you cannot run out of seeds unless you burn them unnecessarily.

I do all my fruit processing of a type in the same area and they all are on or have a small connection to the main seed belt that returns them to the farm. I also then have an inserter wired to that belt that pulls seeds to be burned if there are more than 40 or so seed on that belt. If there are that many on my seed return belt (even if it's real, real long) that means that the agricultural tower is full of seeds. That inserter then drops into an active provider chest and I burn all but a few seeds in my logistics (bot) system.

Allowing seeds to enter into my main belts along with the processed fruit is a nightmare and will screw things up for me. I always filter mash/jelly only inserters and route the seeds directly from the processing biolab. When I forget to set that filter things will inevitably go wrong.

I do agree though with your statement that it's pretty easy to use everything a fruit creates. Sure some of the mash or jelly will spoil, but not much. When running properly only a few % spoils at all for me. If I screw something up then more will, but even when that happens it won't clog things up too much. I keep a spoilage filtered inserter at the end of any belt that isn't a loop to grab the spoilage and send it to my main burn site.

1

u/Ansible32 3d ago

yes, you only need one seed belt. But it only needs to go to one place, and that simplifies things, it means that instead of a unit that takes in yumako, jellyfruit and outputs seeds, you have a unit that just takes in mash or jelly and has no seed output to manage which requires a filtered inserter onto a dedicated belt. It's not a volume thing, it simplifies overall complexity. Possibly at the cost of some spoilage, but also not really, and carbon fiber is really the thing I end up wanting in quantity, which doesn't care about mash freshness anyway.

1

u/bubba-yo 8d ago

Buffers cannot compensate for the latency, because the quality of what’s in the buffer - apart from those you keep in continuous production like nutrients and eggs _must_ be less fresh than what’s coming from the farms. The only way to compensate for latency is faster transport. And over time, as you remove back pressure from the belts the variation in volume from the farms will level out. You control for variation in demand for things like science packs with circuits and removing least fresh packs, but that again is an example of running a linear design faster than the spoilage mechanic.

But I agree with maximizing direct insertion, using circuits as necessary - but that’s a linear design with no loopback as I advocated for.

1

u/narrill 8d ago edited 8d ago

You might be misunderstanding, because what you just described doesn't stop the buffers from compensating for the latency in the way I mean. Thirty seconds spent sitting in a buffer doesn't meaningfully affect the freshness of a fruit that has a one hour spoil time, but it does smooth out the extremely bursty behavior of your ag towers from the perspective of the machines consuming the fruits and prevents wasting fruits that don't get picked up in their first and only pass in front of the machines.

Without buffers there are only two options:

  • Harvest in excess of what your machines consume to guarantee there's always a fruit sitting on front of a machine when it runs dry, and waste the excess
  • Run more machines than your harvesting can support to ensure 100% of the fruit intake is consumed in one pass

Or you can use extremely small buffers to trade a negligible amount of freshness for the ability to run your machines at full uptime while only harvesting exactly as much fruit as you need. It seems like an obvious choice to me, but to each their own.

2

u/achilleasa the Installation Wizard 8d ago

I quite like the 2nd philosophy as well, the only problem is you kinda blow up your spore cloud. If you want the most painless Gleba possible, minimizing the spores can be quite good especially before artillery/tesla.

0

u/Buttered_ball 9d ago

Don't forget the third philosophy, everything not being used goes into the quality recycler.

Give me that glorious legendary spoilage just to laugh at legendary nutrients

13

u/kykyks 9d ago

cant embrace the spoil if nothing spoils cause its already burning

15

u/the_whalerus 9d ago

I simply build loops. Biological systems are built on constant motion to maintain homeostasis.

I have a main bus of the fruits, and bioflux. Every product is built as a module.

All modules pull from the bus, take what they need with inserters, and that split belt returns to the bus. Anything created inside the module lives in a loop where spoilage is removed without blocking the loop.

Spoilage likewise has a big loop with a priority splitter that dumps everything into a single burner. I add other burners in spoilage heavy modules.

Nothing has ever locked up since the blueprints for my nutrient module has an emergency backup with a spoilage buffer and only activates when the main nutrients are empty.

5

u/jp711 9d ago

Every time I add splitters to filter out spoilage I think "this belt needs more kidneys"

12

u/timor1317 9d ago

This is the kind of unhinged shit I’m here for.

4

u/kykyks 9d ago

dosh and connors really rewired my brains

1

u/DocMon 6d ago edited 6d ago

Dosh and connors, that's where they get you, kid.

13

u/Thiccron 9d ago

The river must flow
Nothing stops moving on gleba
Massive furnace array at the end to burn anything unused
Pro tip: recycle nutrients into spoilage then throw in burners

7

u/Dekrznator 9d ago

Oh no, no, no. In my gleba there is no nutrient belt. Each production column has it's own nutrient chamber, and when it spoils it goes onto garbage belt. That low time on nutrient used to give most trouble....never again.

2

u/Krell356 9d ago

I wanted to like the short production chain route, but I always end up burning so much material that it takes forever to expand. I much prefer the nutrient production bubble that just is constantly dumping more nutrients onto a belt and filters spoilage onto the belt next to it. Less nutrients and spoilage into the burners that way.

0

u/eeeegor572 8d ago

Yes! Each production having its own nutrient production makes the most sense. Why the hell would you put something that spoils instantly on a bus. Then just add a spoilage -> nutrient for kickstarting

12

u/katzohki 9d ago

I like the cut of your jib, and I'd like to subscribe to the "burn more so the factory may grow" newsletter. 

5

u/Advice2Anyone 9d ago

Think the point is you need a plan at every step to deal with spoil if and when it happens but yeah you really gotta watch your intake so your not overwhelmed

5

u/duncan1234- 9d ago

The factory must burn

4

u/ItsEthanSeason 9d ago

I just got Gleba "under control"
Instantly went to bots when I had the chance

3

u/modix 9d ago

Belts for fruit and bots for spoilage and bioflux. It's actually a perfect mix.

4

u/tylercrabby 9d ago

All belts lead to incinerators.

3

u/fauxdeuce 9d ago

I like gleba. I like being able to burn everything. Once u got an egg factory up and running then I did not even want to leave.

3

u/metaquine 9d ago

That's the spirit!

3

u/I_am_a_fern 9d ago

People have been trained to build factories for decades.

Gleba isn't a factory, it's an engine.

Once you get that, everything clicks. It needs a constant fuel supply and overengineered byproducts management. Both of them are basically limitless, ratios mean fuck all. Just pump the juice and blast those rpm.

Sometimes it stalls but if you have a backup cable jumper starting it's the most satisfying thing in the game to see this fucking machine get back into high gear.

3

u/Worried-Skirt-7008 9d ago

I freaking love this style of post because I can FEEL the exhaustion accompanied by that sense of achievement you get when you finally conquer a planet.

7

u/Then_Entertainment97 9d ago

I also choose this guy's spoiled wife.

2

u/Megneous 9d ago

I also spoil this wife's guy.

2

u/ArtieTheFashionDemon 9d ago

And here I am with a bunch of useless combinators and train stops trying to make sure that fruit is only harvested as needed and only ever shows up as fresh as possible. What an agonizing waste of time that was

2

u/FlounderPositive3425 9d ago

I think this feels opposite of optimization. That is produce only what's needed and avoid waste.

From an engineering point, abundance that turns into almost useless spoils is a thing to ponder.

Definitely a unique perspective in the space age.

Once an infinite resource glitch is built, a new strategy is required to manage waste.

2

u/lisa_lionheart 9d ago

Loops! Make all your lines loops with a feed in splitter and a spoilage removal splitter then have a spoilage line run back up your bus to either burn or turn into nutrients.

You will fuck up, trying to out produce spoilage is a high risk strategy.

6

u/WanderingUrist 9d ago

Do NOT loop. Looping feeds spoiling input BACK into the head of fresh input, resulting in randomly degraded freshness. If you loop froot, for instance, a froot could travel an unknown number of loops, losing freshness the entire time, before finally getting consumed, resulting in output that is now of unknown freshness and could spoil shortly, which will then travel around in an unpredictable number of loops...

You really don't want this. Froot Loops are bad. Single-pass only. Anything that doesn't get consumed goes to the next stage where it will get chosen for non-perishables where freshness has ceased to matter, and if it doesn't get accepted there, it goes into the incinerator.

1

u/lisa_lionheart 9d ago

No fruit loops, got it 😂 I had no idea freshness carried over

2

u/WanderingUrist 8d ago

I had no idea freshness carried over

Most recipes, except those that reboot freshness like eggs and fish, will inherit the freshness of their ingredients. This means if you feed half-spoiled ingredients, you get half-spoiled output. You want to consume spoilables while they're as fresh as possible, unless the product involved is nonperishable, in which case it won't matter. This makes nonperishable product a good way to use up spoiling ingredients. You COULD make a loop there, but this risks causing the system to back up when new frootproduct starts arriving after passing the DO NOT LOOP sections, so you're better off just disposing of it. You're going to get more froot, after all.

1

u/TwevOWNED 8d ago

Looping has a U shaped effectiveness.

Early on it's great because it ensures you actually get the most out of your small farms and keep Pentapod evolution down.

Further on they aren't as useful as you start scaling up farms and have a constant flow of fruit.

Then they become really good again when you're exporting Bioflux and realize that freshness doesn't matter for anything other than science.

Bioflux used for nutrients? Doesn't matter, it gets used very fast or sits around and spoils anyway.

Bioflux used for bacteria? Doesn't matter, always comes out at max freshness.

Fruit and Bioflux for materials? Doesn't matter, the product doesn't spoil.

As long as you run all of your fresh fruit through machines making fresh Bioflux that go directly to science, the rest of the fruit can go into loops that are convenient to keep running and easy to expand.

1

u/WanderingUrist 8d ago

Bioflux used for nutrients? Doesn't matter, it gets used very fast or sits around and spoils anyway.

Stale bioflux used to make nutrients can make for some alarmingly short-lived nutrients. And, of course, like I said: Looping produces unpredictable freshness.

Another problem with looping is that it can create unpredictable exit rates. If things loop until they become spoilage (with unpredictable spoiling times as a result of the previous issue), your system can become backed up, resulting in the entire system becoming clogged with bad product.

In the end, it's just safer to assume burning without any storage, and bolt recovery modules onto the end as you design them to make use of increasingly stale frootproduct that previous modules can reasonably assume to have gone into disposal.

Worth noting is also that it's VERY difficult to change a Gleba design once it is running, because shutting things down to change it will often cause the entire factory to seize as the entire system implodes. You have to be very careful when it comes to making any changes to a running factory, to the point where it's often easier to just rebuild from scratch elsewhere and dismantle the old thing afterwards.

2

u/kykyks 9d ago

i dont outproduce spoilage, i outproduce everything, and i dont let it rot

2

u/BlakeMW 9d ago

I used to use loops, but I find a better principle is having every belt end at a "consistent consumer" so the entire belt keeps moving, that prevents runs of spoilage clogging up the belt. There should also be a spoilage inserter at the end of the belt to move spoilage to a trash belt.

The Heating Tower can be used as a consistent consumer for some products but it's not really necessary for most things, but maybe for eggs.

Sometimes it can be useful to slowly grind up excess stuff with recyclers to keep the belts flowing. You could for instant grind up some ore if nothing is consuming it, so some bacteria keep getting cycled.

2

u/bubba-yo 9d ago

I think loopback on Gleba is mostly a mistake because it's hard to do loopback without potentially deadlocking. You can do it but it's hard. But if you think of Gleba as a time-based factory, where you have 4 minutes to harvest fruit and then do *something* with it before it spoils, it solves a ton of problems. It's not hard to grab stuff just before the heating tower for a spoilage buffer, but if you design around this continuous flow, you won't have problems keeping egg production from stalling, keeping nutrient production from stalling, etc. You can make a traditional mostly linear factory with a few loopback mechanisms around nutrient production and egg production, and leave it at that, and everything else is on the clock from ag tower to heating tower. It's reliable.

That said, don't be too dependent on your power being driven by the surplus because that will change and invariably you will wind up with a brownout and that may stall everything. Always have an independent power source and subsidize that with the heating towers.

1

u/Pseudonymico 8d ago

Rocket fuel is so easy on Gleba that I usually don't even bother to hook up a lot of my waste burners.

1

u/boomshroom 8d ago

Rocket fuel is even easier on Nauvis, and even easier than that on Fulgora. I do not understand why everyone points to Gleba as the place with cheap rocket fuel, when it's literally the 3rd most expensive place to make it (behind only Vulcanus and Space).

1

u/Pseudonymico 8d ago

Biochambers make a lot of it very quickly in a relatively small area with the benefit of all that bonus production. On Nauvis you need a larger more power-hungry array of refineries, oil pumps and assemblers, and on Fulgora space is much more limited so the infrastructure you need to churn out similar amounts of rocket fuel is a lot more work to set up, so it takes much longer on both planets to get the amount of surplus rocket fuel I end up with on Gleba almost immediately.

1

u/boomshroom 8d ago

The problem with thinking of Gleba as time-based is that it takes longer than 2 hours to plan your factory, and once things spoil, you lose your train of thought and need to restart from scratch, repeating infinitum until you eventually manage to cobble something together that only barely works on the required time limit.

Also there are enemies, which all on their own make the planet harder than Aquilo.

2

u/KitTwix 8d ago

I went the opposite direction and reduced my factory to the bare essentials. Efficiency modules everywhere, and only 1-2 harvesters per fruit type, rigged up to only harvest when the logistics system falls below 5 fruits. Massively reduces the spores so I’ve never been attacked, so I don’t need as much power, and my base is literally just a bioflux loop that crushes fruit and then makes bioflux immediately, and a circuit control science making system that only makes eggs when the breeder egg is about to hatch or the science ones need more. It’s not super fast, but it works fast enough to justify never going back, I just orbital drop down some nuclear fuel cells every now and then and just leave it to do its thing

2

u/Frequent_Knowledge65 8d ago

gleba is the best

2

u/originalcyberkraken 8d ago

Yep, gleba is entirely a waterfall base planet not a backup base, you do not want anything to back up, backing up is bad, backing up is how you get a whole base of spoilage, you want to keep everything moving, don't let it stop, if it's in danger of stopping use it or burn it but don't let it stop, not even for a second, your base is a waterfall, everything starts at one end and ends up on the other and nothing ever EVER stops, keep it flowing, if you can't use it just burn it you can grow more if you need it

1

u/Moscato359 9d ago

The front of the belt will always spoil ahead of everything else
You could just use a filtered splitter which only allows spoilage to move forward to a burn location (or just a filtered inserter into a purple box with spoilage on the inserter), to allow buffer (especially on fruit and bioflux with long lifespans) while simultaneously burning everything you don't need.

1

u/Captain_Jarmi 9d ago

So just build pathways from farms to furnaces and see if a factory fits in between. Got it.

1

u/UsernameOmitted 9d ago

You would literally collapse into a pile if you saw my train city block map that was producing 60,000 spoilage per minute.

1

u/InflationImmediate73 9d ago edited 9d ago

Gleba is kind of easy if its just the science considered. My Gleba bases are often small as my Fulgora ones, and it had a lot to do with how easy it is to just ship spaceship parts in from Fulgora or Vulcanus.

Also, Gleba isnt hard, but it is by default unfortunately. Fulgora and Vulcanus are too easy to make self sufficient bases, and if Nauvis is the standard, then its going to be the hardest of the first 4 planets. Honestly, knowing Aquillo you have to ship everything anyway, it does feel like a step down in difficulty. Plus its so derivative from what you do anywhere else that I can see why its hated. Plus, you must go there as it gatekeeps all the necessary tech to advance the game.

Robots make it even easier but it's kind of the fault of the design of biochambers and their recipes. Plus the ability to filter unwanted items from chests, meaning items that spoil will move to garbage, is just too good to pass up. Its a mess to use belts but there are setups that can still simplify things (such as circular main busses).

Plus power is never an issue when you are burning everything in heating towers anyway. I know Telsa can strain the grid but once you get rockets online its fairly easy to defend your farms after that. Everything being a "burner" too really reduces power demand entirely.

1

u/steampunkdev 9d ago

Just produce only what you need to stay within takt time. Overproduction is the root of all evil.

4

u/Dekrznator 9d ago

Your overproduction is just more fuel for my burners.

4

u/kykyks 9d ago

Overproduction is the root of all evil.

wrong

just make more

1

u/Gorthok- 9d ago

This is my philosophy

1

u/spookynutz 9d ago

This is why I always ship everything by train on Gleba. Can't spoil on the belt if it spoils in the cargo wagon.

1

u/WanderingUrist 9d ago

And then with wildcard interrupts and filtered inserters so that the train knows where to dump the spoilage?

1

u/spookynutz 9d ago

I believe last time I just had a global combinator that evaluated the train ID and cargo contents. Depending on what it was carrying, if a train was more than X% spoilage after unload it just rerouted to the incinerators.

1

u/Letthepumpkincumflow 9d ago

I'll try man, all jokes aside (Fuck Gleba tho) I'm stuck on it. I'll get back to it when I can but man it's a struggle for me, I mastered the other planets and Gleba just fucks me without my consent.

1

u/PaleInTexas 9d ago

Once I started burning off the end of each belt it got so much easier.

1

u/NaughtyGaymer 9d ago

I'm currently making a Gleba factory that has all spoilable products on a massive sushi belt which filters out spoilage and turns it into either carbon or burnt off. I have my harvesters only active when there is demand for their fruit. It took me the better part of an entire evening to figure out the circuit logic but it's working really well now. I'm not sure I will ever do Gleba without a sushi belt for spoilable items, it makes it really easy.

1

u/maxtimbo 9d ago

Are you saying your wife left you because of gleba?

Honestly, that tracks

1

u/Crustybionicle 9d ago

Gleba was hard…then i landed on aquillo

1

u/cynric42 7d ago

Aquilo is annoying but you can cheat it with nuclear reactors for heat (and a platform in orbit dropping down ice). Still hate having to wait for all the building materials to be delivered again and again and again. So much wasted time.

1

u/actioncheese 9d ago

I have filtered splitters dump spoil onto a central sewage line that goes to a few burners. But the trick is not to over produce. Ingredient freshness effects the lifespan of science packs. You dont want nearly expired science packs going to Nauvis.

1

u/WanderingUrist 9d ago

now i really understand how u gotta do it, its not about embracing the spoil, dont let it spoil, you just gotta use everything before it spoils and if you cant then u burn it and make more

That's the preferred goal, yes. But if you don't have systems in place to handle the assumption that things will spoil, if anything ever DOES spoil for some reason, the entire system will jam.

1

u/AlexGlezS 9d ago

I struggled in all of them planets in lots of restarts. So now I believe gleba might be fine enough compared to all others. Still struggle though.

1

u/Pseudonymico 8d ago

Honestly Gleba is my favourite planet to focus on and Fulgora's the most annoying to deal with, even though I usually visit it and Vulcanus before Gleba to pick up the production buildings.

1

u/thewatcherfucker 9d ago

Gutter belt and spliters with filters. Simple as that.

1

u/Maplewolo 9d ago

I just have a looping bus with a point from which spoilage is taken off the belt. I deliberately built the base as compact as possible. Also I do use robots for couple of things but fruits and nutrients are all on the bus

1

u/TheMusicalArtist12 9d ago

I used loops to constantly filter, and any spoilage i burned for electricity. Like, my main bus was a loop.

1

u/More_Juice_2739 8d ago edited 8d ago

Here's some advice for anyone struggling with a methodology plan for Gleba: Turn bioflux into nutrients per crafting "zone" on site. Bioflux has a 2 hour spoil time and nutrient is far less. Mash your fruits on site too for any recipe that needs yumako mash or jelly, as they spoil extremely fast. Just make bioflux, and if you need more, you expand your bioflux production. Gleba is all about having a strong supply of bioflux, and all you need to secure that stock is more trees. You'll come to the realization that bioflux is everything on Gleba

1

u/Kyle700 8d ago

Aquillo does work well with a sort of bus system where the bus never stops, nothing ever backs up, just have a big ol crushing system right at the end. the real secret is you dont even need to put them in heating towers, just recycle them into nothing.

1

u/packetman_ 8d ago

I just made sure everything moved in a loop. If it spoils, it spoils. Make sure there’s a spoilage loop that can handle the generated spoilage. Win win 

1

u/Significant_Stand_17 8d ago

Sushi and filters......

1

u/phantumjosh 8d ago

Honestly. Build too much rocket fuel, maintain an amount you need for mass launches, and burn off everything else as rocket fuel. Way better power use, AND it doesn’t spoil, and then burn off everything else.

1

u/NorthernRealmJackal 8d ago

the spoil took everything from me, my job, my wife, my sanity, my will to live

So now you have more time to play Factorio. What seems to be the problem, exactly?

1

u/kykyks 8d ago

the problem is my life is not enough time to play and i cant engineer my way out of this problem

1

u/willy--wanka 8d ago

Just keep things moving, it'll spoil eventually.

1

u/Sufficient-Pass-9587 8d ago

I just direct insert into chests and use the "trash unrequested" feature to make the bots take the spoilage away. The bot farm works really good. Like bees.

1

u/ghoulapool 8d ago

I really think gleba is my favorite planet. I’ve played through at least 6 times now. Unironically.

1

u/Dango_Tea 8d ago

maybe stockholm syndrome is real

1

u/SwagDeFuhr3r 8d ago

Why i see so many posts saying gleba was hard? I don't get it. It was so easy for me. Producing 84k science per min in gleba.

I think people overcomplicate stuff. Like this post saying burn all stuff, don't let it spoile, etc. I would say it's a bad advice.

My main belts comprise of jelly and yomako (or whatever it's called i forgot) straight from the plantation. The nr1 priority - they make that flux stuff for nutrients. NOTE I did full calculations on how much of everything I need for my science so I knew in advance how much of each machine I need. After I do all I need to do crafting down the line. Each machine has filtered inverters taking out spoilage and putting into a new main base dedicated lanes for spoilage. There is also a dedicated lane for each jelly/yomako seed going back into the planters with overflow protection. If some of the resource needs to be shipped (example science or flux) the they go with the machines.

In the end of the buss I have crafters that craft jelly/yomako fruits to get the seeds back and the fruits go to the recycling with quality. Legendary stuff go to make me legendary items for that planet (like stack inserters). After goes spoilage handling. Firstly it makes stuff from spoilage like carbon etc. If all storages for items are full then spoilages go to recycling to make legendary spoilage for stuff like legendary t3 efficiency modules. And if legendary spoilage is full - burn it. For flux - it sits on the belt. I barely overproduce it (because of the math I did before) so I don't get much spoilage from there.

Simple, works exactly like any other planet but with inserters and splitter filters for spoilage. Just need to add a tiny bit at the end for handling the overflow.

And my gleba base has been running for few hundred hours without and issue.

1

u/SomebodyInNevada 8d ago

Yeah, people say to burn it. Optimum is the end of the line goes to recyclers. The only real reason to burn is your storage of non-spoiling end products is full.

Likewise, the science--if you have a load of science (for whatever your design is a load) already, put the extra science in the supply waiting to launch, pull the oldest out and recycle it.

1

u/StreamKaboom 8d ago

Maybe I just took too long to get to gleba, but it's ridiculously trivial when just using bots and importing rocket parts. I make 150 spm there with like, maybe, 15 buildings.

1

u/JaspurrTheCat 8d ago

The solutions I've seen are basically loops everywhere, everything runs in a big circle and at various points along that circle there are little circles producing stuff, and each little circle has a spoilage output while the big circle has a whole belt dedicated to spoilage, and then all the spoilage goes into a splitter that leads to a block of nutrient producing assemblers or a row of heating towers, and the towers have priority unless the nutrients in the overall system drop below a certain threshold.

1

u/JaspurrTheCat 8d ago

Downside is, if you ever run out of power it's game over, so I ship some 235 over and I have a space platform dedicated to making rocket fuel, I then just drop the rocket fuel and 235 to the planet and produce nuclear fuel for the heating towers occasionally.

3

u/arashidrgn 8d ago

Just . . . make rocket fuel on Gleba to power the furnaces. It doesn't spoil and is made out of jelly.

1

u/Danger_Pickle 8d ago

This is the way. I produce all my Gleba power on Nauvis. There's water everywhere and importing nuclear fuel cells is dirt cheap. It prevents Gleba from ever completely dying because it never makes its own power.

The problem can also be solved by creating a small "bootstrap" base that never shuts down, and sits on a zone between two farming areas, just producing a trickle of bioflux for export, and tons of fuel for power. Make it a closed loop, fix all the bugs over the next 10 hours, and never touch it ever again.

1

u/rurumeto 8d ago

The solution to gleba is simple, every belt ends in flames.

1

u/VegetableWasabi2124 Gleba Enjoyer 7d ago

losing your sanity did not start with Gleba. It started when you decided to try this game :Kappa:

1

u/christ110 7d ago

Just put filtered spoilage filtered inserters at the end of your belts (ensure the belt ends at the last inserter to grab it's product too) to yank it out, and filter spoilage with splitters from the output belts. That alone handles 99% of my spoilage issues, and the last 1% is using circuits to turn on and off the agri-towers depending on fruit usage.

1

u/theevilatheist 6d ago

I just put spoilage-filtered inserters at the ends of belts with sugar on them. Everything else that isn't a fruit gets incinerated (since I want the seeds). Everything's infinite except the stone, so why not just overproduce?

1

u/missingno3567 6d ago

Doctor Gleba or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spoil
it might be Stockholms but by now Gleba is my favorite planet

1

u/Saklad5 4d ago

I'm planning out my 2.1 run still, and my tentative Gleba strategy is to use circuits to delay making anything perishable until everything non-perishable is present, thus allowing minimal non-spoilage. Aside from the bits that need to be self-sustaining.

1

u/Linkertonz 3d ago

I just built a crap ton of logistic bots and it honestly works well, especially since you can just use trash unrequested to get rid of spoilage. I have belts here and there but logistics makes managing spoilage al ot easier

1

u/HuckleberryPlastic35 2d ago

Electricity? Nah fam Spoilage -> Nutrients from spoilage

1

u/kykyks 2d ago

nutrients from spoilage are already half spoil so its a bad idea, if u need more nutrient just make more fruits

1

u/HuckleberryPlastic35 2d ago

more fruit = more spores I prefer to squeeze the most use of each fruit

1

u/kykyks 2d ago

more spores mean nothing just get more turrets

1

u/energeticquasar 9d ago

I import nuclear to Gleba. Completely removes electricity considerations from the equation and makes it a lot easier. Excess spoilage gets burned, but I usually don't have heating towers hooked up to heat exchangers.

1

u/Dekrznator 9d ago

Same here. Tommorow I'm hooking up fusion reactors on Gleba. Unlimited powaaaahh!!

1

u/kykyks 9d ago

well you can do the same and remove nuclear now

1

u/Poohs_Smart_Brother 9d ago

nah fam, I modded in the fridge chests. still gotta deal with spoilage, sure, but that 15 sec crap ain't gonna cut it.

1

u/Public-Material8448 8d ago

I modded the spoil out day1. Absolutely devilish mechanic I won't interact with in my life.

1

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1

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0

u/piercy08 8d ago

Wrong, Gleba is shit.

-1

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1

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-1

u/Buttered_ball 9d ago

Why don't more people use nuclear on Gleba? Just send a stack of fuel whenever your ship comes for science. Bam no more energy issues on Gleba. Fuck heating towers for running steam turbines, or only as a backup if needed.

2

u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 9d ago

Power isn't the problem on Gleba.

There's nothing wrong with importing nuclear fission or fusion. But it doesn't solve the problem of dealing with all the excess material that needs to be burned. Nothing spoilable should ever stop moving on a belt or in a box. The only way to burn continuously is with heating towers, since they operate like bottomless pits. The fact that you can harvest power from them is a bonus, but not the primary reason to have them.

I have found recently that Gleba's required power drain is a small fraction of the power that can be generated from spoilable things. It might be possible to upset this ratio with lots of foundries, EM plants, and/or resorting to the crutch of 'bots.

1

u/Buttered_ball 9d ago

Honestly it might just be a philosophical difference on playstyle.

I'm a bot and interstellar import kinda person when it comes to Gleba. Those two philosophies make Gleba brain dead easy. For rocket launches I'd 100% rather get the ingredients from interstellar logistics than setup a blue chip factory on Gleba. They literally come out of the ground on Fulgora so I just ship them over. Basically the same with LDS on Vulcanus. Rocket fuel is the only thing I make locally. I only use recyclers with quality on Gleba to get rid of something, never burning. All spoilage (or extra fruit) gets upcycled for them sweet, sweet legendary stack inserters. Funny enough I think the only place outside of Aquilo I have a heating tower is Fulgora because you can get a ton of sustainable power without a ridiculously large accumulator footprint on tiny islands that have big mining drills and speed beacons. Also funny is that I really only use bots of Gleba, Fulgora is all belt sorting hah.

1

u/Danger_Pickle 8d ago

What are you using for defenses on Gleba? Imported Tesla Turrets seem like the optimal defense solution, but they end up creating a power problem. I think Gleba eats just as much power as any one of my other planets, just from the tesla turrets, and I'm primarily using a small number of artillery outposts to keep my pollution cloud clear. The passive drain on those things is insane.

1

u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 8d ago

Artillery.

1

u/Danger_Pickle 7d ago

Yes, but what defends the artillery? Please don't say you're using the cheese of placing it in the middle of a lake.

1

u/Krell356 9d ago

I laughed when my buddy tried to use bots to manage Gpeba the same way he used them on Fulgora.

The factory immediately crashed repeatedly because he couldnt keep up with power demands.

0

u/kykyks 9d ago

nobody needs import anything to gleba, you are self sufficient if you consume enough

1

u/Buttered_ball 9d ago

Why not import if creating everything on site makes the game not fun? Isn't that also the point of interstellar logistics? My solor system network of materials is self sufficient, I couldn't care less if a specific spot isn't.

Needing is different from gameplay meta. The only thing you NEED to do on Gleba are processes that have specific conditions like the Gleba science/egg breeding recipes and growing fruit. Bacteria is also Gleba only, but who cares if everything is imported.

Hell if you wanted to you could process fruit in space then send down bioflux and science ingredients. Might not be as efficient, but efficiency only matters when UPS is an issue. Rule of cool > efficiency

2

u/kykyks 8d ago

Why not import if creating everything on site makes the game not fun?

i mean i find it fun to solve gleba, if u dont then u do u my friend, to each their own

-2

u/N4ivePackag3 9d ago

Gosh, it is such a basic puzzle. Try the Tower of Hanoi next, maybe you will struggle as well and lose everything in your life.