Gleba has killed the game for me.

[AvengerStar]

I'm surprised Aquilo, the cryogenic research planet, doesn't add some form of refrigeration or other preservation technology that would make expanding Gleba easier. I imagine the challenges and threat of spoilage would still be present in that case, and it would still be ultimately necessary to have contingencies to deal with such spoilage, but at the very least, it would help with keeping research packs and biter eggs stable longer waiting for transit. Not to mention that it would make thematic sense.

Even after one gets through the hump of actually designing a factory in Gleba that works, as it stands, it's by far the most confining of any of the bases just from this one mechanic.

[MisterDoctor]

This is my base, only the encircled in red where farms that point. Most important, the one on the far left was not there yet.

I would say your farms are too close to your base; your Jellynut farms are basically IN your main base in fact.

your farms should be kept as completely separate bases that have to transport the fruit (belt or train) to your main base for processing. you should expect your farms to potentially be demolished once in a while so you should have backup harvesters and belts. (I have not used trains for fruit but theoretically if you did use trains you would want the train stop to be far from the harvesters also. or possibly it could be possible to have impenetrable defenses at your farms, but I have not managed to get something impenetrable yet.)

I am at evolution 0.80+ on Gleba and my main base is almost completely undefended except for dealing with hatching pentapod eggs.

image of gleba base

(I am not an expert player this is just for example)
("New Base" is because my original base was at yumako farm 1 which was a bad idea)

11-09-2024, 16-58-39.png (842.97 KiB) Viewed 1449 times

[BlueTemplar]

I don't think I can mark it as spoilers

You have to use

Code: Select all

[spoiler="bla"][/spoiler]

Still better than the above poster, that spoiled that

spoiling will keep on spoiling even after Aquilo...

[MisterDoctor]

thx

[mmmPI]

I would say your farms are too close to your base; your Jellynut farms are basically IN your main base in fact. your farms should be kept as completely separate bases that have to transport the fruit (belt or train) to your main base for processing. you should expect your farms to potentially be demolished once in a while so you should have backup harvesters and belts. (I have not used trains for fruit but theoretically if you did use trains you would want the train stop to be far from the harvesters also. or possibly it could be possible to have impenetrable defenses at your farms, but I have not managed to get something impenetrable yet.)
I am at evolution 0.80+ on Gleba and my main base is almost completely undefended except for dealing with hatching pentapod eggs.

I highly disagree, having your farm inside your base is very good, it keeps fruits fresh and minimum perimeter to defend. Making it easy to have artillery range that entirely covers the spore cloud and more giving you almost no attacks. Not from pollution, only the occasionnal party when a new nest is killed by artillery. Which makes it easy to make impenetrable defense

You shouldn't have any filthy creature destroying your farms, it's quite doable even with 0.98 evolution

[MisterDoctor]

I highly disagree, having your farm inside your base is very good

possibly late game but I did Gleba first so I was defending myself with yellow bullets at first. also I had sent a platform to Gleba early which started the evo timer before I got there, so evolution was at 0.24+ before I even landed. so I had to fight off stompers with yellow ammo for a while. so my strategy is/was based around defending being almost impossible. if you can build up impenetrable defenses then things change, yes.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, this thread has been mostly about
«How do I even make a rocket silo + rocket to escape this forsaken place ?!»

But
«How do I produce lots of Gleba science without being too bothered by the natives ?»
is a very different question...

[apriori]

Hmm, biters' eggs don't spoil in captured nests.

Looks like biochambers should keep freshness of items (all our just produced) acting as a proper environment for organics.

But there's is another aspect: items produced from a partially spoiled items become partially spoiled. Captured nests don't accept partially spoiled eggs.

[BlueTemplar]

Use spoilers for late Gleba too please...

Setting gameplay aside for a moment (which is of course still the most important consideration), I can see how biter nests are a natural environment for eggs, while biochamber's aren't. The equivalent to biter nests for fruits is not biochambers, but the trees themselves !

[JackTheSpades]

I'm surprised Aquilo, the cryogenic research planet, doesn't add some form of refrigeration or other preservation technology.

Amen.
I haven't been to Aquilo yet as I'm currently revamping a lot of my infrastructure with the new machines from Fulgora, Vulcanus and Gleba. From what I can tell with Factoriopedia, Aquilio's Cryogenic Plant rounds up the last chemical recipes with higher crafting speed / production bonus and the eventual fusion reactor and railguns will be necessary to make it "there".

I think cooled chests, e.g. with heat pipes and perhaps a "cooling tower" that uses ice for fuel like the heating tower could be neat.
Honestly, having escaped Gleba recently, I don't actually care that much about fruits and whatnot spoiling anymore. The only problem I still have is that Pentapod eggs reuire a constant stream of Nutrients to not hatch and the fact that Agriculture Science spoils.

So, if the Cryo-Plant had a recipe to create some "frozen" entities like Frozen Eggs and Frozen Agriculture Science that you'd then have to manually thaw out again with the Cryo-Plant it could provide a nice middle ground between just trivial "cold chests" that just disable spoiling and being forced to rush the science and eggs where they need to be least they expire/hatch.

[Tinyboss]

The only problem I still have is that Pentapod eggs reuire a constant stream of Nutrients to not hatch

More like a constant trickle. You can safely run the assembler once per 14 minutes, and harvest a single Yumako tree to fuel it.

You can use combinators or a belt with some splitters that cycles a single item to make the timer. Or you could just run it when the leftover nutrients spoil (checking for nutrients=0 in a chest). That would be once every 5 minutes, which isn't as efficient, but it's an enormous improvement over constant cycling.

[ByDou]

Definitely agree with you, have around 600 hours in game and with gleba i had to download editor extension mod to figure out how the layout should be and do some testing AND even with editor extension mod where i have everything i might need + infinite resources + over powered personal items, i still couldn't figure out gleba, its not like i'm not able to figure it out, it is just too much head ache that doesn't worth to get over it. I stoped playing the game just because of gleba and im really sad to say gleba is the biggest and probably first mistake of factorio dev's.

Note: just signed in to say how bad gleba is...

[JohnAlekseyev]

I went to Gleba first, and while I agree it's a huge challenge, I really love the planet!

The setting is very cool, both graphically and style-wise (I love having a very-alive planet after all the typical hostile environment sci-fi tropes like volcanic, ruins, desert, etc.). With a bit of thought, you can produce everything you could on Nauvis on Gleba, too, and the efficiency is massive! You can generate iron and copper from almost nothing, your smelting and assembler pollution doesn't even matter, you can get chemical products for cheap (except coal, which is a bit harder), and you're never running out of fuel. But your space platform has a lot of capacity, so I don't see a reason not to bring a reactor, some turbines and heat exchanger stuff, as well as a couple of nuclear fuel items. They'll keep you set for basically ever, just make sure to store all the excess steam right away, since your consumption will be near nil at the beginning. (The new circuit conditions to read reactor fuel/temperature status make it trivial to have an extremely efficient reactor. Thanks so much for this!)

It is quite a puzzle, however, and it takes some taking breaks and thinking about it. But it can totally be made to work!

Here's a screenshot of my crappy, largely belt-based agriculture base. The smelting and stone mining is off to the initial landing area, and ore gets shipped there with a simple shuttle train, that then delivers the plates and landfill back. The main base here was simply landfilled into the swamp, right next to the red fruit harvest. Jellynut is delivered via express belt. In both cases, circuit conditions limit the harvest to only <50 harvest items on the belts/logistic network. Note that this base is extremely far from optimal, it just naturally evolved as I went along. But it produces 1k agricultural science for regular space platform shipments very reliably already.

Base for those that are interested

gleba_base.png (9.51 MiB) Viewed 1095 times

All in all, I really, really like the difficulty of Gleba. The base game has a slightly increasing difficulty curve with one major jump at oil processing, so it is really nice to have that difficulty curve increase further in Space Age. Especially since it's not artificial difficulty like "more HP and damage for enemies", or stuff that needs you to be very good at moving/shooting/being fast with clicking, but rather actual logical puzzles that you can solve just by putting in some more thought. So I really applaud Wube here, Gleba turned out so much better than I had even hoped from the FFFs!

[BlueTemplar]

Congratulations !
(Still quite neat compared to my swamp-thing.)

Being good at combat still helps a lot on Gleba : just like on Nauvis, you're rewarded by dealing with spawners in pollution range. But, unlike Nauvis' fish, the Gleba foodstuffs still help even with full HP (and some shields) !

But your space platform has a lot of capacity, so I don't see a reason not to bring a reactor, some turbines and heat exchanger stuff, as well as a couple of nuclear fuel items.

One reason is that you might not have them yet, especially if it's your second planet (your own experience notwithstanding) :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=120974

[Tinyboss]

All in all, I really, really like the difficulty of Gleba. The base game has a slightly increasing difficulty curve with one major jump at oil processing, so it is really nice to have that difficulty curve increase further in Space Age. Especially since it's not artificial difficulty like "more HP and damage for enemies", or stuff that needs you to be very good at moving/shooting/being fast with clicking, but rather actual logical puzzles that you can solve just by putting in some more thought. So I really applaud Wube here, Gleba turned out so much better than I had even hoped from the FFFs!

Man, I could not agree more. Not really knowing how to efficiently set things up, making a crappy factory that barely worked with a ton of babysitting, gradually having ahah! moments and improving this or that...it gave me that magical feeling like when I was a new player, in a way that Fulgora and Vulcanus didn't. Gleba is so, so good.

[Mango]

I finally arrived to Gleba as well and I have to say I love it!

For me Fulgora was fine - new game mechanic with the recycling and lack of space were interesting challenge.

Vulcanus was easier Nauvis. I expected demolisher to be a big boss, but I just one shot him with a nuke and uncovered 5M tungsten patch. So I went further away and one shoted medium demolisher as well. Then I just made some rare foundries and left forever.

Gleba is different. The spoilage and nutrients make the logistic challenges so different that it really feels like a new factorio.

I have not managed to get to Aquilo yet, maybe that is even better, but right now I prefer Gleba to all other planets.

Also to those complaining about cliff explosives being researched on Vulcanus, I learned that you can terraform by nukes

[BlueTemplar]

Oh yeah, the atomic bomb is very powerful... but also very expensive : in all 3 of research costs, needed U-235, and weight.

[Mango]

Oh yeah, the atomic bomb is very powerful... but also very expensive : in all 3 of research costs, needed U-235, and weight.

Yeah, you cannot transport atomic bombs directly, but you can transport uranium 235 and craft them where needed. 1 bomb costs 100 U-235 which is 1 stack. And because it is so powerfull you need just a few.

The research cost is not so important to me. I usually stay on a planet long enough to have all researches and some infinites before I leave.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, but that stack of U-235 is 5 rockets by itself.

[AvengerStar]

Still better than the above poster, that spoiled that

spoiling will keep on spoiling even after Aquilo...

A quick search on the tech tree reveals the same thing. I could go on to further debate the necessity of spoiler marking content on a topic that explicitly talks about the grievances of such topic, but that's irrelevant.


Gleba has a challenge I like in theory. But unlike the other planets that have machines replacing old tech that are either basically drop-in to extant designs or require some but not overbearing redesigns and supply to make work, it's significantly harder to properly implement the same sort of improvements from agricultural tech, while not having many practical returns for it. So on top of it being the hardest challenge compared to the other planets, it also comes across as the least rewarding overall.

The way to fix this (and, indeed, whether there's a need to even "fix" this), is an open question. I will say that I haven't seen as much backlash from the other planets' challenges. How much of that is stemmed from players simply not being accustomed to Gleba's design requirements I imagine isn't negligible, and shouldn't be ignored as a consideration, but neither should the amount of people that share this consensus.