TL;DR
The biochamber and to a lesser extent heating tower are vastly less usable than their contemporaries thus making Gleba a far less appealing candidate for a "first planet" that likewise has far less of an impact on other planets due to having very low usability outside of Gleba.THE PROBLEM (WHAT? PT1)
OverviewThere are a lot of posts I see about people complaining about Gleba being their least favorite planet or how going there first is a very bad experience.
I myself actually really liked the challenge. Arguably once you reconfigure your brain and actually know what you are doing it might actually be the easiest to set up and get going with. (Part of me actually wishes we had some more complex recipe chains to try and deal with there)
But when starting new playthroughs I too find little desire to head there as my first or even second world other than just for the fun of it. All of the rewards are sort of secondary bonuses more than any game changers on any of the other worlds.
The BIG rewards for each planet seem to be their main structures, which, on Gleba, are the heating tower and biochamber; and these are, by comparison to their competition, just not all that enticing.
First the biochamber
As compared to its contemporaries (the foundary and the electromagnetic plant); it offers very little in the way of a reason to use it anywhere but on Gleba. In addition to offering very little, it also requires significant setup infrastructure to actually use. For comparison:
Foundary:
* Modifies your entire raw material pipeline and greatly reduces the amount of income needed for recipes that use iron or copper the two main resources.
* Setup requires just adding calcite imports and some basic logistics for supply.
Electromagnetic Plant:
* Modifies everything related to circuits, a major intermediate required in basically everything. And also enables faster production of modules. Reduces volume of resources required to produce them and reduces infrastructure around them.
* No setup cost besides the buildings being a little chunky.
Biochamber:
* Provides more efficient Rocket fuel and oil cracking.
- The easiest things to scale.
- Raw materials to create are entirely infinite so productivity bonus is somewhat less valueble.
* Setup requires a significant infrastructure modification
- Requires logistics to deliver nutrients and return spoilage.
- Spoilage needs to be handled and processed since the factory will definitely stall at some point.
- Oil processing as a Gleban throughput puzzle is significantly more complex than any other chain on Gleba if you want to actually avoid spoilage entirely (by having it going 24/7).
- Probably requires importing bioflux for said nutrient production since most planets do not have reliable ways of generating it.
- No way of turning off logistics if the plants are idle (especially with needing to import bioflux).
Next, the heating tower.
Arguably more useful than the biochamber, this thing lets you produce power/heat extremely efficiently. Though its overall usefulness is somewhat situational:
* Can't use it on space platforms, so no carbon based turbine power for you.
* On Vulcanis it is effectively pointless (since you can just easily turn sulfuric acid into turbine food).
* On Nauvis it is also pointless unless you skipped uranium processing for some reason.
* On Fulgora it has some solid utility reducing the required number of accumulators by a fair margin and giving you a sink for all the solid fuel being produced from scrapping.
* Required on Aquilo so not much to say about it there.
However, its contemporaries are useful on basically every world.
* Mega Drills are super useful anywhere that has an ore deposit, Which is every planet but Aquilo.
* Recyclers are useful on every planet because they let you both void things you don't need, and lets you heavily scale quality production.
THE SUGGESTIONS (WHAT? PT2)
BiochamberThe biochamber's big issue here is that a cost benefit analysis of it leaves it entirely lacking. There's hardly any benefits and the cost of factory retrofit are higher than all the other structures and then some.
So lets improve the benefits a bit by increasing the number of things the biochamber can actually produce. The following list seems like some easy ones to add:
* Plastic (from coal).
* Sulfur (from petroleum).
* Solid Fuel (any, maybe?).
* Lubricant
* Maybe batteries?
* Liquid Holmium and/or electrolyte. (Incentive to use on fulgora)
* Carbon from Coal. (Incentive for Vulcanus in addition to oil cracking)
In addition to the above, it might also be neat to use the biochamber as some sort of "biomechanical engineering" structure. So maybe also...
* Robot Frames
* Robots
* Electric Engine Units
* Engine Units?
Maybe alternate recipes for the above that use more oil products in exchange for using less metal products or circuits? Unsure. Though I feel like being able to make electric engine units adds a pretty solid boost to its usefulness if a little more on the questionable side of how exactly a bio plant makes electric engines (Maybe some HL2 combine synth shenanigans)
Its worth noting that with the above changes there would be some overlap with the cryogenic plant. This is probably fine though, as the cryo plant offers a few other recipes still and the 8 module slots makes it distinct enough of a choice of what to use and where.
However, even with all of these new recipes, it still has a higher infrastructure cost with foundaries, which are arguably still offer more value. So how do we fix that while still preserving the functionality of the plant?
Here's what I came up with: what if for the more non-gleba recipes... the biochamber could take an alternative fuel source? Instead of nutrients, it could take some other sort of "biofuel" for specifically those recipes. Biofuel that either doesn't spoil or spoils into nothing (requiring no cleanup). Biofuel that would still have a freshness rating too. Biofuel that can only be made on Gleba using a mixture of bioflux and some other resource (maybe carbon? or seeds?)
Now you still have to transport and create fuel for the biochambers and still have the gleba throughput puzzle to solve; but you don't have to bother with any infrastructure related to spoilage for your end destination, so it has the same infrastructure cost as foundaries.
Heating Tower
This one is in better shape then the biochamber; but is still a fair bit underwhelming compared to the other two structures on the other worlds.
The fix here is to find a way to make it a little less situational, enough so that using it on other worlds is worthwhile. But how do we make something thats only purpose is to generate heat more useful? Well, for this idea, I'm taking a little bit of inspiration from Mindustry.
What if certain structures benefited from heat being supplied to them besides just power generation? Like for example, what if oil refineries, biochambers and/or electromagnetic plants had a productivity or speed boost if they were adjacent to something giving them 500C of additional heat.
That boost could either be flat (just get enough heat and it will consume it to boost) or based on how much heat is being provided (1000c giving a 2.25x bonus, 500c giving a 1.25x and a gradient from there or something).
Would immediately raise the tower's usefuless on other planets while adding some extra logistics puzzles to compensate (moving fuel around and controlling heat between machines). Would also act as a sort of "soft opening" to part of the puzzle on Aquilo.
Could also add some additional utility on Gleba as well (besides power generation or voiding) like maybe for bioplants the effect is that it gives a "Freshness" productivity boost or something (Ingredients at 50% freshness with a heat boost might produce a 75% fresh product instead of a 50% for example). I'm not exactly sure how heat makes food less spoiled but we can probably just say it makes the machine operate faster/more efficiently or something (videogame logic for the sake of gameplay).
Another random thought I had after writing this out initially is what if heating bonuses could be applied to beacons to let them crank out a little bit more from their modules (since boosting structures by being close to them is something beacons already do). Might add some interesting synergies or designs to bases in this way.
WHY?
Gleba currently feels like a second class planet to visit. You are mostly going there because you have to do it to beat the game; or for secondary things like the spidertron or stack inserter. It simply doesn't currently compete with Fulgora or Vulcanus for "where should I go first" because it doesn't offer those other worlds anything significant from its primary two structures (unlike the other two planets).So improving this fact boosts the overall gameplay experience by making all three planets relatively equal in terms of benefits and expands the usefulness of some generally underwhelming structures to add more interesting synergies and more diverse solutions thus making the game more interesting and more fun.
