Quality on Gleba.

[Justderpingalong]

TL;DR

A couple of suggestions to make quality more feasible on Gleba. Because right now it kind of sucks.

What?

Currently, it's hard, if not impossible, to do quality science on Gleba. Because whilst you can get quality jelly from grinding up stack inserters, mash does not have a single recipe that outputs mash as part of the ingredients in recycling. This means the only way for you to get quality mash, is by simply constantly grinding mash and HOPING you get quality mash. Which, with the insanely short spoil time of 3 minutes at base and 7.30 at legendary, needs to be processed ASAP to get legendary anything.

So, I'd like to see wube implement/change a recipe so that it allows us to recycle it for quality mash. Because the only alternative right now is making normal bioflux, turning it into a capture bot rocket, then quality grinding that. Which is, frankly, ludicrously expensive compared to how we can obtain holmium/tungsten as quality.

Personally, I'd think one of the following could work:
1. Let us recycle carbon fibre into yumako mash and carbon.
2. Give quality seeds a chance to hold higher quality fruit, up to the level of the seed. Agri tower quality determines the actual percentage chance.
3. Instead of a chance-based system, let us harvest legendary seeds for legendary fruit.

Why?

By making quality easier to obtain on Gleba the planet as a whole and especially its' recipes become a lot more valuable. Because, if you can just 'grow' legendary fruit, you can turn it into legendary ore, of which you can then make legendary products, allowing it to somewhat compete with Fulgora/Vulcanus in terms of how easy those 2 are to make quality stuff on.

[CyberCider]

You think the game should be balanced around quality science? It’s practically a meme feature.

Also, only Fulgora is particularly good at quality, which makes perfect sense considering what it unlocks. Vulcanus is only marginally better at it than Nauvis, while Gleba is only marginally worse than Nauvis. So in the end it doesn’t particularly matter where you do it.

[raven2cz]

This is a good post. Most of the legendary science packs went smoothly. But the agriculture science pack is really a huge hassle. I also feel like it wasn’t well thought out, and your suggestions aren’t bad. However, they need to be examined from all angles to ensure they wouldn’t cause some massive production of legendary items, but actually help only the legendary agriculture research in production.

Right now, I literally have forests for producing capture bot rockets. Konage did simplify a few things, but even so, the entire research really depends on Gleba legendary science.

[Justderpingalong]

This is a good post. Most of the legendary science packs went smoothly. But the agriculture science pack is really a huge hassle. I also feel like it wasn’t well thought out, and your suggestions aren’t bad. However, they need to be examined from all angles to ensure they wouldn’t cause some massive production of legendary items, but actually help only the legendary agriculture research in production.

Right now, I literally have forests for producing capture bot rockets. Konage did simplify a few things, but even so, the entire research really depends on Gleba legendary science.

I don't think there's that much need for balancing. Gleba being Gleba means that it's by far the most annoying of the 3 planets to build a factory on because it's essentially a burner-only playthrough but with added spoilage. Letting us build legendary stuff there more easily would offset that annoyance.

[mmmPI]

I don't think there's that much need for balancing. Gleba being Gleba means that it's by far the most annoying of the 3 planets to build a factory on because it's essentially a burner-only playthrough but with added spoilage. Letting us build legendary stuff there more easily would offset that annoyance.

I have a Glebase that produce legendary blue science from bacteria and trees without burning anything else than fusion fuel to ship to Nauvis because ressources are infinite it's super stable.

There were other post suggesting that quality seed gives quality fruit/trees but that would make the game too easy, the 3) is the worst imo.

The 1) doesn't make the game easier imo, if you want quality carbon fiber currently you can recycle them when they are low quality, so you have a sink for all your yumako that isn't made into quality mash.

I think the 2) is the more in line with the current game, it's random, it make sense that you'd sort the fruits, it would introduce good gameplay decision as to wether or not you use quality seed. But i don't think it would necessarily make things easier as it cancreate an additional difficulty to manage when you just want quality yumako mash and you process it with quality module, you get quality seed and you don't need an extra farm for it, you can just plant them alongside the others, players would be force to deal with quality seed, and they can't destroy them, because they would risk running out of seed, and it can happen that they turn a significant % of their yumako into an attempt at quality mash, creating too many quality seed and running out of the regular one when they suddenly don't need quality anymore.

[Justderpingalong]

I don't think there's that much need for balancing. Gleba being Gleba means that it's by far the most annoying of the 3 planets to build a factory on because it's essentially a burner-only playthrough but with added spoilage. Letting us build legendary stuff there more easily would offset that annoyance.

I have a Glebase that produce legendary blue science from bacteria and trees without burning anything else than fusion fuel to ship to Nauvis because ressources are infinite it's super stable.

There were other post suggesting that quality seed gives quality fruit/trees but that would make the game too easy, the 3) is the worst imo.

The 1) doesn't make the game easier imo, if you want quality carbon fiber currently you can recycle them when they are low quality, so you have a sink for all your yumako that isn't made into quality mash.

I think the 2) is the more in line with the current game, it's random, it make sense that you'd sort the fruits, it would introduce good gameplay decision as to wether or not you use quality seed. But i don't think it would necessarily make things easier as it cancreate an additional difficulty to manage when you just want quality yumako mash and you process it with quality module, you get quality seed and you don't need an extra farm for it, you can just plant them alongside the others, players would be force to deal with quality seed, and they can't destroy them, because they would risk running out of seed, and it can happen that they turn a significant % of their yumako into an attempt at quality mash, creating too many quality seed and running out of the regular one when they suddenly don't need quality anymore.

Running out of seeds wouldn't really be a problem. The base 50% productivity means the production chain has a seed surplus. Meaning you're probably already having to dispose of them. I sure have to on my base. I also never mentioned the chances that the agri towers would have. I wouldn't know what would feel good. Regardless you'd still probably have farms that accept only normal quality seed just to keep a supply going, whilst having a dedicated set of farms that are focused purely on grinding quality. Which I think would be far more interesting than having to literally build capture bot rockets only to turn them back into bioflux.

[Turandot]

I want to support this post. I especially think that

2. Give quality seeds a chance to hold higher quality fruit, up to the level of the seed. Agri tower quality determines the actual percentage chance.

is what would make the most sense here.

I don't really understand the carbon suggestion (point 1), but I mostly don't understand why all of these items have quality but then not the mechanics for it. Was the reasoning ever mentioned in an fff?

I don't see how quality seeds make the game too easy- I personally still think, a year after release, that Gleba goes against Factorio game design and is by far the hardest planet to control. The fact that agricultural science is so wasteful adds to this feeling of the whole planet feeling 'off'. I thought that the turn to quality science would be what the game designers intended- Gleba is wasteful but once you master it, it can be optimized (in line with the game). But to then find that there is no way to control quality on Gleba returns me to my initial confusion.

[crimsonarmy]

For anyone wondering about quality seeds growing into quality fruit see 124678. Every variation of it I can think of is on there.

[vitharr]

After having pondered the desire for making Gleba into a progressive quality area that would fit a GMO idea, the only new concepts I've been able to whittle down to aside from the discussions on the balance thread listed above boil down to playing with the 'danger' of the planet, pentapod eggs, and working with spoilage in a more interesting way.

IMO, 'becaon' like objects that 'consume' pentapod eggs for fuel and provide a radius of quality to the growing trees around them would be one way of enacting a reasonably risky way of allowing for quality. It would be especially interesting if this object wasn't a crafted structure, but a predatory plant that instead of consuming the egg, would need to kill pentapods to provide its effects. Along the lines of how asteroid grabbers 'look', allowing it to grab the pentapod egg or live creature offered to it. This would also open up the design area of an agriculture tower, a balance of land utilization vs quality, and provide a much more important boost to the soils on Gleba

Alternatively, make the process of obtaining enough quality seeds the problem rather than just obtaining one and being ready to scale from there. Having each step of quality have a reduced yield of seeds, such that they become net negative beyond rare would be a good first step. Common farms being used to claim more seeds, running quality loops of those to gather enough legendary seeds to maintain a farm of those. Even better if the risk of pentapods here was involved, having a recipe to metabolize the fruit and obtain the seeds be pentapod eggs and raw fruits, meaning higher quality pentapods needing to be maintained to process the seeds from various supporting farms.

The other idea would be to have spoilage be beneficial in other ways other than freshest is best. Perhaps seed yield can be based on how low the spoilage level is, making the long timer on legendary fruit be a 'detriment' in the same way it is for legendary bacteria