I think Gleba is breaking me

[Falesz]

It's fall break at my University and so I pretty much spent the last week from the moment I wake till going to bed playing Factorio.
Vulcanus was fun and cool. Fulgora was cool too, but the limited space and the overflowing of junk materials tested my patience by the end since I couldn't have known in advance just how many overflow recyclers I will be needing, plus getting bottlenecked by the low Holmium ore drop rate. But I managed to get through it with a reasonable Electromagnetic science pack production rate.
I went to Gleba yesterday.. and I think this is the point I'm returning to real life. This is breaking me. First I was looking around like an idiot for like 15 minutes just trying to figure out where the resources are. I knew spoilage would be a thing, but I thought as long as my factory design is correct, it won't matter, so I didn't let myself be discouraged by all my initially found resources spoiling by the time I set some production up. But then I was trying to figure out Agricultural towers. It's not enough that the Yumako trees were a kilometer away from my starter Stone patch, but then as I placed an Agricultural tower and put some Yumako seeds in it, it said there is no spot seedable by the inputs. I was standing there like.. "What?? You just harvested the naturally occuring Yumako trees from right here!" And then the discouragement from spoilage caught up with me. I tried to put some Biochambers down and design some production, but I couldn't never test anything out because everything kept spoiling before I could finish thinking about my design. I considered building a Heating tower to route all spoilage there, but that required Concrete or Refined concrete? Which I had no easy way of making there, so I'd either have to run around collecting Iron ore and putting them into smelters manually or import it from Nauvis. So I couldn't figure out how to automate resource harvesting and any design I tried to play around with just kept getting blocked up by Spoilage. I don't want to be lazy and import a ton of Logistic bots, but at this point I might just do that. And I haven't even encountered any attacks on my factory, which I hear is exceptionally frustrating on Gleba!
I think my Factorio marathon ends here :( This isn't really fun after Fulgora already made me grind my teeth. I'll take a break for a couple of days and then come back fresh. Any spoiler-free advice you might feel like posting here in the meantime, I'd be grateful for.

[Edwin]

Different challenges for each planet. Gleba is definitely the one that is most unlike other places.

Making concrete on Gleba is easy enough. Plenty of stone and water. And iron ore comes from the small rocks that you have to mine to unlock stuff in the tech tree.

If you want to try out stuff, you can just make a separate save and start the map editor from the console. Makes it easier to plan out and try concepts. Then load the old one and do it for real.

[Falesz]

Map editor is a good idea, I just wanted to experience the expansion for the first time naturally, like back in the day when I first played the base game. I wanted to just go along with any difficulties that might come up from not knowing the expansion yet, but.. I think map editor it is, after this first experience.

[Ecclesia]

I feel you. That was my first reaction to Gleba as well. A sense of dread: I just wasted all these seeds and fruit right next to me, what if I waste the rest as well?

But it came down to two things that changed my mind:
- Building a Heating Tower for energy
- The recipe: Bioflux >>> Nutrients

With 1 Heating tower energy becomes a non-issue for a starting base
With the first few Bioflux (spoil time 2 full hours!) you make plenty of Nutrients which you put back into the machines.

[Analbumcover]

If Gleba seems overwhelming, break it down into manageable parts. Your first task should be to make steady-state nutrients. This backbone will allow you to generate a surplus of nutrients that will allow you to tinker around with additional biochambers and production chains at your own leisure and introduce the logistics challenge that spoilage represents in a small scale.

[sweet lemonade]

A few vague tips:
- concrete is basically free, since you can get 50 iron ore from a rock and a ton of stone, and theres plenty of excellent fuel for furnaces around you.
- farming is a bit tough at first but pay attention to the preview when placing. Green square means ready to plant immediately.
- pay really close attention to the time to spoil on all items that spoil and what has a fuel value (can be burned), think about how you can use that to your advantage

And don't feel too bad about stuff spoiling. Resources are infinite here :)

[Vapor Dosh]

I'm kind of in the same boat because I heard Gleba sucks and I saved it for after Fulgora and Vulcanus, which is good because I'd be even more lost without the armor and worker bots. I really hope Gleba is going to get more adjustments, or at least some in-game protips because I still don't have a proper setup.
Also I was really confused about agricultural towers too and I still don't think I have them completely figured out either. I thought their purpose was to let you farm closer to your main base, but you can only plant seeds on the white spots on the minimap and artificial soil is more limited than I expected.

Originally posted by Ecclesia:

But it came down to two things that changed my mind:
- Building a Heating Tower for energy
- The recipe: Bioflux >>> Nutrients

I actually didn't build any heating towers yet and was struggling to figure out how to get power, cause I don't think spoilage and wood are going to be reliable for burning in the furnaces for steam. I'll have to look into those.

[Ecclesia]

Originally posted by Vapor Dosh:

I actually didn't build any heating towers yet and was struggling to figure out how to get power, cause I don't think spoilage and wood are going to be reliable for burning in the furnaces for steam. I'll have to look into those.

I first made the mistake of making regular boilers with turbines, boy that was a mistake.
The heating tower is basically just a cheap version of the nucleair reactor which burns pretty much anything. (it is up to you to figure out which items are used best, part of the fun of discovery :) ).

[Quarzon]

Originally posted by Vapor Dosh:

I actually didn't build any heating towers yet and was struggling to figure out how to get power, cause I don't think spoilage and wood are going to be reliable for burning in the furnaces for steam. I'll have to look into those.

Rocket fuel is very easy and cheap to make on gleba, you can use it to power boilers or heating towers.

[NGMZeroX]

Gleba almost broke me too, I remember stopping playing just because I couldn't think clear anymore and I was in a closed loop of thinking. If you want a rough guide read the following, other wise skip this.

stage 1: unlock Gleba building:
consider this your burner stage, make a minimum setup to unlock the agricultural tower, biochemical and heat tower.

stage 2: craft 2 agricultural tower and as many bio-champers as you can get.
there is plenty of egg drops, just convert all you can find to bio chamber, you might need 30~50 at the end of this if you are going for a full base, or about half of that if you are just going for the science.

each agricultural tower should be in one resource, while placing it there is a grid around it.
-- orange = Bad land
-- yellow = land that you can develop in the future
-- green = suitable land
plant it with a spot with as much green as possible, don't worry about the seeds or it planting things yet, you can hand farm trees and hand plant trees if you need to.

stage 3: getting the seeds: this is very straight forward, just process as many fruits as you can using bio-champers, it does not matter if the products get rotten, you just want the seeds.

stage 4: bioflux production, bioflux is for fuel (nutrition), is for ore (through bacteria cultivating) is for science (with alien eggs) and it kinda and it last for 2 hours this is the heart of your factory.

stage 5~6: egg farm and science: if your factory running with no back ups, you can finally get some eggs and make production loops to multiply them, before converting them to more bio champers or science. if your science going bad, you can consume it on "health" research, that only require space+gleba science.

- if your focus on getting automated ore production, you will need one bacteria champer, and as many cultivation loops as you need, it is the main way of "multiplying" ore.

- make sure that every machine, and every end of a belt line have an inserter dedicated to removing rot, have a dedicated rot line that take all the rot for reprocessing or burning.

- nutrition sucks and don't last long if you convert your resources to nutrition non-stop you are just "rotting" your resources. don't over produce it, produce enough to get your factory running and keep it in check, limit it with logic circuits,or direct feed it to machines, or keep it in short belts not to over-buffer-it.

- use the heat tower for both power and burning of excessive resources.

- Quality spoiling products increase it spoilage time, maybe quality science worth it in Gleba i am unsure.

[Hurkyl]

My spoiler-free advice -- which is sort of moot since you've gotten a bunch of spoiler advice -- is as follows.

• Don't manually produce things until you're ready to use them
  
• Study the properties of the items in the Factoriopedia to better understand their properties
  
• Look over the recipes to find an efficient and sustainable way for the factory to sustain itself. Or at least to produce whatever you immediately need.
  
• Lay out a design
  
• When it's ready, manually produce and feed the resources to get it started

The slightly less spoiler-free advice is focus on the things that have long spoil timers or don't spoil at all. Try to make your factory so things that spoil quickly are immediately used

The less spoiler-free advice is bioflux is the most important resource for agriculture, and it keeps for a very long time and also producing rocket fuel is an efficient way to store energy for generating electricity in a way that doesn't spoil.

[Quillithe]

Doing Gleba naked is definitely a rough start.

You can get a trickle of resources and power with each individual fruit but getting going requires two ag towers, a heating tower, and probably at least 6 bio chambers.

You basically need to hand pick fruit and mine ore before then. I used burner drills for stone because CANNOT BUILD ON MARSH is the worst thing about the planet.

It's a lot harder than Fulgora where you can have a miner into a recycler into a box and hand feed some assemblers to jumpstart pretty fast.

[spyke2009]

It's widely regarded as the worst planet and has been reportedly since the beta tests.

ONE way to mitigate the problem would be to allow splitter belts to detect spoilage %'s and such, splitting them off if they're at a threshold. Even the inserter only "prioritise most spoiled first"

So there's a bit of a lack of control of where items go, which led people naturally to the "river" design principles. That everything flows and ends up as spoilage, then you build a "real" base just off the agri-base. Admittedly I haven't played around with circuits and belt reading which might hold a solution. As it stands really it's just about using everything up asap when you break it down.

I like the CONCEPT of gleba and it's economy/ecology. I just think we lack ways to properly manipulate and filter spoilage.

[Quillithe]

Well yeah the agri- base basically only supplies raw materials.

Spoilage isn't so bad, just loop every product that can spoil and filter the loop, OR send it all to the heating tower no matter what.

Expand in parallel. Fruit takes forever to spoil and everything else shouldn't need to go all over your factory. Make it, use it, and send it off.

To me Volcanus looks the worst, haven't done it yet though.

[Avloren]

Spoiler-light advice:

Play very close attention to spoilage timers. Some items spoil in 2 hours, some in 3 minutes. There are even a few very important things that don't spoil at all. Don't let something that spoils in 5 minutes or less sit on belts, try to use it up ASAP. If something needs to sit on a belt, make sure it's at a step in the chain that takes an hour or more to spoil.

But also, try not to let things sit on belts - it makes sense to have a loop or a one-way trip to the burners, belts should never back up if you can avoid it.

Every belt or machine that handles spoilable items is going to have to deal with those items unexpectedly spoiling. So every such machine needs to have a way to output spoilage and get rid of it (filtered inserters and splitters are your friends). You can minimize this with the tips above, but you'll never 100% eliminate it.

Whenever you unlock multiple ways to make the same thing, the more advanced way doesn't exactly replace the old way, you probably need both for different reasons. Usually there's a simple way to start production (and re-start it if everything spoils and comes to a halt - this WILL happen), and a complicated and fragile but far more efficient way that you want to build up towards and mostly rely on. This applies to nutrients in particular, but also iron/copper bacteria.

A heating tower is like a cheap nuclear reactor, give it a heat exchanger and a couple turbines and throw whatever into it and your power problems are solved for a long time. Note it takes quite a while (and a TON of spoilage) to build it up to max temp, so there's a bit of a startup cost, but once it gets there it will lose temp very slowly proportional to your power use. And your Gleba base shouldn't have a ton of power use; most of your stuff is powered by nutrients.

Efficiency mods actually work in biolabs, they can massively reduce how fast they burn nutrients.

[Falesz]

All the advice is great, but no one is reacting to my line about the Agri tower saying there is no seedable spot around it, when it literally just picked up some Yumako trees 5 seconds ago. Does anyone have any idea what could be going on with that?