I'm starting to love Gleba

[RedPine]

It's a slow process, but I'm figuring it out. I'm expecting each player to independently come up with some wildly different solutions.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Same, even tried browsing servers to look at other players' setups but I'd get instakicked before I could even type.
I did see someone setting up a cargo wagon-based crafter but it involved +20 deciders and the throughput was abysmal.

Personally, I connected tree farms to trains with filters on the cargo wagons, then sent those to assemblers (no need to rely on nutrients). Afterwards set up furnace arrays working off modules consisting of 4 bacteria cultivators + 1 bioflux, and those allowed me to build whatever layouts I needed.

[Cerodil]

Agreed, the outcry of Gleba is reminding me of when people used to complain about fluids and blue science. Once you get the hang of it it's not hard.

[Glyph]

I imagine Gleba production lines like faucets. Turn on the fruit processing, which terminate at a heating tower, and build production by drawing off of it. Key to Gleba in general is always have an output for waste (to a heating tower) and anything you don't immediately use is waste (because fruits are functionally infinite)

[Vapor Dosh]

Originally posted by Cerodil:

Once you get the hang of it it's not hard.

I ended up caving in and looked up some blueprints. I reached the point where I can pretty much leave the factory going, but I still can't imagine picking Gleba as my first planet because it starts so overwhelming, especially if you don't have construction bots yet.

[AlliedKhajiit]

my first crack at gleba on my own will probably be throwing logistic bots at the problems tbh, maybe later I decide to come up with belt solutions but it feels like you need a hundred splitters and a hundred inserters all with their filters set which is annoying to do, and then things are liable to suffer a complete and utter shutdown anyway. My friend I've been playing MP with set up gleba on his own while I screwed off and did more fulgora things and gleba has suffered 3 total blackouts where everything was turned off, spoilage was everywhere on the belts and in machines, and we can hardly even troubleshoot the issue. Then there's the natives that ignore walls and cliffs and have stampeded through the base multiple times but now there's like 50 rocket turrets setup to finally defend from that happening (any time it happened we just reloaded old save and then went and manually killed them)
It's a planet that definitely has its charms and I'll probably come to enjoy it in the future, but for now it's the planet I'm least excited to tackle on my own

[PewSquare]

Absolutely, I'm by no means a factorio expert and I'm warming up to gleba now. It was my first planet to land on, and it made me restart the whole play trough as I felt I was under prepared (which I was).
Now on the second attempt, it just clicked. What helped was staying away from bots as the resource throughput is insane on gleba.

And making a slow modular start.
1. Create farms.
2. Pulp/Jelly the Fruit
3. Route seeds back to farms
4. Incinerate the rest
This was all it took to finally understand gleba. Since once this was established, I could see the insane ammount of resources generated. So everything else just went on a belt that makes a huge circle with an incinerator at the end. Every so often a filter to filter out any spoilage... and you are good to go.

It does feel like gleba requires a better understanding of belt sidedness and how to take advantage of multiple materials on one belt. But at the end of the day, on gleba, you should imo just overproduce and incinerate the rest.

[Marosh]

Originally posted by Glyph:

I imagine Gleba production lines like faucets. Turn on the fruit processing, which terminate at a heating tower, and build production by drawing off of it. Key to Gleba in general is always have an output for waste (to a heating tower) and anything you don't immediately use is waste (because fruits are functionally infinite)

That is probably what makes it so hard for many. The usual playstyle is buffering. Buffer in chests or belts (a belt with items that aren't moving is also just a buffer) and have an overflow before that buffer to move it to a different factory.

Once you get rid of this mindset, let items flow all the time (atleast the stuff that can spoil) and have it reach an disposal area, Gleba becomes quite easy. Probably my favorite planet to figure out. If it didn't break the last 40 hours, it won't break the next 400 hours.

[Zogtar]

how I feel about the game in general. I've restarted so many times after figuring out how to get to x-point. Me about to get choo choo running after me do oil (need clear bug with fire stick).

Just bought the DLC, so pretty driven to catch up to you big branes.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Marosh:

Originally posted by Glyph:

I imagine Gleba production lines like faucets. Turn on the fruit processing, which terminate at a heating tower, and build production by drawing off of it. Key to Gleba in general is always have an output for waste (to a heating tower) and anything you don't immediately use is waste (because fruits are functionally infinite)

That is probably what makes it so hard for many. The usual playstyle is buffering. Buffer in chests or belts (a belt with items that aren't moving is also just a buffer) and have an overflow before that buffer to move it to a different factory.

Once you get rid of this mindset, let items flow all the time (atleast the stuff that can spoil) and have it reach an disposal area, Gleba becomes quite easy. Probably my favorite planet to figure out. If it didn't break the last 40 hours, it won't break the next 400 hours.

Funny things is there's also some vital buffering. You probably want to 'ferment' bacteria in chests.

And then to make sulfur and carbon you need to ferment something thqt spoils in a box (probably nutrients)

[anarnam]

Below I added some random tips for Gleba - and no, I'm no pro - just finished optimizing it the best I could yesterday and thought I would share some experiences with everyone else.

Your main line shouldn't be actual material to be used, but material to be burnt in the heating tower (spoiled stuff)

Create an entire main bus (it doesn't have to be a straight line, since you don't even have space to do it) that has spoiled crap in the middle where each side line connects to the main one (the exact opposite from typical main bus). Every material (untill ores and bacterias) should have a "drain" mechanism that cleans your belts from spoilage.

Your unprocessed raw "food" has much more "fresh" timer than processed mash and jelly which have only a few minutes - take that into consideration as well.

I like how someone commented above that you should imagine you're having a faucet - you need a drain in order to not overspill. In other words, you can literally DDOS your base on gleba in seconds if not managed well :D

As a precaution, place requester chests with 1 nutrient request crafted from spoilage (keep 1 provider chest with a stack of spoilage so you can always craft it) to kickstart your production of nutrients (from bioflux) and bioflux itself in case something bad happens (which it will). 2 bioflux nutrients biolabs should suffice for quite a big base tbh plus 0,5 biolab for each pentapod egg production biolab

it's really hard to calculate how much you need to waste as little jelly and yumako stuff as possible so you have to feel the process (I was experimenting a lot untill I got satisfying result of around 2000 or more science packs per 30 mins which is completely enough for me at this stage)

Pentapod eggs - keep some turrets near each biolab where you produce them or say good bye to your base - also don't keep too many of those eggs in inventory if you don't have a proper power armor on.

Bulk inserter - this makes throughput at least 10 times more efficient on your current belts - it is absurdly OP and improves production like crazy (I can only imagine the efficiency when combined with tungsten belts :O which I still don't have researched) - apart from using them to process yumako and jelly stuff make sure you leave the planet with at least couple hundreds to increase the throughput of ores (coming out of trains) in your main base.

The biggest tip - don't bring too many laser turrets but rather focus on production of red ammo and gun turrets (of rocket if you can afford a bit of time to make explosive rockets or something) - they just don't work for bigger spiders which will literally stomp over your base and wave you good bye when you ragequit the game :D

The last one - at certain point you're going to be energy starved (not enough temp in heat tower) even though you're burning trash like crazy (mostly with spoiled nutriens) - you will have to feed it with rocket fuel, which you need to craft anyway to launch your rocket.

The biggest thing I'm missing on Gleba is a freezer - keep things fresh untill I need them in case of huge emergency.

[Torham]

I personally quite like Gleba. my first attempt was full bot factory, just requesters and providers, and spoilage requested at the heating towers. While functional, the production speed was low and the bots were burning a lot of energy.

My second Factory is a circular belt design. each product is on a loop, continuously being produced and used up, spoilage is filtered out by splitters. There is very little waste, basically the only thing that is being burned at the towers is excess spoilage and eggs . It even has a fail safe mechanism to automatically start up production. Turns out spoilage keeps indefinitely, and you can use regular assemblers to boot up the base and make some initial nutrients.

I do not use the copper/iron bacteria. I ship metals from orbit from an orbital mining station. It also produces rockets for free from asteroids, to keep my rocket launchers stocked up

[Cerodil]

Originally posted by anarnam:

Below I added some random tips for Gleba - and no, I'm no pro - just finished optimizing it the best I could yesterday and thought I would share some experiences with everyone else.

All your tips are good agree completely just want to add a few of my own.

Biolabs don't actually use power, they just eat nutrients, efficiency modules inside biolabs make everything inside them last longer.

An alternative way to get power is to park a ship in orbit and drop carbon to burn in boilers/steam engines.

This isn't really a tip but a recommendation. Go to Fulgora first, one of the techs there makes navigating and fighting on Gleba 10000x better/easier.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by Cerodil:

Originally posted by anarnam:

Below I added some random tips for Gleba - and no, I'm no pro - just finished optimizing it the best I could yesterday and thought I would share some experiences with everyone else.

All your tips are good agree completely just want to add a few of my own.

Biolabs don't actually use power, they just eat nutrients, efficiency modules inside biolabs make everything inside them last longer.

You mean Biochamber, not Biolab.

I just checked and that doesn't look true: putting efficiency modules in a Biochamber did not change the spoil timer of the contents. Efficiency modules just do what they usually do: they reduce the energy requirements, which means it takes longer to consume the nutrient fuel.

I suppose when you're struggling to get a self-sustaining reaction that making the fuel stretch longer would be helpful. But my impression is that the other way around: the higher nutrient consumption of using productivity modules would actually make it easier to manage the fueling, since it would be harder for nutrients to be lying around long enough to spoil.

[Quillithe]

One thing I'm realizing about Gleba is that it's a much longer planet to deal with.

Fulgora you need to figure out some sorting and science packs are the most complicated, but setting up production lines is simplified by mostly already having all the intermediate products. And rocket launch materials come right out of the trash so it's super easy to set that up. Power is trivial and endless, no enemies.

Volcanus has about as many steps to metal as Nauvis but simpler and lets you directly produce a bunch of intermediate products which simplifies things. Plastic is a little more involved but if you made an oil cracking setup for Nauvis it's basically the same. Rocket parts are intermediate and power is trivial and endless. No enemy attacks. Science packs are pretty easy.


Gleba lets you skip some oil steps but you still need furnaces and an involved setup basically to replace mines and a whole normal factory like Nauvis. Science packs are easy but spoil. Rocket parts are as hard as nauvis except maybe fuel. Power is reasonably easy but not entirely trivial since you need to feed it enough material but spoilage is too little and fruit wastes seeds so you need to sort it out.

And there are enemies so you need defenses and a bot network to repair them and an ammo distribution system.

It's taking about as long as the other two together, especially since Volcanus is really easy

[BKo]

It's a mess, you're simply past the bad part. If I ever tried to play Gleba again bare without any cargo drops (I won't) it'd be just as bad as the first time. This is the only time in factorio where I ever made one base and just copy and pasted the entire thing in a really ugly and clumsy way rather than designing exactly what I needed, because this planet is way too tedious. The only good part about it is that it seems to be the most infinitely self sufficient and potentially stable planet of them all, provided you make enough defenses all your design can handle spoilage well enough. All of your materials come right out of the ground and will never run out like ore or scrap veins, except stone, but you don't necessarily need infinite stone to keep launching rockets and whatnot.