[Spoiler] Have I understood Gleba right?

[GAMING_Alligator]

EDIT: Marking as spoiler, since this thread gives away the solution to the Gleba "puzzle". You've been warned.

So, I think it works like this:

I use a biochamber to process a fruit. This gives me mostly "mash", but also a small amount of seeds.

I feed the seeds back into an agricultural tower, which makes more fruits, and those fruits go back into the biochamber.

The mash is used for "other stuff".

With a bit of luck the maths works out and this is self-sustaining, but better add productivity modules to the biochamber to just make sure.

All of this makes spoilage as a secondary product, which I send to a heating tower to use for power.

Avoid back pressure in the system, since things will rot.

Does that about sum it up?

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by GAMING_Alligator:

With a bit of luck the maths works out and this is self-sustaining, but better add productivity modules to the biochamber to just make sure.

Biochambers already have an intrinsic 50% productivity bonus. Although you can add modules, if you like.

You definitely need the modules if you process the fruits and nuts in assemblers, though.

All of this makes spoilage as a secondary product, which I send to a heating tower to use for power.

Spoilage in the heating tower is more of a consolation prize than a reliable source of power. Usually the thought is more using the heating tower to void excess spoilage.

[Serendipitous]

With biochamber it is more than self-sustaining, given the 50% productivity bonus that all biochambers have. Nothing wrong with adding more modules of course, just make sure to process fast enough.

Yes, almost everything organic spoils. I would recommend building every belt going into towers anyway so it would never back up. Resources on Gleba are infinite and it's much better to overconsume even if it didn't spoil yet. If everything flows into heating towers as a stream without backing up you will never have spoilage (or wrigglers on your base) unless you actually want it. As an upside you will always craft with freshest ingredients possible.

[CentauriSystem]

Pretty much. You can feed the excess mash right into the heating towers because plants are unlimited*. You get back on average the perfect number of seeds with assembling machines with no prod so with Bio chambers the 50% prod bonus gives you plenty of seeds (which you can save for artificial soil).

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Spoil timer - Better to move fruit and bioflux around than processed fruit or nutrients due to the spoil timers, hour or two vs couple of minutes.
This also matters for throughput since for instance, 5 bioflux becomes 60 nutrients.
Spoilage itself - it's used for carbon, eff 3 modules and coal so you want to use conditions on inserters as to keep some for those purposes.
Research - packs care about the ingredients' timers.

Building - build your factory on hills as building on swamp tiles will cost you landfill.
After vulcanus/cliff explosives, go wild.

Also you can use CTRL+F to look up 'natural' to bring up a list of all farmland available.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Ok, so I set up a little circuit to test this, and it worked really well, briefly. Then it ran out of spoilage with which to feed the bio-chambers, and everything ground to a halt, and all the inputs spoilt, giving me lots of spoilage, but leaving me with an empty patch of farmland.

So glad I'm doing this after Vulcanus and Fulgura. It feels a lot harder!

[Hurkyl]

Yep. I thought it was a fun puzzle to actually have to figure out what you need to get things running smoothly.

[Aranador]

Indeed, my first attempt went through three iterations of building then tearing down the factory, setting up conditions, limiters, fail safes, backups, and bootstraps. I learned a lot and will be implementing new ideas when next I play.

I would definitely not want to go here again without a well stocked freighter-load of supplies though, but it is actually fun to work out how to do stuff with minimal support.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Ok, after a hours of wasting my life trying to get this working for Yamako fruit, I think I actually have a self-sustaining cycle now. Or at least it has kept going for long enough. Also the game has decided it's good enough to attract the local wildlife, so I'm guessing I hit some invisible trigger. The whole thing doesn't do anything interesting apart from sustain itself, but it sustains itself!

I spent ages trying to get it working with belts. and was basically just impossible (I'm sure other people have made it work though). So in frustration, I eventually tore most of it the assembly line down and replaced it with bots and suddenly everything just sort of works!

Next step: Do the same for jelly, so that I can make bioflux.

[Quillithe]

Oh, I don't think it's worth getting a self sustained cycle without both because of bioflux to nutrients.

That's the big challenge with Gleba you need about 6 steps all running smoothly before you can really start, where most planets you can build a step at a time

[GAMING_Alligator]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Oh, I don't think it's worth getting a self sustained cycle without both because of bioflux to nutrients.

That's the big challenge with Gleba you need about 6 steps all running smoothly before you can really start, where most planets you can build a step at a time

Oh, getting it self-sustained just for Yamako fruit was definitely worth it. It let me work out and prove the concept without too many variables, and then basically just had to copy and paste it for the jelly.

And once I had jelly automated, I just needed to plonk a requester chest down for bioflux ingredients and my power struggles on Gleba instantly became a thing of the past, thanks to being able to produce cheap rocket fuel.

Gleba really feels like a completely different ballgame, since it's basically solving a big puzzle instead of building simple assembly lines, like everywhere else. I guess the next puzzle is science, which needs pentapod eggs. which I'm guessing I'm going to need some sort of pentapod zoo for.

[Quillithe]

Fair enough. Might be tough to do jelly separately though since there's no jelly to nutrients recipe.

Spoilage to nutrients kinda works but...not well