Why Gleba sucks? and how to fix it?

[MAX]

Too many players have suffered from their first unpleasant experience on Gleba. The spoiling mechanism is unforgiving. Mistakes and errors often lead to cascading failures, usually requiring the player to clean up the spoilage and restart everything. The enemies can, and often do, easily overwhelm early-game defences made up of solely gun turrets. Inexperienced players often get stuck in a loop between dealing with farms destroyed by enemies and production areas filled with spoilage.

Without actually modifying the game mechanism or balancing, how can the game fix that? Here's my two cents:

1. In-game tutorials

Imagine there is a series of in-game tutorials for Gleba like the rail signal tutorials. You can learn how to build the basic nutrient, bioflux and science production in a stress-free environment, and if there's a huge pile of spoilage because you made a mistake, all you need to do is click the reset button. How good is that?

2. Tips on enemy expansion

Too often, players don't understand how the enemy expansion works, and only clear out the spawners within their pollution cloud. Not long after that, an expansion group settles in the pollution cloud, and waves of attacks begins.

If they had better understanding of enemy expansion, and cleared out the spawners not only inside the pollution cloud, but outside surrounding area too, they would enjoy a much longer lasting peace with the enemy. Bonus point for exploring a large area of the map far away from the base. The more expansion candidate chunks, the less chance of an unlucky expansion into the pollution cloud.

3. Nudges on defence

Based on my observation, most people fit in one of the two groups when it comes to enemies on Gleba: those who have artillery on Gleba, and those who complain about the enemies on Gleba. If the game nudges the player to set up artillery on Gleba, perhaps by giving the information on artillery defence when under attack for the first time after unlocking the Vulcanus Metallurgic science, we will see far less people complaining about the enemies on Gleba, and far more people enjoying the unique game mechanism on Gleba.

Your thoughts?

[knighttemplar1960]

1. You don't really need a Gleba tutorial if the idea behind the planet is solving the puzzle. Just reload your save. The thing that would be helpful for the first play through is something in game somewhere that warns you that Gleba is not the best first planet to go to. The time pressure comes from nutrients spoiling so fast. They spoil faster than the ingredients they are made from and there's no real rhyme or reason to the spoilage timers and the products they are associated with. Fruit lasts a long time. Mash and jelly spoil quickly. Mash and jelly make bioflux which lasts a long time. Bioflux makes nutrients that spoil quickly. The other potential solution would be if you could make everything on Gleba in assemblers instead of biochambers. You would still have spoilage but not nearly as much.

The only reason for that is to construct an artificial challenge that isn't a real challenge its mainly an irritant. A tutorial won't fix that. End game tech that lets you modify the spoilage mechanic would and it would give you a real goal to strive for.

Iron and copper bacteria are also rather silly especially as presented. Iron bacteria is an IRL thing on Earth but it takes over a year for it to grow. Copper bacteria is fiction. Which brings up the other thing that has been gnawing at the back of my mind since the expansion dropped. How does the planet sustain itself before the engineer arrives to make nutrients? The trees aren't self seeding, you don't pick fruit, you cut the trees down to get fruit. This creates spores that cause the pentapods to attack. There shouldn't be any trees on Gleba. The first time a pentapod brushed against one its should have gone into a frenzy and destroyed all the trees. Bacteria has the same issue since it doesn't self propagate. The pentapods should have stomped all of it into oblivion before the engineer ever arrived.

2 & 3 aren't issues if you went to Vulcanus and Fulgora first. Especially Vulcanus. Vulcanus cures most of your issues. You unlock artillery and cliff explosives there and the enemies aren't an issue on Nauvis or Gleba anymore.

[Micheal]

Gleba is the reason I quit playing. And yes I played the other planets first, the volacno and lightning planet were both completed and their science.

[dynalon]

Problem of Gleba is psychological and mostly self inflicted. People are unable to take a step back and reevaluate habits they built after dozens or hundreds of hours in factorio. Opinion that Gleba sucks is just voice of small minority of players. People don’t go to forums to praise things they loved about planets or other aspects of the game.
If people were quitting space age because of Gleba then it would most likely reflect in reviews, yet recent reviews are 80% positive and overall is 93% positive.
No matter what you do, you can never satisfy everyone and this is especially true if you try to target large and diverse player base.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The thing that would be helpful for the first play through is something in game somewhere that warns you that Gleba is not the best first planet to go to.

That would be an incredible disservice to the people who aren't allergic to the planet.

The time pressure comes from nutrients spoiling so fast.

Nutrient freshness is irrelevant for anything other than trying to putting nutrients in machines as inputs/fuel before they spoil. Their freshness has literally no other impact:

• Every recipe that consumes Nutrients is either for a product that doesn't spoil, or for a product that is always created with a full spoil timer
  
• They have the full 2.0 MJ fuel value no matter how full the spoil timer is

there's no real rhyme or reason to the spoilage timers and the products they are associated with. Fruit lasts a long time. Mash and jelly spoil quickly. Mash and jelly make bioflux which lasts a long time.

There's an easy way to organize the information: treat fruits/nuts as the inputs and bioflux as the output. The other things are ephemeral and probably should not exist outside of small factory blocks where they're created and used.

Do you really think that there is so much information overload that it's unreasonable to ask players to work out what to do with the first few products they work with on the planet?!?! Or is there some other reason why you think the quoted passage makes the planet suck?

And, incidentally, we already have the dumbed down version; the original Gleba designs involved a larger number of base resources, but the devs ultimately decided to collapse everything into just the two.

The only reason for that is to construct an artificial challenge that isn't a real challenge its mainly an irritant.

What specifically was "that" referring to? What way is the challenge artificial? I mean, more so than anything else in Factorio?

End game tech that lets you modify the spoilage mechanic would and it would give you a real goal to strive for.

What sort of modification would change the things you claim are problems? Is it removal? (whether effective or literal)

I'm being a bit sarcastic, but effective removal is what people usually suggest they want from technology. What modification do you have in mind that would, e.g. ameliorate the fact that the length of spoil timers has no "rhyme or reason"? What change would solve the "time pressure" of delivering nutrients to biochambers other than removing it as a time pressure?

And, incidentally, quality changes the spoil timer directly and everything that accelerates your logistics -- e.g. faster belts, faster buildings -- affects how much the timer is drained throughout processing.

How does the planet sustain itself before the engineer arrives to make nutrients?

Well, biochambers that consume 100,000 calories of food per second aren't exactly natural on the planet.

You're not just making basic foodstuffs. Each nutrient item is nearly half of a million calories packaged in a way meant for nearly instant digestion.

[Mad Gnome]

Too many players cry about Gleba because it's a different challenge than before and they can't simply do the exact same thing over and over.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

*nonsense snipped for brevity*
Well, biochambers that consume 100,000 calories of food per second aren't exactly natural on the planet.

You're not just making basic foodstuffs. Each nutrient item is nearly half of a million calories packaged in a way meant for nearly instant digestion.

The engineer is essentially a humanoid. 10,000 calories in one sitting is a bit over the max the best competitive eater has been able to manage. Instantly trying to digest half a million calories would kill you.

Originally posted by Mad Gnome:

Too many players cry about Gleba because it's a different challenge than before and they can't simply do the exact same thing over and over.

But it is the exact same thing. Biochambers are just burner assemblers. Instead of using power they use carbon based fuel. The end products are 2 items that pretend to be one. The first time you mess with it you can deadlocked. After that you have to make the same mistake over and over again. When you realize that its just kovarex with a ticking timer it can be fixed with a similar system.

The inner planets are playing with legos. Gleba is duplos made with cheap plastic and garish colors. Its not any type of challenge its tedious for the sake of tediousness. There are no clever solutions on Gleba. You can handle every thing the planet has to throw at you with things you learned how to do on Nauvis except you are forced into speed running it by the spoilage timer or forced into starting fresh after clearing the spoilage.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

How does the planet sustain itself before the engineer arrives to make nutrients?

*sense snipped for brevity*
Well, biochambers that consume 100,000 calories of food per second aren't exactly natural on the planet.

You're not just making basic foodstuffs. Each nutrient item is nearly half of a million calories packaged in a way meant for nearly instant digestion.

The engineer is essentially a humanoid. 10,000 calories in one sitting is a bit over the max the best competitive eater has been able to manage. Instantly trying to digest half a million calories would kill you.

I don't understand the response?

The point was that Nutrients are about satisfying massive energy requirements of a biochamber. They're not really something for consideration on the topic of the planet sustaining itself, because as you imply, nothing on the planet is going to eat anywhere near that much food.

If it's the numbers themselves confusing you, I'm taking the in-game numbers and converting Joules to Calories.

Game biospheres are notoriously implausible across the board, but this particular question against it doesn't really stick.

(even if the numbers were smaller the point about nutrients being for feeding artificial buildings would still stand, but the numbers as they are make it that much clearer)

(I'm responding to this specific point because I've seen a few times in the past people having lore issues related to thinking of Nutrients as normal foodstuffs)

(P.S. fixed the quote for you)

[Galileus]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The engineer is essentially a humanoid. 10,000 calories in one sitting is a bit over the max the best competitive eater has been able to manage.

So, the record for competitive eaters is a little more than two averagely sized strawberries.

When trying to be a smartbutt, try not to mistake your cal with kcal.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

The time pressure comes from nutrients spoiling so fast.

Nutrient freshness is irrelevant for anything other than trying to putting nutrients in machines as inputs/fuel before they spoil. Their freshness has literally no other impact:

• Every recipe that consumes Nutrients is either for a product that doesn't spoil, or for a product that is always created with a full spoil timer
  
• They have the full 2.0 MJ fuel value no matter how full the spoil timer is

I actually wanted to elaborate on this.

Most of the descriptions of complaints about "time pressure" people give are related to Agricultural Science, since that loses science value as it spoils, and loss to the spoil timers on most of the items in the production chain are relevant: yumako, jellynut, mash, jelly, bioflux, and pentapod egg. With mash and jelly having the most significant because of their very short spoil timers. And, I suppose, eggs too since they are short and part of the final recipe... although the danger they pose means that almost everyone processes those quickly.

So, there is concrete reward for optimizing the production chain to reduce hits to the spoil timer, and people report being stressed out about it in various ways, but there still plenty space to be functional even if you don't put massive effort into the optimization.

As an aside: if you are using fresh pentapod eggs, then from the way I understand how things average, no matter how spoiled your bioflux is your science packs should still be created with their spoil timer at least half full.

-----

The nutrients cycle, however, is separate from that, for the aforementioned reasons. The spoil timer only affects the lifetime for which a Nutrients item can be used as fuel (or ingredient). And since it is a critical resource, the impact is that designs need to maintain a minimum level of consistency in their operation, and interruptions in service cannot* be hidden via large storage buffers.

*: Well, high quality nutrients extend the spoil timer to give you more leeway on this.

So there is some time pressure here, but of a very different nature: there is no push to be quick. You have a window in which the Nutrients item needs to be delivered, but you can deliver it any time within the allotted window.

------

So if we're going to break down analyze player's experiences, we're almost certainly going to need to be able to separate these two aspects to how the gameplay works.

[MAX]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

1. You don't really need a Gleba tutorial if the idea behind the planet is solving the puzzle. Just reload your save.

Although people signed up for solving puzzles, not everyone likes the idea of time pressure.

Load the save is easier said than done. It's fine if the jam happened under the player's watch. But too often, this happens while the player was busy working on something else. By the time the player found it out, they may be looking at losing hours of game time if they were to reload, or suck it up and go to Gleba and clean up the spoilage. Needless to say, neither is an attractive option.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The thing that would be helpful for the first play through is something in game somewhere that warns you that Gleba is not the best first planet to go to.

I hardly agree. The game should provide the information for the player to make that decision, not telling the player "this isn't the best for you".

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The time pressure comes from nutrients spoiling so fast. They spoil faster than the ingredients they are made from and there's no real rhyme or reason to the spoilage timers and the products they are associated with. Fruit lasts a long time. Mash and jelly spoil quickly. Mash and jelly make bioflux which lasts a long time. Bioflux makes nutrients that spoil quickly. The other potential solution would be if you could make everything on Gleba in assemblers instead of biochambers. You would still have spoilage but not nearly as much.

Not all recipe can be made in assemblers, so there's no way to avoid nutrients. Plus, the player will have a much bigger problem with pollution and enemy attacks if they go down that route.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The only reason for that is to construct an artificial challenge that isn't a real challenge its mainly an irritant. A tutorial won't fix that. End game tech that lets you modify the spoilage mechanic would and it would give you a real goal to strive for.

That will ruin Gleba for me. I really like the challenge of getting the freshest possible science packs into the labs. It's a combination of site location choice, factory design and logistic. There's also an additional challenge of handling switching research without meaningfully causing the SPM to dip. If there's some sort of end game research to slow down or even disable spoilage, all the fun challenge will be gone too.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Iron and copper bacteria are also rather silly especially as presented. Iron bacteria is an IRL thing on Earth but it takes over a year for it to grow. Copper bacteria is fiction. Which brings up the other thing that has been gnawing at the back of my mind since the expansion dropped. How does the planet sustain itself before the engineer arrives to make nutrients? The trees aren't self seeding, you don't pick fruit, you cut the trees down to get fruit. This creates spores that cause the pentapods to attack. There shouldn't be any trees on Gleba. The first time a pentapod brushed against one its should have gone into a frenzy and destroyed all the trees. Bacteria has the same issue since it doesn't self propagate. The pentapods should have stomped all of it into oblivion before the engineer ever arrived.

Should I remind you that real world small power poles can't transmit gigawatts of power, pipes don't teleport fluid, transport belts aren't perpetual motion machines?
This is a game, not a real world simulator. And we also shouldn't expected it to be. If being realistic in some areas improves the player experience, the game will try its best to be realistic. But if being realistic in some areas damages the player experience, you can guess which one the game developers will choose.

[MAX]

Originally posted by Micheal:

Gleba is the reason I quit playing. And yes I played the other planets first, the volacno and lightning planet were both completed and their science.

Actually, I would like to hear from people like you. In your opinion, without changing the actual game mechanism, how can the game best prepare you for the challenge, and make it less off putting?

[MAX]

Originally posted by dynalon:

Problem of Gleba is psychological and mostly self inflicted. People are unable to take a step back and reevaluate habits they built after dozens or hundreds of hours in factorio. Opinion that Gleba sucks is just voice of small minority of players. People don’t go to forums to praise things they loved about planets or other aspects of the game.
If people were quitting space age because of Gleba then it would most likely reflect in reviews, yet recent reviews are 80% positive and overall is 93% positive.
No matter what you do, you can never satisfy everyone and this is especially true if you try to target large and diverse player base.

I can't say it's psychological and self inflicted. When I first played on Gleba, I suffered too. I designed and tested the factory in the editor mode and built it in real game, only to found out that some thing I overlooked can cause cascading failures, and the whole factory is then without power and filled with spoilage. It had happened a handful of times, for different reasons, and each time I had to jump start the whole base from scratch. It gave me hell a lot of headache. I ended up putting a lots of programmable speakers on Gleba for monitoring and alert on all sorts of things to prevent similar events from ever happening again.
It was a steep learning curve. I wish there was better tips and helps, in particular a tutorial style sandbox environment, so I don't need to rely on editor mode to learn.

[MAX]

Originally posted by Mad Gnome:

Too many players cry about Gleba because it's a different challenge than before and they can't simply do the exact same thing over and over.

I don't think that's the (only) reason. Using Fulgora as an example. To produce something like plastic bars or batteries on Fulgora, there will be a very large quantity of undesirable byproducts needs to be dealt with. That's very different than the vanilla game. However, how often do we hear people complaining about Fulgora?

[MAX]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Most of the descriptions of complaints about "time pressure" people give are related to Agricultural Science, since that loses science value as it spoils, and loss to the spoil timers on most of the items in the production chain are relevant: yumako, jellynut, mash, jelly, bioflux, and pentapod egg. With mash and jelly having the most significant because of their very short spoil timers. And, I suppose, eggs too since they are short and part of the final recipe... although the danger they pose means that almost everyone processes those quickly.

So, there is concrete reward for optimizing the production chain to reduce hits to the spoil timer, and people report being stressed out about it in various ways, but there still plenty space to be functional even if you don't put massive effort into the optimization.

As an aside: if you are using fresh pentapod eggs, then from the way I understand how things average, no matter how spoiled your bioflux is your science packs should still be created with their spoil timer at least half full.

From my personal experience and my observation of new players on Youtube, the time pressure is not the freshness of the science pack, but the troubleshooting of the factory when things gone wrong. I have not seen any new player overly concerned that their science packs are only 60% fresh by the time it arrives at the labs. But troubleshooting is a whole different picture.

On other planets, when the production has stopped, it doesn't matters the player spend 1 minute or 1 hour to find the problem and fix it, the amount of work required to fix the issue doesn't change. But on Gleba, fixing it in 1 minute means no need to clear out all the belts and chests, no need to manually feed the power plants, and no need to restart nutrients production from spoilage. Fixing it in 1 hour? Not so much fun.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by MAX:

Should I remind you that real world small power poles can't transmit gigawatts of power, pipes don't teleport fluid, transport belts aren't perpetual motion machines?
This is a game, not a real world simulator. And we also shouldn't expected it to be. If being realistic in some areas improves the player experience, the game will try its best to be realistic. But if being realistic in some areas damages the player experience, you can guess which one the game developers will choose.

All very tired and worn out excuses. Some things you can ignore for game mechanics reasons others are simply too far beyond the limits especially if a reasonable solution is present in game but isn't utilized for some vague reason of 'challenge'. Having a planet based entirely around refrigeration while being unable to utilize refrigeration tech on another planet for a species of humanoid that uses advanced tech like infinity backpack, perpetual motion belts, and instant assembler 'just add air' is just a bit too much of a stretch.

Originally posted by MAX:

Originally posted by Micheal:

Gleba is the reason I quit playing. And yes I played the other planets first, the volacno and lightning planet were both completed and their science.

Actually, I would like to hear from people like you. In your opinion, without changing the actual game mechanism, how can the game best prepare you for the challenge, and make it less off putting?

My wife and our teammates quit at Gleba. I can tell you what her response is to that question because I asked her when she quit:

"You can't make the planet less off putting without changing the mechanics and especially the graphics. The most fun for me on Nauvis was exploring, finding new resource patches, setting up defenses, clearing out nests for expansions, and setting up new mining outposts.

On Vulcanus I got to explore, I had to figure out how to handle demolishers, and got to set up new mining outposts.

On Fulgora exploring was especially important. I needed to find small islands with lots of scrap, large islands with enough room to build on close enough to a medium island that could be reached with a large power pole. The machines would go on the large island, the accumulators to run them would go on the medium. Every large island that produced got rocket silos to export things. The central island for imports was a train hub and the cargo bay. No enemies there but I still had enough fun stuff to do. I ran miles and miles of rails all over the planet.

On Gleba it was hard on may eyes, hard to figure out where and what resources were. There was no reason to explore. Everything was located within view of the drop zone and the few radars I put out. Pentapods go over walls so I didn't get to do anything with dragon's teeth. Once I set up the tesla turrets and the flame throwers around the perimeter I had nothing else to do except clear out spoilage from clogged belts while banks of machines were being produced and laid out. If the too short spoilage timers had been longer. like 30 minutes instead of 5, it would have been different and I might have been able to ignore the graphics and lack of exploration and gritted my teeth until we finished the ag tech tree. I could tell I wouldn't have anything fun to do on Gleba later in the game either. We wouldn't have to expand. All we would have to do is keep upgrading quality on the machines.

Aquillo was going to be the same from what I read. No enemies to fight there either. No challenge in exploring plus annoying to set up.

Shattered planet was going to be designing a huge platform which wasn't all that interesting, less interesting even than the smaller inner planet platforms I made. Even though the platform moves there's no real exploring going on. The resources come to you instead of the other way around and dealing with asteroids is just having the right turrets in the right places, targeting the right size asteroids. No resources to find and mark, no mining outpost to set up. It would have been more fun if instead of designing a bunch of different platforms you rode the rockets you built in the silos to huge asteroids that you set up mines on. That would have been better.

Nauvis, Vulcanus, and Fulgora were Factorio. Once we got to Gleba the game wasn't Factorio any more. It was some factory farm sim hybrid and it wasn't fun any more. Farming sims are boring."