[jswelker]

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

[fabian2k]

I don't think the developers promised more here, but the community might have overhyped itself as it is common. It's still a very solid .1 release, the improvements to space logistics and platform building are very nice. There's also a whole bunch of really nice circuit additions.

Gleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.

It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.

[wronex]

I’ve heard the Gleba gripe in many places but I don’t understand what people are frustrated about. I really liked the challenge. Care to elaborate?

[OnionBlender]

My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.

[tekla]

People don't like Gleba because it forces you to play differently and not just re-do the optimized builds over again.

[ssl-3]

Gleba introduces things like spoilage.

That makes production more interesting: On other planets (or Factorio 1.x), a belt can generally get backed up and that's no big deal. In fact, it's a useful game mechanic: Decreased demand is followed up (eventually) by decreased production. With this feedback, things tend to balance themselves well-enough that the game doesn't stall.

On Gleba, though? A backed up belt means more spoilage, which I liken to trash. That trash needs to be dealt with somehow -- whether burned or converted to nutrients or whatever, it's a problem that accumulates unless it is dealt with.

So it ultimately becomes necessary to find new (for the player) ways to limit production so that there's less trash and fresher ingredients for the stuff made on Gleba. That's is a new mechanic that I'm sure that some people find fun, but some folks just don't seem to like very much at all.

I don't mind playing on Gleba, per se, but those parts are annoying to me.

So I'm pretty lazy about it: My waste management system is centered around purple chests and a continuous flurry of bots. My production limits sometimes don't exist. I make up for this lazy play style with artillery, which Vulcanus is profoundly excellent at producing.

(Vulcanus, in turn, is often oil-starved so exporting with rockets might sound expensive. But I have tankers that bring in oil from the bottomless seas of Fulgora, which themselves become efficient with a small amount of productivity research. Dealing with the thousands of empty barrels that this requires has its own challenges, but that's just Factorio things and I enjoy working on this part more than I do finding tidy ways to sort garbage on Gleba.)

[fabian2k]

Limiting production is probably the most difficult way to play Gleba. The easier way is to minimize buffers and have a path to extract spoilage at every position where it could accumulate. And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.

[ssl-3]

> The easier way is to minimize buffers and have a path to extract spoilage at every position where it could accumulate.

I do that. It's annoying to me. I don't like being feeling annoyed by computer games; being annoyed is not one of my kinks.

> And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.

So burn more stuff -> bigger spore clouds -> even more enemies -> more violence?

eg, always produce fruit as fast as the swamp can muster, and just always burn all excess as soon as it is possible to do so?

[fabian2k]

You never want to burn fruit itself since that wastes the seeds. So you always want to process fruit the first step.

I limit fruit production based on the number of fruit on the belt, to avoid creating a huge buffer. But after that the factory just runs continuously at the same speed. And if I have too much of a final product, it gets destroyed or burned for heat and electricity.

One benefit, especially in the beginning, is that by processing more fruit you get more seeds. And you need the seeds to expand your fruit production later.

The enemies are probably one of the not ideally designed parts of Gleba. It's trivial to handle them if you know how, and can be very frustrating if you try to approach it the "wrong" way. If you have been to Vulcanus and Fulgora you can trivialize their threat.

[jswelker]

Hey man thems fighting words. I like doing different builds but hate feeling rushed with a nonstop ticking clock on an otherwise chill building game.

[rkuykendall-com]

It's the opposite really! On Gleba, you are subsisting on an infinitely fertile river. On one end, the resources flow for ever and ever. On the other end, the resources burn for ever and ever. In the middle, you create whatever you want, for free, for ever and ever. Do not disturb the flow, but draw from it and feed into it. This is a zen of Gleba.

[jswelker]

Just make sure you bring many artillery shells and Tesla turrets for extra zen.

[laughing_man]

Also, Gleba's fauna presents some new challenges. They're a lot harder to deal with than biters.

[lowbloodsugar]

Its not gleba i mind so much as the impact of spoilage. We could have the interesting effects of spoilage on the factory, without the impact of spoilage on transportation. End products, like science, shouldn't spoil. We can put eggs in a Biochamber, and then put that biochamber in our pocket and it doesn't spoil. Huh. And then we can take that egg out of the biochamber, unspoiled. But we can't put eggs in a crate and have them not spoil. Tedious.

[laughing_man]

You can store eggs by making foundation and then recycling it when you need the egg. It's kind of... lame.

[jswelker]

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

[Cpoll]

Totally agree. I tried the JIT approach; I could never get it to work, and I've never seen anyone else do it either. The wisdom has always been to keep everything flowing and accept spoilage (or kludge it with lots of bots and then move on). This patch makes it a more feasible, I think.

I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.

[vantassell]

I just use small buffers. I don't know if that's technically JIT or not, but a smaller restricted buffer with high throughput works great for me.

> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.

[bigstrat2003]

I'll be honest: I don't like Space Age. It seems like the developers were focused on providing entirely new types of logistics challenges to solve, but I didn't want that. I wanted things which were fairly natural extensions of the existing logistics challenges, fresh but not too different. The only part of the expansion I enjoy is Vulcanus, everything else doesn't feel like Factorio any more to me.

[brianwawok]

I love it. Sad that we aren’t to expect another DLC

[rkuykendall-com]

> the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles

Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.

[robotnikman]

Gleba was the only planet I really struggled with getting started on, mainly due to the spoilage mechanic. Felt like I was always manually 'jump starting' things at first because something got spoiled and stuck somewhere. Once I finally got a good production loop going though things got much easier.

The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products

[zer00eyz]

> And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...

Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...

[lowbloodsugar]

Quality mechanic is just broken as gameplay and broken as worldbuilding. Ford doesn't make a Lincoln by recycling 4000 Ford SUVs until they get a Lincoln SUV by change. It is stupid and tedious. Now even more stupid and tedious with the asteroid fix. Fortunately there are mods to just make normal things have the same stats as legendary. Also spoilage isn't fun, and the workaround of converting eggs into Q3 modules and recycling them later back into living eggs just undermines any argument against refigeration or other preservation tech. But hey, mods!

[vitally3643]

I was so disappointed to unlock fusion the first time. The complexity seemed interesting at first but the power it produces just wasn't worth my time.

[terrelln]

Fusion is so useful though. It is easy to set up on ships because it requires no consumables other than the fuel cells, and it has a small footprint. It is easy to set up power on all planets by stamping down a blueprint, and requires minimal resources shipped to them. If you're not expanding the factory, you probably already have a setup that works, so I can see why it would feel useless. But, when you want to double, or 10x your power consumption, fusion makes it easy.

[laughing_man]

The real problem with fusion is it comes so late in the game that it's mostly useless if you're planning to stop when you get the victory screen.