Factorio Space Age: Gleba
Factorio Space Age: Gleba
Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.
Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.
-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters
There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).
So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.
Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)
As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.
Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.
-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad
From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.
So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.
But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.
However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.
So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.
-Spore efficiency maximization
One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).
Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.
Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.
Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.
Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)
How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)
-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”
This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.
Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)
More Posts from Thesassymarquess and Others
Gabriel: If i put the word ‘Dark’ in front of that, will i still be able to transform?
Nooroo: …yes i suppose?
Gabriel: …Cool
What is it about mice with swords that is so dang appealing
Dimension 52
(View the other chapters here [Chapter 1])
Chapter 2:
Another unexpected terrain... just as he’d predicted. Ford took a cursory glance around. At this point he was at dimension 4, and he still felt no closer to home. In fact, Ford felt like he’d managed to get further away this time. He stood in a forest full of white trees with pink leaves. Though the leaves were more similar to cotton in texture.
Ford scowled at his bad luck. At this point it seemed that with each random jump he made, he only got further and further away from home. He checked his log that he’d been recording the days on. “What! I’ve been gone for an entire YEAR now!”
Thinking back on this, it actually felt like he’d been gone for an even longer period of time than that. And yet despite all this time he spent wandering between dimensions, he was still hopelessly lost. “After all I’ve never seen any biology like this!”
“And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen biology like yours.” A sweet bubbly voice responded.
Ford turned around, he’d figured that he was alone initially, but he’d been so wrapped up in thought that he hadn’t noticed a figure approach him from behind. She was about Ford’s height level, and dressed entirely in pink. In fact she was entirely pink, excluding a golden crown with a bluish spherical gem sitting on her head. She looked fairly regal, with a long fancy pink dress, and long pink hair. If Ford had to guess her age, he’d say somewhere around her early twenties. She seemed to radiate kindness, however Ford knew that appearances could be deceiving. After all, he’d learned that the hard way recently.
“So will you tell me who you are?” She was pointing some kind of scanner at him, or at least that’s what he assumed it was.
“I’m just a traveler who’s a bit lost at the moment.”
“Oh, really?” She said with an icy tone. “Where are you from?”
“Oh it’s a bit far away from here, I doubt you’ve heard of it.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re from Ooo, or anywhere nearby.”
Ford didn’t know where this Ooo was, so he felt even more lost than before. He was positive that this lady didn’t trust him, and knew that this wouldn’t end well unless he could turn it around quickly. What was there to talk about that he could use as a diversion. He could ask about the trees, though that might not work, she seemed suspicious about him for his earlier comments. He could try asking about why she is pink, though that might be offensive. Or he could try asking about that device in her ha-
“Are you a human?”
Well that one cut him a quite off guard. Is this one of those dimensions where the sentient lifeforms EAT humans?! This could go real south real fast if it was. Then again, if it was she’d probably already have captured him. He supposed in this situation he could tell the truth without having to worry, at least not quite as much.
“Yes, I’m a human, and my name is Stanford Pines.”
“Greetings Stanford, I am Princess Bubblegum, ruler of the Candy Kingdom. Where do you come from?” Her tone had calmed down for a moment. However, when she asked where he was from the force was back in her voice.
So she was a princess? That would fit with her attire. He wondered if bubblegum was just a surname, if she was actually made of bubblegum, or both. After all, for all he knew these trees could be made of cotton candy. With a name like the Candy Kingdom, that was a fairly valid assumption to make.
Ford was pretty sure that Princess Bubblegum wouldn’t exactly know where he’s from. He’d have to dodge the question somehow.
“As I’m sure you know, I’m not from around here. So out of curiosity, are humans exceedingly rare around here?”
“Well yes, actually. You’re the first human I’ve seen in a long time. I thought that they’d gone extinct.”
“WHAT! REALLY!”
Despite Ford’s shock, he quickly realized that after all his traveling, he’d be bound to hit some kind of world without humans. He just didn’t expect to hit one where they’d died out only recently. He recovered fairly quickly, and followed up with another question.
“So what’s that thing you’re holding?”
She looked down at the device in her hands and then back at him. “Well it’s kind of a weirdness detector. Or at least that’s what I like to call it.”
Well that explained how she managed to find him. He must be setting that thing off like crazy. Of course the study of weirdness and other such similar sciences was Ford’s specialty.
“Oh well, how does it work? Does it detect residual traces of abnormal tachyon frequencies or spacetime ripples?”
From what Ford could tell he’d accomplished his goal of throwing her off her investigative trail. She hopefully wouldn’t push for any more information about where he was from until he was sure she either wouldn’t think he was crazy, or he knew that he could trust her.
“No, no, it actually works off of a fairly advanced simulation of realistic behavior using some complex equations I wrote and compares whether or not the simulation and the real world match.”
Ford could tell that he’d be able to have quite the interesting conversation with this woman.
“Why don’t you try using…”
“So you’re from another dimension?” Princess Bubblegum inquired.
They’d left the forest a while ago and were now sitting up in Bubblegum’s lab discussing Ford’s situation over cups of tea.
“Yes, and I’ve been trying to find my way home ever since. Do you know of any possible ways I could possibly try getting back to my dimension? I’d rather not hop randomly around on the offchance I end up in too hostile of a dimension.”
“Would you know how to find your dimension if we could open up a link? I know that in the land of Ooo there exist many powerful objects capable of opening a portal, but they all tend to be one-way.”
Ugh. Of course he can’t just take the simple way. They can potentially control where they open the portal too, but they can’t actually find which one is his.
“Sadly, no. I don’t know which dimension is mine so I’d just be back to square one.”
“Fortunately I’ve got a plan B. You see there’s a special dimensional room known as Prismo’s time room. Anyone who enters there can make a single wish. Of course be warned that his wishes all come with some form of twist or something so be very careful of what you wish for. I’m sure he’ll explain it to you if you just ask nicely.”
“Okay, so all I need to do is to properly phrase a wish to get back to my home dimension, and he’ll do it?”
“Yep. He’ll take care of the rest for you.”
“The challenge now is, how are we going to get there?”
“Leave that to me, I’ve got an idea of where an artifact is that can get you there.”
“When you said it was in a dungeon I thought it meant one of the ones in YOUR castle, NOT someone else’s rotting booby-trapped nightmare!” Ford yelled as he ducked beneath a swinging sword. He and Bubblegum had entered a dungeon hidden in a slightly less sweet forest nearby. He’d entered with pretty much just a stick in his hands, and she’d walked in with some kind of duffel bag. They’d been traveling deeper and deeper into the dungeon when they’d run into yet another group of walking skeletons. These ones had been guarding a hallway leading to a flight of stairs. Bubblegum had already defeated two of the three skeletons and Ford had been distracting the last one while she reloaded. She got in a blast with what she referred to as her “Ball-Blam-Burglerber.” Honestly Ford had no idea what the real name of it was, but he understood that it was basically some kind of grenade launcher. Whatever it was he ducked out of the way as the ball exploded.
“Can you give me a warning when you’re about to fire that thing in my direction!?”
“Sorry about that. Here take this, it’ll make it easier on both of us if we’re equally armed.”
Ford picked up the weapon she’d tossed to him. It seemed to be some kind of gun but there was a plasma globe right where the barrel would normally be. He picked it up and followed her down the stairs to a new room in the dungeon. They came into a stone lined chamber that was seemingly empty except for a set of locked double doors sitting across the chamber from them. Bubblegum immediately set to work picking the lock.
“What exactly does this do?”
“It’s my electrode gun. I cranked up the charge, it should be able to fry what’s left of those skeletons.”
“Okay, and what about that artifact that we came here for?”
“The Traveler’s Stone? What about it?”
“How does it work?”
“I think you just pick it up or something. I’ve never used it before.”
“Well, I –“
Ford was cut off by the click of the lock. Princess Bubblegum pushed the doors open and in front of them stood about twenty skeletons. Bubblegum whipped out her Ball Blam Whatever, Ford pulled out his weapon and the two of them opened fire. They took down most of the initial skeletons and the few stragglers left behind were either finished off in hand-to-hand against Bubblegum or blasted by Ford.
“Whew- I really wish I knew how to fight like that. Might be useful if I can’t get home right away.” Even if he does then it still might be useful Ford thought. After all he could give his brother a nice right hook for what he did.
“I could teach you if you really wanted to learn. After all we have the Traveler’s Stone now, and we’ve got plenty of time on our hands.”
“I suppose I don’t have to leave quite yet.”
Princess Bubblegum hefted up the stone and threw it in her duffel bag.
“In that case, let’s head back to my castle. I can give you some basic combat training along with some practice with my other weapons. Perhaps you can even design something of your own.”
As he walked out of the dungeon and back to the castle he had a chance to appreciate that for once in this entire ordeal he’d had a bit of good fortune.
…
[Chapter 3]
Honestly one of my favorite Sonic Games. Each one of the Advance trilogy games feel extremely different and hit a different aspect of Sonic. Sonic Advance 1 is the best platformer of the three, but Sonic Advance 2 feels the fastest. There’s a constant emphasis on speed in a way neither 1 or 3 hit. It rewards flying through the stages and has less speed traps than most of the other ones, though I admit Hot Crater Zone’s speed trap got me a few times when I was younger. Sure “Just hold D-Pad right to win” but there was more to it than that. It still holds up to me imo, and I’m lucky enough to still have two working GBA’s and a Battle Connector. The Boss fights are also unique in a way I haven’t seen except in a few final fights in the Boost era. I admittedly was surprised but quickly got into the swing of them, and find them quite fun. In addition the physics of the trilogy were my favorite, and the only physics I like as much are either classic Sonic, or Mania.
My only complaint with the game itself is how hard it was to unlock Amy, and her control scheme. Get all 7 chaos emeralds 4 times as all characters was way too hard for me when I picked it up, it took me until 2020 or so to FINALLY unlock her, and… I found I preferred her control in Sonic Advance 1…
I think the whole series is underrated and overlooked by the rest of the fandom. I’m pretty sure it’s “Adventure Era” but I rarely see anyone talk about them, especially weird since I see a LOT of talk about Sonic Rush, which is essentially Sonic Advance 4, and while I love Rush… the Trilogy plays better and I personally loved being able to play as Sonic AND his friends.
Tl;dr: This is one of the Sonic Games of All Time, and matches with the Classic Series energy in the Adventure Era
Opinions on Sonic Advance 2?
me at the migrants arriving to my fort
This hit way to close to home to me (I had a discussion with a friend of mine where I pointed out a small flaw in a headcannon with evidence from a single episode, but when called didn’t want to have to go searching and prove I was right like an asshole).
Being overly-familiar with a series is such a weird burden sometimes because like
you’ll see some theory being passed around that you instantly know is wrong. Like it’s surprising to see people supporting it because the flaws in its logic are so glaringly obvious. Until it hits you that, yeah it’s wrong, but only because you were able to immediately remember the 5 second conversation between two background characters 17 minutes through s2e13 that definitively disproves it. And no casual fan would have any reason to remember that off the top of their head and it’s you who’s the weird human encyclopedia with a shot-for-shot memory the entire damn series.
Like at that point you don’t even know anymore whether to argue your point or just…maybe go outside for a little bit.
From that time I opened a sulfur geyser in a oil biome, with a magma leak. Also featuring molten lead because I decided to just keep cranking up the heat so I could double my lead extraction from here.
The Video Facial Discussion
Dib sat in front of his computer. He checked the time again, 3:37 PM, or 15:37 as they insisted upon measuring it. Honestly Dib actually did kind of prefer using military time as a system of measurement. It did result in notably less confusion than the standard everyone else went by. It helped to further reduce confusion when you worked the same hours that Dib did. In fact over the past week, Dib had spent arguably just as much time awake at night, as he did during the day, perhaps even more. He felt close to a breakthrough, though he wasn’t exactly sure on what. Regardless the time had come for another one of his progress reports, or “Verifiable Factual Debriefings” as they insisted upon calling it. Honestly he never quite understood all of the insistance of this repetition of these acronyms. Everywhere he seemed to look it was “VFD” this, “VFD” that. If they could figure out some way of phrasing it as a VFD they did. He honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t just call it a video-conference or something. If anything, at this point the insistence on the VFD was more debilitating than anything else.
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A blog about colony management simulators apparently nowadays. Used to do some fan stuff back in the day, but haven't in a long time. Mostly about Dwarf Fortress right now. Might also feature Oxygen Not Included or Deep Rock Galactic
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