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Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's Factorio but more, where each flavor of "more" is different in its own way. If the base game came out in the early 2000's, the DLC would be one of those really good expansions whose purchase would be thoroughly justified, like TA: Core Contingency or SC: Brood War.

I cobbled together a space platform and set forth. Thoroughly underestimated my fuel and ammo needs and got smashed to bits by asteroids while traveling. Now I'm stuck on a volcanic hellscape where none of the production chains make sense, I didn't bring enough stuff, my base back home isn't really set up for remote construction, and I'm having a great time.

Vulcanus is actually the best place to end up stranded on, you got very lucky there. There are almost no threats to worry about and you have easy access to an almost infinite amount of every resource (except for uranium). Gleba is the actual hell-planet.

I didn't play it in this game but it's lovely looking at it.

Infinite power. Infinite minerals. 50% productivity smelters. You can pipe liquid metal everywhere. You can easily fill out a belt with basic metal components.

What else do you need ?

Gleba is really driving me nuts. Unless you do pure bot logistics, the entire thing is a nightmare to automate.

It's deeply irrational trying to do it, but the whole thing has so many edge cases. E.g. I converted all my spoiled vegetation into nutrients. But that means the mechanical nutrient cycle starter plants can't provide nutrients to even start everything else.

etc.

I really hate Gleba too. In hindsight, the biggest problem is you essentially have to beat the entire challenge before you get a reliable source of iron and copper. But you're going to get attacked regardless of whether you're doing well or not. There are other problems but the 'you're getting attacked and you have no good way to get bullets' is just an awful design decision.
In the end, I also went with the 'army of logistic bots' solution. I really wish there was some way to get future technologies without the Gleba science though, having to keep a space platform constantly running there and back is incredibly annoying.

Finally got it working.

Had to make the nutrient belt look whether all the fruit processing, flux making and nutrient making machines are running, and only then start feeding the rest of the factory. Sequence related issues, having to gate all the flows to parts unless they're working..

Screenshot

If I had to do it all over again, I'd leave more space between the segments, and also pre-install some belts.

Gleba is really OP if you get it to work, the amount of iron and copper you get from bacteria is nuts.

I deleted that mess (it worked but required babysitting) and remade it with bigger, better thought out modular parts.

Now it's almost attention free and keeps working.

Gleba is really good imo because stack inserters are godly. You can basically 4x the capacity of any belt. Incredible!

The enemies are no threat - they only appear if you're farming the trees hard enough.

Don't care about pollution - care about the spores.

I mean, you can automate the space platform. I dumped like 15k iron on Gleba purely working out the bugs on mine.

The real problem isn't the spoilage, it's that there's so many feedback loops needed.

And the issue is, if you let your fruit to spoil, you lose the seeds. If you lose the seeds, you lose possibility of sowing them. So.. Yeah.

This got me like 4x due to certain bugs. I've decided to, at the very least, used bots with fruits and seeds. The rest is nuts, the devs purposefully went with absurd amounts of stuff like nutrients to discourage botting.

In the end I decided that this kind of shit needs a modular approach - don't even want to deal with calculations, so I made small units that each does one thing and then just connect them together.

The outer loops is nutrients and waste removal, the straight-thrugh belt is the actual processing.

The issue is mainly that I the fruit cycles were unsynced, so sometimes it'd stop working bc one wasn't available in quantity.

I ended up just brute forcing via log bots, but I did read an interesting post on the subreddit that suggested a "main river" architecture (compared to the typical "main bus"): all spoilables go on a giant belt that ends with a bunch of heat towers where they're promptly incinerated for power. You pull from the river, process the material, feed the results back onto the river. The result is that all your spoilables are always fresh, the "river" never stops flowing, and you avoid any awkward clogs. Viewing Gleba as, basically, a flow system vs. the stock system you see on the other planets seems like it'd greatly simplify logistics. Personally I didn't build a single heat tower until Aquilo which is an obvious missed opportunity in retrospect.

Just burn it for electricity. I brought Tesla towers, they incinerate a megawatt each on standby. The giant crabs are not killable otherwise than rockets or electricity.

E.g. ?.

But you can process it all into carbon, which takes up less space and store it too. Even make coal out of it, really. Which you need to do anyway because of the giant crabs, which are very, very tough and armor-piercing rockets are really the only way to deal with them.

My current strategy for Gleba is to think about it later. I'm not yet sure if it's going to be fun or "fun", but I'm hoping for the former.

The only real difference is, instead of conveyor belts that end, you need loops.

Everything on Gleba except ore decays into spoilage, which can be processed, rapidly & inefficiently into nutrients, which all the bio-reactors need to work, or turned into carbon & explosives.

All you need to do. And ofc, all the bioreactors require removing spoilage and putting in nutrients. And since sometimes a lot of stuff can spoil, long-handed inserters aren't the best. Actually, why didn't I just interleave the shit out of it.

...play play play, write down something and figure out what's probably a way better solution.