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My Factorio: Space Age playthrough hit a brick wall at Gleba. This will not become an industrial hub. It took forever but I finally got some iron and copper production going that doesn't stall out constantly. Now I'm just trying to get the bare minimum going to build a launch pad and start shipping out research. I'm importing all my belts, drones, solar panels, etc from Vulcanus, and I give zero fucks about that. I haven't really had to build any defenses yet, but I can see pentapods creeping closer on my radar. Big ones even. I got some turrets and ammo automated, but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats.
We managed to get to the victory screen this week. It came sooner than expected. We were sort of expecting to unlock some new secret technologies instead of the victory screen. We still have yet to do anything with promethean science packs.
I think in order to really do end game stuff I'm going to need to need to focus heavily on quality builds for a new ship. Or retrofit my existing massive ship. The sheer volume of asteroids in the outer system was overwhelming a blue belts ability to transport missiles. The flat front of the ship also had some vulnerability to asteroids clipping the sides.
But in order for the sheer quantity of stuff I'd want for quality builds, I'm gonna need to clear up more of the production on other planets.
Including plastic on Gleba, which is becoming a real limiter in getting enough quality red circuits. @No_one was brave in being the one to start our Gleba builds. But I think I need to make some of my own attempts, because I've seen the Gleba builds clogg up enough, and I have my own ideas about how to build a Gleba mega factory and it's different than his approach.
I think I want to build self contained mini factories. They take in the raw inputs, make their own necessary intermediate products and output final products. The benefit of this approach over sharing around intermediate products is that the intermediates tend to spoil the fastest of everything, and they tend to require the most in terms of bulk, so they fill up belts and then quickly spoil on those belts. The other benefit of this approach is I can just shut the whole mini factory down if there is enough end product on the logistics network. Rather than sending in a constant set of inputs that proceed to spoil and clogg up once the end storage or spoilage handlers are full.
Take a look at this: https://www.themotte.org/images/17324829035101736.webp
I'm making red/green research from ore, coal, and water. It's moderately impractical, but still cool.
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Ya have a bunch of setups like this on aquilo, and now maybe starting to do them on gleba
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A reference to https://youtube.com/watch?v=nCuf_O2xaw8&ab_channel=NT ?
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Gleba was by far the hardest planet for me, I got brain-burnt enough that I had to take a break for a couple of days. Works ok now though. Aquilo was somewhat simpler, and much less frantic.
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Gleba got us (me & cjet) pretty stumped for the first 3-4 hrs. Eventually I figured out the cursed mechanics and got something going. And yeah, we imported everything to start, power generation, tesla turrets etc.
I deleted everything I built on Gleba that researched the basic tree Ag-tech using stuff, and built a better base that's almost hands off. Took a good look at what I was doing, scaled it up, plugged every inserter into a combinator so resetting the filters on inserters is more convenient, because that's simply a must.
One mistake I made was running nutrients around the base. That's dumb - you run bioflux around and generate nutrients in each module. I feel ideally it should all be run around the base on a loop, I think I'll try that next time I'm rebuilding it.
Apart from that, one needs a really robust spoilage removal system. My second build usually gets clogged on spoilage removal. The nice thing is all the junk or unspent jelly or mash produces enough energy that my nuclear reactor is mostly just backup. The Heating tower has something like 400% efficiency for some bizarre reason. vastly better than boilers.
The one unsolved issue is how to avoid wastage and export only the choicest unspoiled flux. I'm thinking maybe running bioflux in a loop is the way to go so no more than needed gets generated.
As to defenses, we are at evolution 1.0 and spamming 4 rocket 16 normal turret firing positions, spaced 2 pylons apart works fine and stops every attack but gets half-stomped. If you add in a tesla turret that prevents the stomping altogether,just damages it. It's key to not taking losses without having vastly more rocket turrets. Don't think mines do anything to the stompers. Didn't try flamer turrets.
We never had really serious issues with the Gleba wildlife bc of early pruning and artillery.
They really could've made Gleba way messier by increasing the gravity. I'm even harvesting the fruits with drone, still no issues with power.
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Distant belt of land mines plus clearing a dead zone before you leave (maintaining it with artillery later, they're slower to re-expand than biters)
You definitely need a checklist of supplies to bring to have an easy time setting up there.
And never never never use solar there: check the stats. Burn trash in heating tower, heat exchanger, turbine. Split in your jelly->rocket fuel production on low prio so it burns trash before fuel.
Yeah, I dropped off with near everything I needed, plus a landing pad, and a ship to automatically ferry additional supplies. Basically the only thing I'm fabricating locally at the moment is repair packs, turrets and ammo. Valcunus has so much automated, and so much launch capacity, that it's simply not worth the frustration to do it all again with infinitely worse logistics thanks to things perishing, seeds needing to be sent back, spoilage getting sucked out of all the loops, etc.
The worst part starting out was I was constantly running out of seeds because I was processing the fruit and nuts with assemblers instead of biolabs. Oops. I didn't want to have to deal with even more loops for nutrition and spoilage, but it turns out you only are seed positive if you process in biolabs. With that problem sorted I'm finally growing the factory to my satisfaction and getting into the pre-requisites for launching rockets. Still going to need a lot more harvest spots though.
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