It all works but feels wrong and dumb.
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.
> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.
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.
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...
Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.
I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc
It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.
You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441
To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.
When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.
That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.
Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.
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.)
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think
And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.
Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.
fooqux•3d ago
ivanjermakov•48m ago