I feel like I gave the Gleba start a pretty solid effort, but I'm throwing in the towel after making some good progress into green science. I enjoyed the Vulcanus and Fulgora experiences, but I want to reinforce what others before me have said: Pentapods just are not anywhere close to balanced for starting a base from nothing. I feel like I could power through and get to space, but I'm having a hard time finding the fun.

Everything else about Gleba is fine. Logistics are challenging but manageable. I was able to get early power by hand-processing yumako and feeding the mash to a boiler and steam engine. I used mash to power early science, so I wouldn't miss seeds and have to travel far for more fruit. There's plenty of iron and copper in rocks to meet all your starting needs for smelting.

The pain starts when trying to find the first pentapod egg. Normally this is top priority when landing on Gleba, since everything depends on making biochambers. You need one egg for the first chamber, a second egg to make more eggs, and then you are off to the races. Except when starting on Gleba, even the smallest nests can spawn strafers, which you just can't solo with light armor, a machine gun, and a handful of unleveled ammo. I tried turret creep, but even with ten turrets, the strafe bombs picked away at their health faster than I could repair, while the strafer mostly stayed out of range. You need a ton of iron to have a shot, but you can't produce much iron until you already have biochambers, so it's a real chicken and egg problem. Eventually I resorted to kamikaze attacks. I managed to waste some turrets and take down one nest, then died, then repeatedly ran back and did multiple corpse runs in order to ferry the eggs to a safe spot before they could hatch. I tried hunting for easier nests, but only the first place I found was free of stompers, which are absolutely impossible to fight.

So I managed to stabilize once I got two eggs, but it took hours to set up a decent bioflux production line with yellow belts and yellow inserters. By the time I had decent iron production rolling (about half a yellow belt worth of ore) my cloud was expanding and I was going to have to deal with the stomper area. I tried tons of turrets, similar to killing vulcanus worms, I tried a car. Nothing makes a dent in those things without major firepower upgrades.

IMHO the Gleba start could be a bit of pleasure for the right kind of masochist, but the balance of pentapods currently puts it out of reach for non-hardcore gamers. I could reduce my production and just hide from the stompers for long enough to get blue science going, but, well... I don't wanna.

I understand this is a hobby mod and I really appreciate all the work you've put into it. It's a great way to inject some novelty into the beginning of the game, and I'm just a little frustrated that Gleba can't be made more manageable.