I'm trying to play a Gleba start with this mod + Visible Gleba. 4 hours in and I have (slow) automated production of iron and copper plates. It's rough.

Some difficulties:
- Building space. There isn't much land (that's not a swamp or a cliff) to build on.
- Enemies. They're tough when you don't have any weapon upgrades.
- Fuel - but the Sunnycomb and Cuttlepop cultivation helps a lot (the only use I've found for them really)
- Spoilage - getting rid of it reliably without a Heating Tower is hard
- Low-tech stuff: moving stuff around fast enough without belt or inserter upgrades is causing some bottlenecks; at least the Fast Inserter is available quite early

Recommendations:
- More land for building on please! Maybe I should have lowered the water coverage. Maybe I should try out Factorissimo.
- More stone please! I've never been so short on landfill.
- Don't underestimate Gleba without any tech upgrades!

Thanks:
- The huge amount of iron and copper nodules scattered around are the only thing that makes this viable
- The Sunnycomb and Cuttlepop cultivation is a great addition for early power; not sure how useful the other recipes are because it doesn't seem worth setting up a production line before Bioflux

Point by point thoughts:

Difficulties

• Minimal land to build on while you're on a high water setting is a restriction that's intentional to an extent; particularly without other mod pairings, refined concrete is crucial to get yourself additional work space (Dredgeworks makes it water-placeable and it is vastly more efficient than landfill when it comes to stone).

• I may attempt to rekerfuffle enemy balance on Gleba starts but doing so in a way that's agnostic to a particular Gleba-start mod might be tricky.

• Wood is your best fuel source (slightly better per-tile than cuttlepop, your other water cultivar option).

• Spoilage can be crafted into nutrients as an alternate early way to dump it; I typically use it to smelt the bacteria you receive from the pods, then excess into boilers, then excess after that is dumped with nutrients.

• Low-tech is a bit constrained for sure, but parallelization is a big help here.

Recommendations

• You'll want to build your own land, especially on high water settings. Refined concrete is BIG for this.

• There's stone around, you just need to go find it underwater. Cargo Ships is big for this, especially on high water settings; hard-focusing even one boat to go set up seafloor drills on a stone patch is big for stone supply.

• Yep.

Misc:

• Nodules are definitely a good kickstarter. Regarding the basic crop farms, since they have lower output per tile, you want to make as many of them as you can fit, because they can go anywhere there's soil or shallows - one approach to maximize your planting space is to make one tower handle planting both crops and output them on different sides of a belt. They're also great for supplies of basic resources to isolated areas without needing to have a dedicated logistic run for that item (say, you want iron to make refined concrete at a stone deposit, or ammunition at a chokepoint).

I've updated worldgen significantly in 0.4.0 to address a few of the issues you've raised here; prominently included are better highlands, particularly in the starting area, and bigger pentapod exclusion radius (less pressure on your starting area). Unfortunately, the new generation won't slot into existing saves, but there is backwards compatibility for 0.3.0-and-earlier world generation to let the save keep going if desired.

About six hours in on a new start things are going considerably better.

I do however still get the feeling that Gleba was never meant to be played this way: just getting reliable metal production at scale is hard.

What's also bonkers is that Yumako production is more important than Jellynut when producing iron thanks to the cultivation recipes being much more efficient than jelly-to-iron conversion (in terms of the number of biolabs required or the total resource input). It feels like the balance is off, especially since bioflux is available so early.

"The balance is off" is a tricky thing to nail down, honestly. The plant-anywhere crops are definitely supposed to be weaker in raw terms, and what I envisioned is expanding along the available landmasses and cultivating more area (both of the vanilla crops and the mod's ones), especially given you can build up as much of the mod's crops as you want for a shipment and they won't spoil; yumako being more crucial is more of a core Gleba thing, but feels a bit odd in the context of specifically a Gleba start.

If you have any thoughts on additional recipes or balance tweaks that would make things a little better, I'd be interested in hearing them out. Even if your idea doesn't end up being the right fit as-is, it could inspire other adjustments.

If you have any thoughts on additional recipes or balance tweaks that would make things a little better, I'd be interested in hearing them out. Even if your idea doesn't end up being the right fit as-is, it could inspire other adjustments.

The current balance: 1 yellow belt of iron / copper ore requires 6 biolabs running bacteria cultivation + a pair converting Jellynut/Yumako to bacteria to kick-start the cultivation; approx 156 Yumako + 63 Jellynut per minute. Not using cultivation requires 50 pairs of labs and 6000 raw Jellynut/Yumako per minute.

Idea 1: boost bacteria output of Jelly/Mash 10x to 1. Cultivation is still almost three times more resource-efficient but non-cultivation is actually viable.

Idea 2: boost bacteia output 20x. Remove cultivation. This makes iron/copper output directly proportional to raw input as well as making it easier to set up early production chains.

Idea 3: jelly/mash decay into new items (Jellyslime / Mashrot) which are then further processed to extract the iron/copper ore from spoilage (or can be burnt directly). Other Gleba recipes could be adapted somewhat too, maybe even allowing calcite extraction from Cuttlepoprot. But maybe this should be another mod entirely.

As you can tell, I don't like the Gleba recipes much, especially bacteria cultivation to produce more metals.

One thought I had was a biochamber recipe to combine a cuttlepop pod, an iron bacteria and three jelly to create a piece of "digested alloy" which smelts directly into steel (effectively 7.5 iron a production cycle, narrowly outcompeting the max yield from these ingredients processed into plain iron without foundries in play). Could alleviate iron pressure somewhat.

Also doing Gleba start, and wanted to add my experience after 2 hours:

I was looking at and adjusting starting settings and noticed that adjusting the starting area size did literally nothing in multiple map previews, and only moved one or two nests that weren't even the closest to the center of the map in a few of the other previews.

I got the new farming and such figured out pretty quickly, but trying to clear nests out of my immediate area so I had the same amount of room as I usually feel comfortable starting with... I had a few extra pistols after that.

It seems like something is making small rafts generate closer to the "starting area" that isn't affected by the sliders in the enemy tab.

There is; I checked even in vanilla, and the small egg rafts close to the spawn regardless of starting area seems to be a core feature. As they were fairly straightforward to tackle with a submachine gun and some supplementary drop-and-go turrets in my test playthrough, I didn't look into it beyond that, but [EDIT] it appears I may be able to make the starting enemies' distance scale with the enemy starting area size parameter, so I'll likely be doing something along that line in next update if I can figure it out.

In my second Gleba-start I found the enemies perfect: several small nests not an immediate problem but in the vicinity, and no regular nests nearby. You need some eggs early so don't remove all the nearby small nests.

I definitely intend not to remove them entirely. The idea is just letting the scalar influence how far away they are, if possible, for more customization to personal preference.

I also did AnyPlanetStart, so I hope it is OK to post here! Thanks for the mod, awesome to see a bit of a different take of this planet.

• Enemies, I tried to roll to get an island world but it was not really enough. I got stompers after a while and was not able to deal with them before having any bacteria setup ready and I had 0 ammo left for fighting and production was down due to attacks, so I ended up having to remove the stomper nests using /editor. Feels like I would want to focus more on just the Gleba mechanics without getting distracted. The pentapods are OK, but stompers are really a bit too much when having Gleba as starting planet.
• Fuel, I could not really figure out the wood and other burner recipes, seems like I got almost nothing back. I tried to burn spoilage instead after I got something set up
• For electricity, not sure what to do in the beginning since getting the heating tower is a bit difficult or even a storage tank for buffering is hard without the bacteria setup. I ended up manually adding/removing radars to increase electricity consumption to burn the spoilage. I did not find any way to automatically automatically connect/disconnect the radars based on any condition since I did not have tanks nor batteries.
• Map, not sure if it was just the map I rolled, but I got a lot of swamp around what I had thought was an island, so there were belts of enemies that I had thought were going to be clean/safe when I rolled

I think it was A LOT better than vanilla experience with AnyPlanetStart however, where I gave up entirely, so many thanks!

• Enemies/Map: If you want to be fully safe while you figure things out, you have to roll until you get a fully isolated starting island. I'd highly recommend it for Gleba starts, but I don't mandate it because the mod isn't Gleba start only.

• Fuel: Bacteria from basic crops and the spoilage you need to smelt them are fairly well-matched, so my approach in test scenarios was to simply use the majority of spoilage on the smelting lines and activate a belt out to a boiler (with plenty of inserters) if the spoilage backed up a lot.

• Electricity: It's advantageous to set up multiple dedicated agricultural towers exclusively for fuel. I personally did mixed towers (wood and sunnycomb) to use both land and shallows wherever the tower was placed, and sorted each item onto its own side of the belt, both feeding into boilers.

Thanks, perhaps sharing some good seeds that work well for Gleba start would be nice! Perhaps even put on the info page. Many thanks

Added some sample seeds in the info page.

2873620607

My current seed, and I think it starts with an island that only has two shallow water connections to other land mass and deep water everywhere else, and no egg rafts nearby
Had to travel for making biochambers, but I was able to prepare for said travel and acquisition with a machine gun and a few turrets this time, much easier.

• Spoilage: turn it into nutrients
• Electricity: build like half a dozen farming towers for Cuttlepop (lower spore production than Sunnycomb). At least it's easy to automate replanting since you don't need to return seeds. My electricity needs still weren't truly solved until I unlocked the Heating Tower.
• Yumako cultivation: not having enough ground to farm this is still my biggest problem.

For scaled-up cultivation of the high-yield crops, the medium-term plan (before overgrowth soil) is likely securing a new yumako farming plot "overseas" and shipping fruit back by boat. It lasts an hour after harvest, so you have a fair bit of leeway for processing it if your loading and unloading is prompt.

Additional note on Cuttlepop vs. Sunnycomb: They have identical spore pollution per produced "seed" / unit of time. Sunnycomb just cycles slower.

Just had Uranium mining research complete as soon as Ducts were finished researching from the "Fluid Must Flow" mod

And the game crashed

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1203077676290670602/1317411989235957790/unknown.png?ex=675e9706&is=675d4586&hm=eef8e6d44503f3d11aa7cd07a21139f5c63e9f199852b57cc22a74a49db72b12&

I am on experimental.

EDIT: it seems to be any time I mouse over the research window. Might be unrelated but it only starts causing problems after "researching" uranium mining by creating sulfuric acid

EDIT 2: it was Nuclear Science, the one adding uranium science to Norbert

Bug reports should go in a separate thread, with a mod list if you have mods besides ones named in the description page here.

fair enough

On topic though, it feels like the volatile resin should take 2 wood and 2 Sunnycomb. I'm supporting 500/s on one ag tower of each, and I'm pretty sure I could double that if I used a different source of steam than burning the wood/Sunnycomb.

Initial yield was 150 but I bumped it up in the interest of making resin supply reliably attainable at outposts without needing maxed productivity. You're getting (at baseline) "2.5 coal's worth of resin" from 2 agricultural product inputs, where 2 agricultural product inputs into the straight cuttlepop or sunnycomb processing would give you 4 ores' worth of bacteria plus the spoilage.

Ah, outposting.

The map string I'm on has plenty of room for fruit farmland on the starting island once getting seeds and the artificial soils going.

I'm going into the middle of a huge lake building plots for mass Sunnycomb and Cuttlepop farming, and shipping it via boat.

I will say, I'm already at medium stompers guarding the large egg rafts. I've gotten rockets automated but still a ways from rocket turrets.

I'm thinking I'm gonna cheese the Renai Transportation primer thrower inserters to use them with slowdown capsules and flamers as a early tesla turret effect

I have continued to play on Gleba, and I am getting a bit stuck since it does not seem possible at the point to extend yumako production beyond 5 towers with artificial soil, so I can not really increase production without going off the main island. The enemies are now pretty tough at evolution 0.56 and I am not really into fighting them toe-to-toe. I could also not find any "great" areas for Yumako production on the map. It would perhaps have been nice with another island that I could somehow clear and then get a decent chunk of yumako soil, but now it seems like yumako soil is pretty scarce and enemies are on connected belts of islands.

If I don't want to fight the enemies, it feels like my options are to either go to Nauvis to get overgrowth soil or to go to Vulcanus to get artillery. But if I go to another planet this early, it feels like I can just as well continue there since it is easy to scale production on either Nauvis and Vulcanus compared to Gleba. I was excited about building a sea empire on Gleba, but it feels like the balance is a bit off so it is not really rewarding to do this and it feels like the best strategy is still to escape Gleba as soon as possible. It feels like we need a reason to ship things by boats (only shipping stone now) and a reason to actually stay on Gleba and do this.

Any recommendations for staying on Gleba would be welcome. Can also share my save.

I am running on seed 4273849788 from info page with recommended settings.

I'd heavily recommend the Ironclad to deal with the issue of making landfall without offensive supplies from other planets; if the Ironclad's inadequate, that's definitely a bit of a conundrum. I've also been looking into adjusting pentapod balance to make it more approachable for Gleba starts, but pentapod strength is set up in a way that's unusually difficult to intercept with mods.

With regard to that specific seed, if the yumako wetlands to the west are a bit too contested you can sail north (past the west side of the dead marsh island) to reach an additional yumako wetland guarded only by a small egg raft and one medium raft a bit further north. I'd also suggest looking into some Defender robots for supplementary firepower.

I also have another thought on making things a bit nicer, which I'll be looking into shortly.

You can moat now!

I mentioned how the mortars are now underpowered compared to the buff cannon shells got in 2.0, hopefully it gets buffed and hopefully the bug with it's damage not being fully applied both get fixed soon

Also, I made a blueprint of a 6 tower farm plot out of reinforced concrete and undergrounds to maximize farming area, and made farm plots out in the middle of the oceans with landfill shipped from Vulcanus, that seemed to help me with my copper and iron supply, the slipstack agriculture is something I would recommend if you still want an ocean empire. Stone for landfill and such.

Thanks for the moat feature, will try it out!

For the things mentioned above about slipstack agriculture helping with copper and iron supply, I don't understand since slipstack agriculture seems to be about stone.

For the blueprint with concrete, what are you growing on that? I usually grow sunnycomb directly on reinforced concrete, which is a bit cheaty maybe.

I mentioned how the mortars are now underpowered compared to the buff cannon shells got in 2.0, hopefully it gets buffed and hopefully the bug with it's damage not being fully applied both get fixed soon

Good news on the bugfix front, at least! Direct damage bug got fixed real recently (2 days ago).

For the things mentioned above about slipstack agriculture helping with copper and iron supply, I don't understand since slipstack agriculture seems to be about stone.

I think they're just referring to liking it as a way to get sustainable stone instead of relying on the aquatic patches that can deplete.

For the blueprint with concrete, what are you growing on that? I usually grow sunnycomb directly on reinforced concrete, which is a bit cheaty maybe.

Sunnycomb growing on concrete is 100% unintended, but it's currently bugged on the game side (tile placement rules aren't being respected by agricultural towers) so it will continue until that bugfix arrives. I think in the above circumstance they're using the concrete to build the infrastructure for the planting towers (loading and unloading, belts, etc).

I use the concrete to hold the power poles and lights and belts, and the slipstack agriculture I meant as the way to get more stone without having to find another stone patch to suck dry just to expand to another stone patch to suck dry.

Also, if you want to consider a more end-game Gleba base, the Quality Seeds mod adds way too much IMO but the cultivators appear to save a lot of headache/space and allow you to control the spore release. I'm still figuring out how it works in conjunction, but the name "Cultivated Water Cane Cultivator" has a nice ring to it.

Ok right, yes finding new stone patches all the time is a bit distracting. On Nauvis things usually settle when you go to bigger patches some distance away and a bit of mining productivity but here it seems like patch size does not increase. I don't really feel that relocating mining to another 200k field every other hour is sustainable. I would very much prefer to extend or prolong the current patch in some way. I suppose in vanilla Gleba you don't need stone in the same way since you only really produce agricultural science on Gleba.

Is there any intention here from a game play mechanics perspective? I suppose our options are

• Continue constant relocation of mining operation
• Focus on mining productivity research
• Import from Vulcanus or Nauvis (but then again it is easer to import the finished science packs that require stone instead)
• Production modules in anything in the chains that depend on stone
• Install other mods to solve the issue like slipstack agriculture

I don't have a particular intention dialed in yet, besides that the patches mean you can "get off the ground", figuratively and literally; long-term, it makes sense to travel to Nauvis for biolab access, but that doesn't bear on current stone balance.

Is there a stone patch size you think might work better? No access to big drills for aquatic patches means I have a fair bit of headroom to increase patch richness before I start competing with other planets' stone; the general size I want to be targeting is "big enough to feel worthwhile to set up on, small enough to not compete with Nauvis' patches.

As a supplementary note, patch richness does indeed not increase with distance from the start right now, since Gleba's stone generation procedure doesn't use the standard resource_autoplace setup. That being said, I think I'd probably rather increase the yield of patches across the board (potentially barring the starting patch) than try to integrate the distance scaling.

For the moating, I have tried that a bit but I could not get it to work well and there were too many tiles it did not work on. Also difficult to see what has been moated and what is not moated and it just feels out of place. In addition to being weird, it feels like moating was a bit too much like using the map editor so I do not really like it. I think I will try other approaches. It seems like I can not moat on craters which is weird, see https://imgur.com/a/X0aLGsi

I think I would prefer to not have the moating available and removed from the mod and have this like a map generation setting instead if you want more isolated islands. I think I will try to set up flame thrower defense instead and see how that works on the parts of the island belts that I have cleared.

I got the Ironclad now, and that is great for getting rid of the nests together with the cluster bombs, but the nests a bit more inland are more tricky. I currently try to clear with jetpack, destroyer robots and rockets.

For the stone, not sure, perhaps it is OK, it is better now with more mining productivity. I also found a land patch of 800k that I could migrate to once I figure out how to deal with the pentapods. I think the yumako is a much greater issue now so the stone is probably fine.

WRT map generation: it's a bit of a tricky deal to finetune it. Gleba's terrain uses a ridge procedure for main altitude generation, and increasing island separation without eroding more land is consequently pretty difficult; you do have control over it with the water coverage setting.

WRT moating stuff and island chain defense: I can see excavation braces not being a personal preference, but I like giving people more options. Config setting to entirely deactivate the braces and associated technology is a possibility, though. Flamethrowers I think will be alright for dealing with the wriggler pentapods, especially the ones that emerge when killing the bigger pentapods - rockets are very likely necessary to deal with the bigger pentapods initially, though.

Ok thanks, understand that it is tricky with the map. I tried the moat a bit more now and it looks really weird on the map, like unexplored.

https://imgur.com/a/hTPeaaE

Also the issue I posted with the craters above seems to be a bug, i.e. could not place on the craters. I think the craters are from fighting pentapods.

As mentioned an option to disable it could be nice, and have it default off. It seems like very OP and I think it conflicts with play style indicated by giving rockets from resin. It seems like the original idea was choke points.

Map color is darker for distinction, but I might have overdone it slightly :)

I've been investigating the thing with the pentapod stomp craters and haven't found a conclusive reason for why that would be happening. For now, the excuse is that the impact made a hardened scab you can't push down with braces, but if I can find a way to permit placement there, I very likely will.

Map color has been lightened and braces now default to deactivated; the initial thinking was to have them as an optional tool to further ease up on difficulty, and I agree that defaulting to off aligns better with that. The types of defenses aren't mutually exclusive, though - some island chains can be too well-linked to moat effectively.