I feel I should preface this by saying that I love Gleba. I find it to be the most challenging planet in the expansion, and the second-most challenging aspect. I only find Space Platforms harder, and with that it's specifically going to the shattered planet, and that's probably because my platform is too small.
Starting with my first Gleba I landed on, we'll go over how I tamed the fungal ball we call this planet. This is technically what I call my "second" base on Gleba, but the first base was built in the same place, with the same towers and such. It was basically just replaced with the new base, which then had 2-3 revisions done as well.
Starting with my farms, you can see I've put some significant investment into their defenses. On this Gleba, which was my first Gleba, I put a lot of focus in trying to squeeze as much production out of a single tower as possible. The tower itself is circuit controlled, using a connection between the outgoing belt, the incoming inserter and the tower itself. The tower turns off if it has no seeds, the inserter only puts seeds in if the quantity of fruit on the outgoing belt drops below 300 or so. This is the same for both the Yumako and Jellynut production lines. This helps stop overproduction of each fruit, and tries to keep the fruit roughly as fresh as possible, without causing the main base to stall at all.
So here is the initial lazy river of a base. The outer white belt is a nutrient belt, traveling around the entire place. This aspect has had the least revisions made to it. Top to bottom, left to right, each "loop" contains one set of biochambers, generally to make multiple items out of different qualities, starting with Jellynut processing. Next is bioflux to nutrients, iron bacteria, copper bacteria, sulfur, carbon, and then legendary carbon. Along the bottom is Yumako processing, Bioflux, Plastic, Carbon Fiber, Rocket Fuel, Eggs, and Lime Science.
The recyclers are to produce higher quality bioflux for science production (The base uses rare quality eggs/science), and my spoilage upcycling area. I'm planning on massively scaling up the spoilage upcycling at some point, but I lack the biochambers right now.
Here's a closer look at Science production. Since this was originally built for rare-quality science, it's had to have epic & legendary retrofitted into it. I do think if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably not set science up as rare... but I'm still looking into actually setting up an upcycler for high quality lime science, since it's actually pretty easy. The biochambers are set up to only allow eggs to be added if we already have bioflux in the chambers, this prevents eggs from staying in any chamber other than the egg reproduction lines. Note the absence of turrets in this area. While I've had accidents previously (note that this area currently ISN'T running, as the eggs hatched and I haven't replaced them yet), the only problems with destruction I've had inside the base, was when some stompers tried to build a new egg raft by the power plant...
Here's the production lines for LDS & Processing units, including an upcycler, and a Legendary LDS crafter (Sending to Nauvis for high quality space parts). The ammo production lines are also here.
Finally the power plant and mall. The mall does include a biochamber crafter, a lube biochamber & soil assemblers. The heating towers have circuit control to only add fuel if a tower drops below a certain temperature, and another one to trigger an emergency fuel supply of rocket fuel (because I had a brownout issue with the prior base). Last time the system went down was because I accidentally disconnected one of the seed lines, and burned all of my Yumako seeds, and I didn't notice until an emergency alarm went off to let me know the power was critical.
Overall, this base served me well enough to complete the game, but has shown its cracks in how it worked, and what its capable of. With what I learned from making it, I designed a much better successor to it, and I'm going to show that off next.
So starting at my farms, I decided to try and maximize the soil usage, rather than the towers. So I build multiple towers with no overlapping coverage, and making sure the towers were built with access on non-farmable (without overgrowth) soil. I'm still on the fence if I want to go overgrowth, but I think I'm just going to build more farms instead, since that seems to work as well, and is much easier. The Jellynut looks very similar, just flipped vertically. Going with a rail network was done to decouple the dependence on the base the old design had. Now I can instead connect up the fruit train with a base needing fruit, and the resupply train with a resupply base. I'm planning on later using this to build several independent bases that specialize in one or more products, and just shipping more stable ingredients around.
The railyard is an absolute nightmare, that I'm GOING to fix, but I was trying to clear that stone patch first, and also I did underestimate the space I needed. Still it proves that an unoptimized solution still works for Gleba because this? Is awful. I genuinely forgot about it until I looked at it... Also now's a great time to mention that the trains are all circuit controlled. So a station sets a request for fruit to send a train out, and the trains go to the farms based off which farm was least recently visited. It's all done through some fun circuitry that wasn't that complex. (Agricultural towers get told to harvest when a train is inbound & station priority is set by how many minutes its been since a train departed the station. So they prefer to visit farms that haven't been visited recently... i.e. ones that should have fully grown trees.)
So I used a similar ordering for the production lines, however, instead of using a flow-through design, I swapped to a dead-end line for everything but bioflux & lime (agricultural) science. I also stopped using quality along the production. Part of it was to simplify the build in the rush to agricultural science (I was playing an MP game, and trying to beat my friend to producing our respective planetary sciences. I was on Gleba, they were on Fulgora. I beat them for science, but lost in exporting... mostly because my first batch went bad before I had a rocket load.) I use similar techniques for handling eggs, and the belt going around the whole base is instead a spoilage belt, both for dumping spoilage onto to remove it from dead ends, and to stockpile for the bootstrapping assemblers to restart the base if something goes horribly wrong (which they have run, but I haven't noticed the base shut down, so they're clearly doing their job right).
So like before, here's the power plant, and it relies on the same system as before, only major change is that I'm using indicator lights to indicate the status of each heating tower. It's cool, and lets me see the system's status at a glance. Likewise, you can see biolubricant and the two soils got moved into the main production line area. I didn't feel like saving that 20 or so jelly at the end of the belt, so it just rots into spoilage (which is primary what the power plant burns. Spoilage, eggs, & rocket fuel).
Lastly the mall is to the north, crafting all the oddities I need, and there's a small processing units & LDS setup built to supply the trains & rockets with whatever they need to keep them going.
A major change I did with this base compared to the prior is utilizing a singular piece of tech I figured out while setting up some stuff on my previous save's Gleba for exporting Bioflux.
So all incoming science gets loaded into this passive provider. It holds roughly 1k science, which is one rocket load. Once it has more than 1k science, the inserter behind it turns on and pulls out the most spoiled science packs. Since they go into a steel chest, they are no longer available to the logistics network, and will never be loaded into a rocket. Likewise, I could change this to stockpile more science before throwing it out for rot, but our base isn't ready to receive that much science just yet. I think if anyone takes anything from this post, they should take this system, as it *will* make sure you have only your freshest science, eggs, or bioflux available for rockets. If you have a freshness problem after setting it up, you don't have a freshness problem, you have a production problem, and need to scale up, which is fairly easy to do, because bioflux, lime science, and eggs are all high-throughput recipes.
Having covered my Glebas, I am considering showing my sushi Aquilo (Fulgora is also a sushi system, but I think it's far less interesting than Aquilo)
Daily Fungi Fact 129: A gleba is the fleshy mass of spores inside the sporocarps(fruiting bodies) of some specific fungi, such as puffballs and stinkhorns. Gleba found on stinkhorns is usually foul smelling and gelatinous, the foul smell being used to attract insects to disperse the spores.
finally, after ??? hours of experimenting and trying again and again, i have made a self-sustainable and self-managing base on gleba that will not stop working as long as enough jellynuts/yumako fruits are provided
the main bioflux processor
the self-starting iron/copper bacteria center that makes roughly 60ore/sec each
my rocket launch center that makes roughly 2/sec of each rocket ingredient
and the most important part, the agricultural science pack center with only one! breach so far
gleba is definitely the hardest planet so far and a really fun challenge, i can tell why many people complain about it but also skill issue lmao
personally, my favourite planet so far
ALSO all farming is handled by logistic bots cuz im too lazy to belt them, the train is purely for vibes
