Gleba is a very weird planet, one that I find overly complicated and a real pain in the butt to manage. It has enemies that will attack you the more you produce (sort of like pollution), it has a ton of water, it only has stone as a natural formation, it has very specific locations to place buildings that can be a pain to defend, and importantly, almost everything on the planet has a timer where it will spoil. Spoiled items in a production chain suck, as you’ve lost time/resources invested. Oh, and one particular item when spoiled spawns enemies. It is a right nightmare to get going, but once it is running, it feels like free everything.

Power

50% solar power sucks, so to start you really need to limit your power usage. You’ll quickly unlock a Heating Tower, which is sort of like a nuclear power plant. Put in fuel, transfer to Heat Exchangers (4 per), and then to Steam Turbines (2 per exchanger). Save yourself the headache and ship all of the material to Gleba to build this power plant.

You can use different fuels, and the start up time takes a lot of materials. Once it hits 500 degrees, the burn rate slows dramatically, so you really really want to use a conditional inserter that shuts down above 530 degrees. I recommend using Rocket Fuel, as you can easily import it. Be warned, it will take about 10 just to get it running.

Early Gleba

When you first land, you’ll find it painful. Set up the power as above, install a Big Miner on the nearby stone patch and have it start creating Landfill. From there, you want to go exploring. You’re looking for water patches that have Copper or Iron Stromatolites. Collect these and 1 minute later you get basic ore. You can set up a basic foundry with imported Calcite to create Copper + Iron plates + Steel.

The next step is finding Yumako (yellow) and Jellynut (red) trees. Each will give you a fruit that can be refined into seeds and unlock the Agricultural Tower. Processing 1 stack of the fruit should give 1 seed which can be replanted for another stack of fruit. Mk3 Assemblers need productivity modules to ensure you don’t lose the seeds. You’ll place the towers where you collected the trees, the ground icons will be green when placed (have at least 4). Use robots to ship seeds to, and bring back the fruits.

You can use some of the plants to manually create Nutrients, 10 will unlock the Biochamber and open up a world of optimization & pain.

Biochamber

Biochambers have a 50% productivity increase on their recipes, and all of them are specific to this planet. Create one in an assembler, then use that product to create more. You’ll need pentapod eggs, which are found on Gleba’s enemies, so go hunting.

Biochambers do not use power, they use nutrients as fuel. Efficiency modules reduce the amount of fuel burned, while production modules increase it. This is great for power generation issues, but horrendous as you need to find a way to create a few tons of nutrients to power everything. Oh, did I mention that Nutrients spoil in 5 minutes? You still need them as the productivity bonus is the only way to ensure you get enough seeds from fruit.

Biochamber Crafting Tree

There’s a complex interaction between all the products on Gleba, and most of them focus on Bioflux, which is created by combining the products of the 2 tree types. Bioflux is then used with other things on the planet to create most other products. This creates some really complicated dependencies, and you’ll need to work in modules to craft specific items to be used elsewhere. More than any other planet, robot speed & amount will make or break your production chains. 1000 logistic bots will not be enough.

You’ll have crafting modules for:

• Nutrients
• Yumako
• Jellynut
• Bioflux
• Rocket Fuel
• Pentapods
• Science
• Plastic
• Carbon
• Sulfur
• Lubricant
• Carbon Fibre
• Iron Bacteria
• Copper Bacteria

I would not recommend starting any given module until the Nutrients one is up and running (Spoilage + extra Bioflux should be used to create Nutrients). The bacteria ones are optional, not much use for copper on this planet – iron has a lot of uses though.

The main challenge here is space. You’ll only be able to fit 4 or 8 Biochambers with an Efficiency Beacon for any given product. You’ll need to send nutrients to each item on a cycled belt, then the actual basic material to the Biochambers. You’ll need to ensure that spoilage is removed from every step (active provider chests are the only real option). You’ll also need to collect the material for distribution elsewhere. Adding too many nutrients will cause spoilage, so you’ll want to rate limit inserters in many cases. Pentapod production will spoil into enemies, so you’ll want turrets protecting that module.

The goal is to unlock the planet’s science, which you guess it, can spoil. You will need to modify your science hauler to go right to Nauvis after Gleba, and even on Nauvis, have a burner to get rid of any potential spoilage.

Dealing with Pentapods

There’s the short term answer of Tesla turrets around the base, as they are the only effective way I’ve found that deters them.

The long term answer is to look at your map, check the Pollution tab and see how far the spore cloud has gone. Build a defensive wall around the cloud and only collet fruit from trees when you need them. That should limit the spore cloud from growing.

Next Steps

Honestly, this planet is a right nightmare to manage, as much from the spoilage mechanic as it is from the rather insane nutrient requirements to power Biochambers. And I haven’t even begun to talk about the enemy spawns, land configurations and PITA logistics present. I enjoyed Fulgora as it presented logistical challenges to sort through a pile of stuff with limited room. Gleba has more complex production chains and a continual timer that makes things go poof.

Biolabs have no use outside of Gleba, which makes it an outlier. You will be exporting Carbon Fibre, Stack Inserters, Biolflux, and Science. Spoilage is used for efficiency 3 modules but since it doesn’t spoil naturally, odds are you will have tons of it on other planets. Given the multiple logistic challenges on this planet, large scale factories are not practical. Modular is the only way… and that will cause future challenges if you want to focus on quality items.