Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.

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.

I don't think the developers promised more here, but the community might have overhyped itself as it is common. It's still a very solid .1 release, the improvements to space logistics and platform building are very nice. There's also a whole bunch of really nice circuit additions.

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.

For a time I thought steam on Linux had begun to add .desktop files for games. Nah, just Factorio. Wube really is the GOAT.

> And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

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...

The big changes are presented in the Factorio blog, read FFF #421 to #423 here to get an overview:

https://factorio.com/blog/

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-443

The only simulation game which keeps my laptop fans quiet, incredible.

The crushers could be vastly improved by treating recipes as a filter.

I don't think it'll be too hard; you can build infinite legendary iron from just a dozen or so foundries on Vulcanus. Legendary coal and stone are not much harder, and from legendary coal you get legendary plastic and then legendary steel and copper via the LDS shuffle. It's not quite as broken as the asteroid casinos and feels much more factorio-y IMO.

Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc

Washing ore is probably the easiest solution - research high levels of mining productivity, put quality modules in drills, filter off uncommon+, and loop them through recyclers until they are at the desired quality level.

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.

I’ve heard the Gleba gripe in many places but I don’t understand what people are frustrated about. I really liked the challenge. Care to elaborate?

The right way to do that is trains. A fully compressed, stacked belt is 960/s, but a train can easily hit that throughput as well (and even exceed it). And they are much easier to set up across long distances than belts are.

It's already faster even without that because it now uses mixed content rockets to build ships and platforms. But space-to-space logistics do mean that you can make rocket launches less bursty and continually ship stuff into space to then use it.

I was so disappointed to unlock fusion the first time. The complexity seemed interesting at first but the power it produces just wasn't worth my time.

Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).

My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.

A train can easily move more than 960/s, but the train isn't always moving. To actually exceed 960/s over time with trains gets some massive stations.

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.

People don't like Gleba because it forces you to play differently and not just re-do the optimized builds over again.

You could always have mixed rockets if you loaded them yourself, which wasn't ideal but not toooo much of a hassle. For me it was more that rocket platforms are dog slow to produce and can be shot up at only 50 platforms per rocket. Not too horrible in the endgame when you may have dozens of rocket platforms, but in the early to mid game it can really strain my rocket capacity sometimes.

I plan to have a slow but wide platform with lots of storage that just loops around between Nauvis and to hoover up as many metallic asteroids it can find, then turns them into space platforms. When it loops around to Nauvis, it ships off the platforms to any spaceship under construction that might need them.

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

Fusion is so useful though. It is easy to set up on ships because it requires no consumables other than the fuel cells, and it has a small footprint. It is easy to set up power on all planets by stamping down a blueprint, and requires minimal resources shipped to them. If you're not expanding the factory, you probably already have a setup that works, so I can see why it would feel useless. But, when you want to double, or 10x your power consumption, fusion makes it easy.

For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient. You get to reuse the same rail network, and sometimes not have to route dedicated belts for 6 low throuput ingredients from all over the map

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

I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.

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.

Gleba introduces things like spoilage.

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 had the same experience with the platforms when I first played Space Age. But this depends entirely on how you scale your Nauvis factory before you start launching rockets. You don't want to start too small, if you rush to rockets too quickly the beginning of your space exploration will be tedious.

> the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles

Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.

Hey man thems fighting words. I like doing different builds but hate feeling rushed with a nonstop ticking clock on an otherwise chill building game.

Totally agree. I tried the JIT approach; I could never get it to work, and I've never seen anyone else do it either. The wisdom has always been to keep everything flowing and accept spoilage (or kludge it with lots of bots and then move on). This patch makes it a more feasible, I think.

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.

I'll be honest: I don't like Space Age. It seems like the developers were focused on providing entirely new types of logistics challenges to solve, but I didn't want that. I wanted things which were fairly natural extensions of the existing logistics challenges, fresh but not too different. The only part of the expansion I enjoy is Vulcanus, everything else doesn't feel like Factorio any more to me.

Limiting production is probably the most difficult way to play Gleba. The easier way is to minimize buffers and have a path to extract spoilage at every position where it could accumulate. And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.

It's the opposite really! On Gleba, you are subsisting on an infinitely fertile river. On one end, the resources flow for ever and ever. On the other end, the resources burn for ever and ever. In the middle, you create whatever you want, for free, for ever and ever. Do not disturb the flow, but draw from it and feed into it. This is a zen of Gleba.

I just use small buffers. I don't know if that's technically JIT or not, but a smaller restricted buffer with high throughput works great for me.

> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.

I love it. Sad that we aren’t to expect another DLC

> The easier way is to minimize buffers and have a path to extract spoilage at every position where it could accumulate.

I do that. It's annoying to me. I don't like being feeling annoyed by computer games; being annoyed is not one of my kinks.

> And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.

So burn more stuff -> bigger spore clouds -> even more enemies -> more violence?

eg, always produce fruit as fast as the swamp can muster, and just always burn all excess as soon as it is possible to do so?

Just make sure you bring many artillery shells and Tesla turrets for extra zen.

You never want to burn fruit itself since that wastes the seeds. So you always want to process fruit the first step.

I limit fruit production based on the number of fruit on the belt, to avoid creating a huge buffer. But after that the factory just runs continuously at the same speed. And if I have too much of a final product, it gets destroyed or burned for heat and electricity.

One benefit, especially in the beginning, is that by processing more fruit you get more seeds. And you need the seeds to expand your fruit production later.

The enemies are probably one of the not ideally designed parts of Gleba. It's trivial to handle them if you know how, and can be very frustrating if you try to approach it the "wrong" way. If you have been to Vulcanus and Fulgora you can trivialize their threat.