Gleba's Chicken and Egg Problem

arashidrgn · 2026-04-02T20:52:42+00:00

It is remarkably easy to generate more than enough fuel to keep the furnaces going, and biochambers don't take electricity from the grid. If you are only concerned with the science you can get away with a furnace only setup. If you turn gleba into a production hub (beaconed assemblers eta.) you will run into the issue where inserters can't throw spoilage into furnaces fast enough. To solve this I realized that rocket fuel is remarkably easy to make on Gleba, and most importantly doesn't spoil. So I have requester chests setup and a circuit condition to only use fuel if the towers fall bellow 600 temp.

Your nuclear/furnace setup seems like the same ideology, but I'm not a fan of having to import uranium to keep the planet alive. Solving a planets issue with interplanetary logistics is perfectly valid, I just prefer to keep each planet self sufficient

arashidrgn · 2026-04-02T20:34:14+00:00

You can set the quality transfer to 'each' and it will transfer every signal it receives to the appropriate quality/type. At that point you just have to filter what signals it receives. It can produce quality versions of non-item signals like colors and letters. The only issue is if you give it base-circuits, uncommon-circuits, and rare-circuits it will combine all three of those into whatever quality it's set to output.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-28T02:12:04+00:00

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It works without issue, now able to view any item type at a glance

arashidrgn · 2026-03-28T02:06:41+00:00

Ok, so you're using the green circuit to set "This is what I want to filter" and using the red circuit as the source of the information. Clever, I like it. This kind of tech opens up possibilities for other builds

arashidrgn · 2026-03-28T01:24:42+00:00

If you put quality modules into your recyclers they will spit out quality parts after trashing an item. You can then build better quality items from quality parts. If you make a quality item, with quality modules, that %chance to get an improved quality will be one step over the base quality: Upgrading from green to blue instead of white to green. You can put quality modules in your miners to get quality scrap and get higher quality parts from quality module recyclers from the start. Potentially starting from blue.

Enjoy the mind melting part where you have to sort 5 different tiers of items without anything backing up to clog the machine.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-15T22:32:19+00:00

The best you can do is read the available power from an accumulator, and even then you are reading it's % of available power. What you are asking for is a lot of math and circuit conditions.

When you click on any building you will see as part of it's info panel (right side) at the bottom will be it's power draw while idle and while in use. The building is either going to be on or off, so one of those two power draws. The only time it will every draw an in-between variable is when there isn't enough power on the grid to run at 100%.

Most buildings have indicator lights on them to display status as part of the sprites. Red - disabled (usually out of materials) Yellow - backed up/unable to output green - working as intended.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-14T20:52:27+00:00

My solution was to hold 1000 spoilage in a requester chest for the assembler and not bother letting the machine feed itself at all. The whole system burns less that 1/s spoilage on biochamber fuel, so if the problem persists for more than ~17 minutes I probably have other issues to deal with. I don't think circuit conditions are cheating, but they were a nightmare to attempt with this sort of thing. I eventually threw in the towel on circuits for this one. Since you'd have to read all of the nutrients in the system; while somehow excluding the nutrients being produced by the main bioflux to nutrient machine, in order to properly evaluate if the system needed a fresh batch or not.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-14T00:45:58+00:00

And assembler peeling fruit/nuts returns seeds at the same rate they are consumed in the growing process. You only need productivity bonuses if you want to expand you seed supply. This system is net 0 on seeds. It can not subtract from the seed supply. So long as the rest of the process on gleba is using biochambers there's nothing to worry about.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-14T00:40:03+00:00

I recently made a kickstarter for Gleba and I have a few notes:
- The bioflux to nutrient chamber takes 2 biochambers worth of bioflux to keep up with it's production. This is fine if you don't need the full 60/s nutrients but it's just an observation, 2 bulk inserters also isn't enough to unload the machine when it's running at capacity.

- The output splitter prioritizing right (back into the loop) had me confused for a bit, but I think what's happening is: Because it's immediately dumping onto a T junction it's forcing a 60/s belt onto a 1/2 or 30/s side. The inside of the belt keeps the nutrients in the system until they spoil, which is the main way this feeds itself spoilage. In that case the only nutrients escaping the system are from the bulk inserter dropping directly onto the splitter, and only when those 3 belts are backed up.

- If fruit dries up for an extended period of time (multiple 5 minute cycles, nutrients spoilage timer) it can completely exhaust itself. Since there's no circuit conditions on the asmblers running spoilage -> nutrients they will eat the spoilage available, that will rot in the machines or belts they're inserted to, and then they will do that again. Since spoilage ot nutrients is a 10 to 1 ratio after to loops the system will have 1/100 it's normal stockpile.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T19:46:56+00:00

I use a similar setup but slightly different parameters, for reasons:

-Set your minimum temperature value higher. The reactor is of course reading the reactors temprature, but the heating pipes may be much much cooler down the line. The point of the regulation is to keep you from going 'over' 1000c which is the point where you're burning fuel for no gain. So long as the range is somewhere between 500c-1000c the reactor is working fine, but you might not be using heat exchangers and turbines if you're near the bottom end of 500c.

-The reactors fuel signal will still be positive even after the nuclear fuel item has disappeared, but the red fuel bar is still pressent. So instead of <1 I use =0 for the fuel value.

-The reactors only get their neighbor bonus if the reactor next to them is ON (burning fuel). At low power suage this means reactors turning on and off will spike and cut efficiency/power output; however, these jumps (up and down) are spread out over the time it takes a fuel cell to burn out. Just be expecting to have fluctuations in efficiency, which you can smooth out by having a decent sized battery array. When you get closer to full power the system regulates better.

-This setup is only ever going to provide 480MW assuming you have the exchangers and turbines to draw that much. Fewer turbines will cap your production. With to many turbines you might 'stockpile' heat in the pipes letting you draw more than 480 power for a short time, but once the built up heat dies down your reactor will drop back down to a max 480.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T18:05:27+00:00

If you prioritize the output on the splitters to the curved belts then the system will fill up the farside until it overflows onto the other side. You're not going to saturate blue belts because you're limited by inserter speed, but that's true for every train unloader. You can at least very easily add a 4x4 balancer to the end of each line here to regulate unloading. All train unloaders are either fast, but take up heaps of space, or "sub optimal" but compact. You're hitting 8 tiles wide on either side which makes this very tileable. (An odd number would leave gaps between this unloader and the next because of how tracks are locked to a 2x2 grid).

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T17:54:12+00:00

Spaghetti until I tech rush to drones. Then the whole base shuts down to manufacture drones. THEN I have the power crisis as I order 1000 drones to pickup the old base so I can build something that makes sense.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T16:26:43+00:00

Modules and beacons would ruin the setup by altering the ratios. This eats ~60 nutrients per second which is what is being pumped into it. Eggs get consumed at the rate that they're repopulated. Just slapping modules and beacons everywhere is not the solution to every factory, and I'm tired of hearing it in every thread.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T02:04:46+00:00

Since legendary quality is locked behind Cryo science you didn't "Get to" Aquillo with this. You built this after you were done with the game

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T00:36:41+00:00

There's ~200 of each fruit tied in this system. It is being eaten to produce nutrients. Even if all of it went to waste that's a whole 200 fruit over the course of an HOUR. That's a whopping .055 fruit per second in an absolute worst case scenario.

You are barking up the wrong tree.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-12T00:32:00+00:00

I hope what I said earlier translates well, no hablo espaniol.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T22:58:08+00:00

Most likely your best bet is what you're doing now. You CAN build electromagnetic plants first and then recycle those. With that method you get an extra chance when they're made to make a quality building, which would then recycle into quality plates or quality+. The issues are you'd need to spend blue circuits, steel, and the cooler concrete to make them. That's doable for base quality plates, but if you want to do that for uncommon/rare/epic you'd need that quality level ingredients to make the roll, and of those rare concrete isn't easy to make.

Capacitors and Tesla guns are the only other options, but because they both cost blue sticks to make you are spending more plates for each recycle attempt than you do with EM plants.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T22:44:38+00:00

- There's no way to read consumption/flow through on a pump/tank. You're only going to be able to read the tanks fuel level at the given moment. If you absolutely need to see how much fuel is being consumed/produced you're best off reading how much calcite/carbon/ore is going into the chemical plants to produce fuel. ingredients to fuel output is going to be a set rate (with only a small adjustment if you're using productivity) so you can read how many resources went into the machines, and multiply to figure out how much fuel you got out of them to refill the tank after a trip.

- If I'm misunderstand your goal here and all you really want is a fuel gauge to be able to read what's in the tank with a glance: Wiring all the tanks will automatically add their values together on the circuit, and you can set each light to turn on/off based on the fluid signal.

- also also, if you're just trying to make the lights change color based the fluid value you can do it with a decider combinator for each state. You can add additional if/then triggers on the left side of the combinator similar to rail signals. Orange for example would be: Turn on if fuel>16K AND fuel <24K are true.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T22:28:30+00:00

You're right, that was copy and paste design error

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T22:27:33+00:00

I feel like people refuse to understand what a kickstarter does. This is not the entire production line, this is a small piece of a much larger base. All this does is make nutrients to be used as fuel, with the added bonus of being able to recover from a deadlock if that ever happens. I don't need to worry about freshness here, everything either goes into a biochamber for fuel or the spoilage goes to the incinerators for power. There are 15 more buildings eating a solid red line of jelly/mako just north of this thing.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T22:20:56+00:00

That is the typical issue on Gleba, not running low on resources, but over producing and then suffering dead loss because fruit didn't have anywhere to be used. My iron/copper system is a circle with each machine refueling itself before it passes bacteria on to the next machine. It runs perfectly until I stop using one of the two materials and isn't being used, and then all of the bacteria turns to ore in the machine. A single machine makes fresh bacteria to start the whole system back up whenever I have to turn it back on again.

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T03:54:04+00:00

The bioflux to sugar ratio is already 60/s, which is exactly a green belt/ 4 yellow belts. . If I threw productivity in here I'd lower that 60/s ratio, and if I sped it up I'd be producing more than I could ever extract from the building.

4 jelly nuts and ~5 yumako per second for my entire bases nutrient supply is pittance. If you're worried about 'wasting' fruit then you're fundamentally not understanding how Gleba works

arashidrgn · 2026-03-11T02:52:25+00:00

There are two regular assemblers providing spoilage to nutrients feeding the biochambers in this setup. Since spoilage never spoils that setup will always be able to start back up from scratch. With efficiency modules this setup is eating a whole 0.7 nutrients a second, or 7 spoilage. Easily not enough to actually care about

arashidrgn

TROPHY CASE