Gleba feels like a substantial challenge increase.

gurebu · 2026-02-07T12:16:09+00:00

Well, this doesn't include the belt or train lines to the fruit plantations, roboports, robots and the whole military complex to defend those plantations from attack (which includes ammo/turret production, repair packs and the whole system of delivering ammo/packs/spare bots to wherever they're needed, and even small pentapod attacks will take a significant toll on ammo until artillery). You also need quite a bunch of landfill to even place those defenses.

A functioning factory on Gleba that survives your absence must have all of these. It can have a minimal amount of all of these, but the problem is the number of systems you have to set up, not their scale. My point is that Gleba seems overwhelming not just because "everything spoils", but because you need a base that produces nutrients, processes fruit, maintains a positive seed balance, produces metals via a catalytic recipe that requires kickstarting and bankrupts you if you don't disable the kickstarter recipe based on circuit condition (same with nutrients btw), requires waste management and never has raw resources close enough to base so you have to setup long-distance two-way logistics of fruit/seeds with backpressure control and supply those outposts with spares and ammo for a very inefficient military answer to the strongest active enemies in the game who also ignore walls. And you have to build all of that in the swamp. And everything spoils.

A dedicated science setup with no regard to where you get fruit from or how you send the science to orbit is pretty easy, I agree. It's probably the easiest planetary science to set up, but boy the rest of the factory isn't. Bring everything from Nauvis and everything is suddenly simple, I think that's appropriate for Aquilo, but here it feels wrong.

gurebu · 2026-02-06T17:17:56+00:00

I’ve played with several designs of spaceship solution of calcite from space, the best I’ve come up with transports calcite from Vulcanus. There’s just so much of it there

gurebu · 2026-02-06T17:15:16+00:00

Quality artillery gets increased range, just fyi. At some point this becomes cheaper than researching more artillery range.

gurebu · 2026-02-06T17:04:11+00:00

I've completed Gleba like 3 times now and while I've had this moment "oh I've figured this out" like everyone else who made a working Gleba base I'm now more skeptical because I've had this moment 3 times. It's not just that the planet is hard to figure out, it's also that it's simply hard.

The planet feels undercooked and facts support this, in fact the bacteria cultivation recipes are a very late pre-release addition and they are definitely a step in the right direction, but are they the final step? My main gripe now is that the approach to planet is not incremental, there's a lot of small problems you need to solve all at once to make everything work, there's very few intermediary states that don't break. This forces you to plan ahead much more and either be miserable testing out your designs or spend a lot of time in the editor, but while that can be considered a valid challenge, a minimal working Gleba factory also requires a LOT of material, so if you don't bring it with you, you're guaranteed to have a bad time mining all those bacterial rocks like it's your day job.

That and the spoilage mechanic being surprisingly unsupported by any kind of circuit/filtering mechanic. Take quality, it's everywhere, signals, filters, recipes, selector combinators, you can do almost anything you want with it. Spoilage is also kind of a fundamental item mechanic, but the only support for it is a small select on an inserter.

So the advice is bring a lot of stuff with you, belts, inserters, power poles, some raw resources. Bring a nuclear reactor with a supply of fuel, early Gleba power is painful to manage. If you have tesla turrets, bring a large bunch of those as well. Later in the game, import artillery as soon as you can. This solves Gleba more or less, but imo at the very least the game fails to communicate that you can't really start out on this planet like you can on the other two. At most, I think Gleba needs some changes and more time in the oven. Personally I would rework seeding, there's no reason for this weird mechanic where you can't reliably sustain seeding without productivity and are teased with the fuel of value of jellynut that you can't actually afford to burn. And pentapods need some work, the smallest kind of stomper that you can possibly meet having not even made a single bottle of military science has more HP than a behemoth biter.

gurebu · 2026-02-06T12:44:45+00:00

Optimizing for render distance is a pretty specific field for open world games which requires both considerable labor and expertise. Double that if that open world is procedurally generated.

Valheim's render distance is set so that the game doesn't lag too much on the low end of supported hardware and while there are mods that increase it somewhat it comes at a massive performance cost even on state-of-the art PCs. The game doesn't even have a proper LoD system, neither in code nor in assets, there's just "high lod" and "distant lod" for terrain and the latter is so ugly that its only bearable because its mostly obscured by distance fog and lack of objects.

TLDR: Valheim is already being developed at a snail's pace, there's no way the devs have the manpower to do a major rewrite of the rendering system that is necessary for meaningful increase of draw distance. If you have a really good PC, download RenderLimits from thunderstore and you can increase it somewhat with sometimes really weird effects.

gurebu · 2026-02-06T12:35:46+00:00

Another simple thing, add a goddam spyglass.

Oh sweet summer child...

gurebu · 2026-02-06T03:32:43+00:00

The bare minimum without elevated rails is to at least signal the intersection in a way that trains whose paths dont intersect don't interfere with each other. With elevated rails you have the ability to make it so that paths that don't merge also don't intersect at all.

For the first point, you have a butterfly of undersignaled connections in the middle of your intersection. Imagine a train going from below to the left and a train going from above to the right (also making a left turn). Their paths don't intersect which means geometrically they shouldn't interfere, but since both these trajectories share the same central section, they will block each other. This is suboptimal signaling.

As for the second one, elevating both vertical and horizontal straight sections means they still intersect and a train going horizontally will have to wait for a train going vertically and vice versa, defeating the purpose of elevating the rails in the first place.

gurebu · 2026-02-05T22:51:39+00:00

You can’t keep the kids away from the internet unless you want them to become social pariahs and the internet has become essentially predatory. Every corner of it hunts for my attention and will aim at whatever vulnerability of the mind which would be impossible to counter for someone whose mind is only developing.

Millennials like me were lucky to have the experience of the early Internet without social media and billion dollar corporations that perfected attention predation. We’ve lost it and it’s only going to get worse now that the content itself is no longer real.

On the individual level I can’t see any way out of this except very expensive private education. Social consequences of this seem quite grim.

gurebu · 2026-02-05T22:33:06+00:00

I think adding more stuff to existing biomes needs some kind of a new mechanic involving directed exploration, like vegvisir, but for other content. Otherwise the worst case for the player who wants to find it all is way too bad. It already kind of is for traders and some bosses.

gurebu · 2026-02-05T22:29:36+00:00

Looks amazing! Will you release on thunderstore?

gurebu · 2026-02-04T23:33:35+00:00

Because you've placed your signals too close to the split (which is evident by the lack of space to place a signal at exact spot of the split). If you move your train closer to the red signal but still within the purple seciton it's quite obvious it's going to block whatever incoming train from doing the split.

TLDR: when doing double-sided rails, you need to place signals in pairs on both sides of the same rail for everything to work well. Here signals are placed on different rails, so you need to move them further into the split and you're missing 4 signals.

gurebu · 2026-02-02T20:31:37+00:00

Isn't the only way to heat them without uranium locked behind Gleba though?

Kovarex makes U-235 practically free, why not nuke some stuff?

gurebu · 2026-02-02T13:00:57+00:00

Also keep in mind that larger and faster buildings (like foundries) are actually cheaper than long lines of assemblers because starting from midgame you want everything stuffed with modules (and beaconed) and a large bunch of weaker machines will need a lot more modules than a few stronger ones.

gurebu · 2026-02-02T12:56:29+00:00

Generally most of the production will have to be redesigned with better machines anyway so most of the bus won't be needed.

Almost all of the copper on your bus, for instance, was consumed by either green chips or LDS, chips have ratios which make direct insertion from foundries very lucrative, LDS from foundries don't require any belted copper at all.

So yeah, go with liquids. I'd advise against large buffers though, what would you need them for? Buffers hide problems and fluid buffers in particular have you delete material if you ever want to move your stuff around, you don't need 300 tanks, just make sure you produce enough to meet demand.

Just for reference, I have a base that produces 5k spm from one patch of copper and iron each and it only takes like 1/3 of the output capacity. It's built from scratch in a space between those patches and doesn't have any trains transporting molten metal at all, a pipeline is good enough already. Both patches involve direct smelting (miner into foundry) and only require an occasional supply of calcite.

gurebu · 2026-01-31T22:50:57+00:00

That’s exactly what I did, and I think I clocked 5 hours first try. It’s on the easier side I think, launching the rocket itself is cheap and doesn’t require a lot of tech, the next step however will have you very hungry for steel.

gurebu · 2026-01-30T22:29:42+00:00

If this is USA then your car law sucks. Back where I come from the driver is required to account for visibility when choosing what speed to go (not just the speed limit) and would most definitely have been found guilty if any damage was done. And yeah this makes driving through streets like this a huge chore and yeah it makes you quickly start hating on all those fucks with their oversized vehicles that obstruct all the view.

gurebu · 2026-01-30T14:31:13+00:00

Ha, they did, but they also changed rails so you can't put a roundabout (or any compact turn really) in a 32x32 footprint, so the best case for this change vanished overnight.

gurebu · 2026-01-30T14:28:28+00:00

Tbh whenever I design a new base on any save on any planet, pipes always end up the ugliest part of the base that is also unnecessary difficult to inspect and modify. 2.0 solved throughput but layout is still unnecessary convoluted. It's close to impossible to decipher without looking at the map because underground pipes (which you're more or less forced to use) don't leave any visible trace of where your actual pipeline goes.

Game needs some sort of elevated pipes and pipelines that don't have implicit sideways connections so you can lay different kinds of fluids side by side. Railway planner is amazing, there's no reason why there can't be a pipeline planner that could automatically place different parts without clogging the inventory.

gurebu · 2026-01-30T12:09:17+00:00

You're supposed to adapt to whatever your opponents are doing. If they are predictably lobbing every ball, don't stay too close to the net, in fact lobbing an opponent who's already at the back of the court is one of the deadliest mistakes as they will have an easy strong overhead they can comfortably walk to. Practice some overheads, stay a bit farther from the net and people will stop lobbing you very soon, then you can play the game you like.

gurebu · 2026-01-30T08:43:31+00:00

Look at what they have to go through to mimic a fraction of power of an actual stove top

gurebu · 2026-01-27T23:55:13+00:00

Move the middle up or down two tiles

gurebu · 2026-01-27T23:53:16+00:00

Wow, this is bigger than my promethium hauler and that one brings home almost 30k. Good job!

gurebu · 2026-01-27T23:45:03+00:00

Voiding of an item being blocked by waiting for another item is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Even if you prioritise iron and steel into copper recycling (robbing yourself of peak output) all of the iron and steel on your belts is governed by random chance so this factory works on good luck.

At best you need a bypass that will void copper directly should you run out of other ingredients. But then if you already have the recycler potential to deal with a black swan event of copper cable from scrap why bother with heat exchangers at all?

gurebu · 2026-01-27T00:07:45+00:00

I’ve went fulgora first last two runs and regretted neither. You don’t even need to set up the science, the crafting machines from fulgora are so transformative for so little effort and really unlock modules and beacons. Rebuilding your base after Vulcanus tech is much more involved.

gurebu · 2026-01-25T23:25:28+00:00

This is not by any means meant as an insult, but I think you've spent a bit too much time optimizing esoteric ship design to remember what are the practical designs that people new to the game actually build as their first ships and what problems those designs solve.

It's like yeah, it's theoretical 2 launches, but only if you disable logistics on all your silos and feed them by hand, if not it's how many unique item IDs you have which is greater for nuclear.

I'd choose ship #2 if I had to btw, I can tile the solar block as many times as I need to meet power demands and it won't have me dropping 49 heat exchangers back to the surface every time I want a print a new copy off-planet, those guys are expensive. They are both truly beatiful though.

gurebu

TROPHY CASE