Why solar and not walls? Why not use the least expensive material?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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On Gleba? Solar panels are the cheaper material.
How so? There's plenty of rock, or at least I've found enough. You use the big miners and get tonnes of the stuff from small patches. I haven't done the math, but... I've always got boxes full of bricks and walls, and idle miners.
Steel and computer are essentially infinite, of course, so technically I guess you're right. I just... have way more wall on Gleba than I could ever use.
I don't know how you manage. All of my stones go toward train tracks and landfill, and I still need to import more to keep up. I'm even using enriched resource settings.
Belts. I have no trains on Gleba, it's all turbo belts. So far, I haven't expanded so far on Gleba that fruit is spoiling on the belts, except when they back up, but if that happens I'll just move processing closer to the fields. What with spoilage management, I've found density is itself an issue, so spreading out to multiple smaller bases is easier. It helps that the native wildlife isn't a robust or aggressive as Nauvis; Nauvis encourages building a giant wall around a mega factory (IME), but Gleba I find it's easier to spread out. Energy being essentially unlimited, I just sprinkle laser turrets around for peace of mind, and a Spidertrons hanging out for just in case... but, really, the most dangerous the wildlife has been is when something got wedged in egg production and spoilage led to outbreaks. It's been ages since one of those happened. Gleba isn't Fulgaris, but it's pretty peaceful, at least around my bases.
My landfill keeps getting eaten with running the egg-breeder. I should set it up to store in biochambers and recycle on demand, but...
I... what? Landfill? What does landfill have to do with egg breeders? Is this related to your passive approach to rafts?
I just have a bunch of breeders on one side of a circular belt, a bunch of ag science plants on the other, a nutrient feeder stacking nutrient onto belt and something on the other side to pull off spoilage. There's some minimal circuitry to ensure eggs don't spoil in the ag plants, but I've got things tuned so eggs never stay on the belt long enough to spoil.
I'm trying to imagine how landfill figures into this. I only use landfill to create overgrowth products, and for expanding farms.
The eggs not turning into science packs are turning into biochambers, constantly. It's how I keep the egg breeding stable without having a bunch hatch.
So, you use excess eggs to create biochambers? Interesting. I don't have excess eggs; I have more ag pack generators than I produce eggs, so one is usually idle unless there's a surplus of eggs, then it builds a pack, the surplus is gone, and the cycle repeats.
Encouragement to make at least some! It's nice to have a local way of restoring egg production (4 biochambers -> recycler -> 1 egg, on average).
Essential since I'm trying to be passive. But I suspect it would be convenient in other situations too. (I guess it'd also be an efficient way to get eggs on nauvis? Haven't thought about why we'd care.)
Wait... you can only farm biter eggs on Nauvis, right‽ And Pentapod eggs only in Glaubis? I haven't tried Biochambers anywhere but Glaubis - I did try to farm trees and fish, but it seemed a waste of time - I couldn't find anything useful for it.
Pentapod eggs need nutrients, water, and an egg for breeding. If you have biter egg farming, you already need bioflux on nauvis (and so nutrients aren't an issue). So this can be done on nauvis (you can place biochambers) once you get an egg there.
The only reason I could think to do this on nauvis is if that's where you are doing your science; you could make the ag science packs directly on Nauvis instead of shipping them (and thus getting more science/less spoilage). (This has another perk! Biochambers on nauvis absorb pollution, so this is nice for a green themed run.)
EDIT: wiki says pentapod breeding and sciencepack can't be done on nauvis; it's gleba specific. I haven't verified this.
I looked into it last night.
No biter breeding on Gelba because the gravity is too high. No pentapod breeding on Nauvis because the gravity is too low.
You can burn the eggs too. Storage for biochambers will eventually fill up and need manual intervention.
First design was walls, but asthetically I do like the solar panels better. You can put a substation nearby and get value out of the space, which walls don't really provide.
I haven't tested if a mess of pipes stop wrigger spawning/stomper walking. Iron is probably cheapest option on gleba?
This is a nice idea that I've never thought of before and seems like it would be useful even on default settings, and even if it doesn't totally work for pentapods.
@Artisian@lemmy.world how difficult is it to get the player or bots close enough to build the walls without being attacked? When I'm anywhere near a nest it spawns biters constantly
A few notes on managing biters early game: Worms attack bots, so blueprint placing was a bad time without killing all the worms first. I had the easiest time doing this by placing a bunch of turrets filtered to only attack worms+biters. I think it should be possible to place a roboport close enough earlier in the game, and then carefully build 'from the inside out', only shooting down the biters when you've basically encased them.
On gleba, I had the mech-suit from fulgora with the upgraded roboport, so I just kite things around while doing the science. Everything de-agros if you get enough distance.
I wanted to add that surrounding a convenient bitter base seems like a good way to make the captive biter stuff less of a headache. You can save one well located base for when you reach gleba.