The Importance Of Lotad Cannot Be Understated. The First Pokemon I Ever Traded Was A Lotad. (With @cowoxsp)

Shooting The Star

Rating: T+

Characters: Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines, Bill Cipher

Word count: 1,604

Summary: An AU taking place in Take Back The Falls where Bill really does kill Mabel. Watch out because I made sure to make this INCREDIBLY feelsy.

AO3 version

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Idenbebmal

Granite 15th, 500 We've arrived at Paddleglens to establish our outpost, and I'm... pleased with the surroundings. The hills are decent, as we've settled along the foothills of our home mountain range. We've got dolomite, chalk and mudstone exposed along the surface of our new home. In addition we've got a decent supply of trees along our northern area, though much of our new outpost lacks any greenery along the southern portion. It's all a rolling grass plain around the river. The river itself is a small thing, barely deep enough to provoke a risk of drowning. I'm happy to report one of the hills is decently large and tall to support our initial outpost and I've begun laying out our plans to delve into the hill to carve out our lodgings. I've already begun to plan how to carve secure entrances on the hill for access to the fort for ourselves, traders, and potential invaders. We look to have a bright future ahead of ourselves... though my cohorts have admitted their skills are... lackluster in many of the departments we will need. We have no miners, woodcutters, or farmers. Just 2 bards, a noble, a carpenter, a soldier, and a cook. One of the bards is a fisherdwarf at least, and before I could talk with them, they were already running to the river... As for the other bard, they have skill with thread, but in the meantime, I've set them to work with an axe. Our cook likewise has been given an axe and set to work, and the pickaxes were given to our noble and soldier.

Granite 17th, 500 First major incident in the fort... one of our bards got into a tussle with a kingsnake. Both seemed to have run away mostly fine, but I admit this is not a promising beginning.

Felsite 4th, 500 Wow, Slate just blew right past huh. We've begun to carve out our lodgings and such out for our initial home. We've established offices for our nobility, and I've begun work as a manager. Our lone soldier is operating as the town sheriff, and the last noble should be sitting down to count all our stocks any day now. Without a mason of any kind, we're relying on our carpenter for most of our furniture right now. Tables, chairs, beds, doors and blocks. I'd prefer stone blocks for our workshops, but we're going to have to make due with birch blocks. The little stone we have that isn't economic stone is going to have to be saved for building some furnaces and such, in case one of the other leaders needs them before we reach magma. Regardless, on this fine day, I'm optimistic for where we're heading.

Galena 3rd, 500 We got our first batch of immigrants in! Two miners, a glazer, an administrator, and 2 peasants. The miners and glazers are both ironically better administrators than the noble, so the glazer's got the job as our broker now, taking that responsibility off me. The miners will join those we'd been having mine prior. The peasants & admin are going to work our fields for now. As well we're putting one of them to work as our stonemason for the time being.

Limestone 1st, 500 Well Autumn has come, and I feel rather poor on the outpost's condition. We have an internal storage area, but so little has been carved out from what I planned, and the outpost liaison will be here soon. I fear we have little impressive here, and while I sent one of the miners off to begin an exploratory delve below us, we have yet to find much aside from a small amount of cassiterite.

Limestone 13th, 500 I don't know what the next leader is going to want, so I'm requesting imports of materials we either don't currently have, or may not have at all. A few stones, copper bars and ore, as well as some crops, as it might be a nice supplement. I don't care if they buy what I asked to import, but I will try to produce the exports asked, which are primarily amulets and scepters. For my remaining time as the head of our fort, I'm going to be trying to set up some manufacturing of those goods, so we might have something to sell next autumn.

Sandstone 20th, 500 Well we got our final migrant wave this year, I'm pleased about that. Trading could have gone better, and in the mean time, I've sent our miners to go prospecting for gems along the hillsides. Our cook has made his first masterpiece, and I don't know if I should be concerned or not. I think he got inspired by the rumor of planepacked, and decided to planeroast some apples. He's shoved so many different ingredients into his apple roast, I suspect he actually was just grabbing individual apples and shoving them in. He put in almost every piece of fruit we had lying around, considering he made 255 servings of the thing. Why he decided to do this AFTER the traders left, I'll never know. I guess he wanted to eat his roast all by himself, but I could have bought some real nice flour and dyes with that kind of money...

Granite 1st, 501 Well... the years over. I managed to delve deep enough to get us some gold with some prospective mining to the west. I smelted the gold and had a set of coins forged to celebrate our first year. 500 gold coins, minted by our cook funnily enough. He chose to put a rendition of The Tin Rock, a finely designed image of a jug on one side, and an image of a millstone on the back. I'd also set up connecting our trading depot by tunnel to our lodgings, and carving a more defensive entrance into our outpost. I'd used the rock we had from mining to get our mechanics to work making mechanisms and set out to build as many rock fall traps as I could on a zig-zagging little path. Likewise, I had a bowyer make us 10 crossbows to get us started defensively. I know metal would be superior, but we don't have any military grade metal to work with at the moment. I'd also managed to set up some production of trade goods like goblets and amulets. Hopefully whoever follows me can find some metal we can use to create a few weapons to wield, otherwise we're limited to the wooden crossbows, and a bronze sword I bought off the caravan...

I uh thought of this at 1am last night

Did you find your missing baby?

Not yet. Kulet is still missing. I admit my schedule has been rough for playing DF as of recent, and my most recent time has been spent on a new fort (The Sea Adventure, a Sinister Ocean/coastal embark). Kulet is from my 4th Fort (Idk the name it was too long). Short summary of my forts though:

1st Fort, Bustmoment: -Tutorial embark. Went fine initially, set up large bedroom complex, good dining hall, and food/alcohol production. Decent traps for surface entrance. Lack of understanding of how Fortifications work lead to bad usage of them, and ultimately made the surface defenses scary to operate. Meanwhile I breached the first cavern layer and only the first, and got involved in a nasty war on Olm people, that kept dragging my dwarves into the lake. Eventually after losing a major military engagement, I dropped the save and made a new world. (I didn't know about Retirement at the time)

2nd Fort, Steelfortress: -The infamous war on birds started here. Embark was a neutral badlands with high savagery & a light aquifer. Aquifer posed no challenge and I was within a year having settled with all three caverns pierced, and a decent magma forge set up. Traps and such were more aggressively deployed, and there were more than a few battles (Internally referred to as the "Great Cavern Wars" against Ant-People) to carve out certain areas underground for farming. Ultimately what drove me to abandon this fort was a 9 month long battle against giant flying agitated wildlife. During that I built up a decently large and armored military, which while incapable of fending off the birds, was apparently itching for World Domination. (More on that later. Though also on another post of mine)

3rd Fort, "Lake of Something" (Name forgotten again): -Having felt a High Savagery was too much & Light aquifers too easy, I searched for a heavy aquifer and got a lake location I liked. After starting the first year, and trying to dig down, I almost immediately hit the heavy aquifer and got stuck for over a year trying to get things stable, and set up a method to pierce the aquifer before beginning to build the fort proper. Unlike the previous forts which had surface trading depots, I decided to move this one underground. Like other forts before and after, I then began to quickly dig towards the bottom, and set up small areas within each cavern to work in, or blocked them off after discovering them. Ultimately nothing particularly notable happened that sticks out in memory, but the fort was ultimately abandoned due to the Cave Adaptation fix update rolling around. Knowing most dwarves had likely developed it in this fort, I decided to take a break from Fortress mode, and play some Adventure mode.

(Which I decided to retire my second fort, as my save of it was in the worst condition of the three, and I originally wanted to retire the fort by "Succumbing to internal invaders" or similar but a standard retirement was an option and I viewed as more desirable)

4th Fort, Gooddesert the Fortress of Mines: -After playing around in Adventure Mode in the 2nd fort's world, I got an itch to start a new fort again, and was talking with my brother. We ultimately came to pick a fort in a Good and Neutral biome cross between "Desert?", badlands and Grasslands. Among world history, as it shares a previous fort, I decided to embark from that Civ again. Just to find out when the Liason came by, that 2 of my 3 dwarven neighbors were at war with me. Going through Legends mode further told me it was my Civ that seemed to have started the war, with all attacks coming from my prior fortress after I retired it. The whole time I was trying to rescue kidnapped children from Goblins in Adventure Mode, it turns out my fort was just attacking EVERYBODY. I played this one until around 1-2 weeks ago, when I began wanting to try messing with some mods for the first time.

4.5th fort, Some volcano Fort I think?: -I had a friend over and I was talking about DF, as you do, and he got curious about the game and wanted to see what it was like. So I booted the game up, showed world gen, we picked an embark, and then retired it to go to it in Adventure Mode. We then made an ideal character for him, and then foolishly rolled up a Worm Man with over 100 pet worms, and crashed the game. I haven't talked with said friend yet, and was gonna play in that world when talking with them.

5th Fort, The Sea Adventure: -That leaves us with our current fort. It's a sinister oceanic embark, and I brought a few adventurers there, including a Dwarf-me, a dwarf-version of my brother, and an anomalocaris (one of the mods) woman of one of my roommates (And their cat as a pet cat, who died to Goblins). Originally the plan was to grow Sliver Barbs & catch Precambrian Arthropods for an aquarium, but I don't know how to do the later half. The Roc attacks have been on this fort.

Here she is, three of her kids are on the same tile as her. I remember reading your prior message, and thought it was smart. Unfortunately none of her kids show up on there. Everything lower is just water smears all over her body. I presume from a recent bath, as that's her most recent memory, and she's still holding the soap. Also of note, in the process of trying to find her again, I tried searching for Kulet by name in the citizen's menu, but she doesn't show up.

Like Kulet still has a name and image. So presumably she "Exists" within the fort?

Still, it and other things got me interested in looking over her personality and history and such.

I'm sorry about what happened at Steelfortress (100-105)

Did you find your missing baby?

Not yet. Kulet is still missing. I admit my schedule has been rough for playing DF as of recent, and my most recent time has been spent on a new fort (The Sea Adventure, a Sinister Ocean/coastal embark). Kulet is from my 4th Fort (Idk the name it was too long). Short summary of my forts though:

1st Fort, Bustmoment: -Tutorial embark. Went fine initially, set up large bedroom complex, good dining hall, and food/alcohol production. Decent traps for surface entrance. Lack of understanding of how Fortifications work lead to bad usage of them, and ultimately made the surface defenses scary to operate. Meanwhile I breached the first cavern layer and only the first, and got involved in a nasty war on Olm people, that kept dragging my dwarves into the lake. Eventually after losing a major military engagement, I dropped the save and made a new world. (I didn't know about Retirement at the time)

2nd Fort, Steelfortress: -The infamous war on birds started here. Embark was a neutral badlands with high savagery & a light aquifer. Aquifer posed no challenge and I was within a year having settled with all three caverns pierced, and a decent magma forge set up. Traps and such were more aggressively deployed, and there were more than a few battles (Internally referred to as the "Great Cavern Wars" against Ant-People) to carve out certain areas underground for farming. Ultimately what drove me to abandon this fort was a 9 month long battle against giant flying agitated wildlife. During that I built up a decently large and armored military, which while incapable of fending off the birds, was apparently itching for World Domination. (More on that later. Though also on another post of mine)

3rd Fort, "Lake of Something" (Name forgotten again): -Having felt a High Savagery was too much & Light aquifers too easy, I searched for a heavy aquifer and got a lake location I liked. After starting the first year, and trying to dig down, I almost immediately hit the heavy aquifer and got stuck for over a year trying to get things stable, and set up a method to pierce the aquifer before beginning to build the fort proper. Unlike the previous forts which had surface trading depots, I decided to move this one underground. Like other forts before and after, I then began to quickly dig towards the bottom, and set up small areas within each cavern to work in, or blocked them off after discovering them. Ultimately nothing particularly notable happened that sticks out in memory, but the fort was ultimately abandoned due to the Cave Adaptation fix update rolling around. Knowing most dwarves had likely developed it in this fort, I decided to take a break from Fortress mode, and play some Adventure mode.

(Which I decided to retire my second fort, as my save of it was in the worst condition of the three, and I originally wanted to retire the fort by "Succumbing to internal invaders" or similar but a standard retirement was an option and I viewed as more desirable)

4th Fort, Desert Mines of Good (or something): -After playing around in Adventure Mode in the 2nd fort's world, I got an itch to start a new fort again, and was talking with my brother. We ultimately came to pick a fort in a Good and Neutral biome cross between "Desert?", badlands and Grasslands. Among world history, as it shares a previous fort, I decided to embark from that Civ again. Just to find out when the Liason came by, that 2 of my 3 dwarven neighbors were at war with me. Going through Legends mode further told me it was my Civ that seemed to have started the war, with all attacks coming from my prior fortress after I retired it. The whole time I was trying to rescue kidnapped children from Goblins in Adventure Mode, it turns out my fort was just attacking EVERYBODY. I played this one until around 1-2 weeks ago, when I began wanting to try messing with some mods for the first time.

4.5th fort, Some volcano Fort I think?: -I had a friend over and I was talking about DF, as you do, and he got curious about the game and wanted to see what it was like. So I booted the game up, showed world gen, we picked an embark, and then retired it to go to it in Adventure Mode. We then made an ideal character for him, and then foolishly rolled up a Worm Man with over 100 pet worms, and crashed the game. I haven't talked with said friend yet, and was gonna play in that world when talking with them.

5th Fort, The Sea Adventure: -That leaves us with our current fort. It's a sinister oceanic embark, and I brought a few adventurers there, including a Dwarf-me, a dwarf-version of my brother, and an anomalocaris (one of the mods) woman of one of my roommates (And their cat as a pet cat, who died to Goblins). Originally the plan was to grow Sliver Barbs & catch Precambrian Arthropods for an aquarium, but I don't know how to do the later half. The Roc attacks have been on this fort.

The Video Facial Discussion

Dib sat in front of his computer. He checked the time again, 3:37 PM, or 15:37 as they insisted upon measuring it. Honestly Dib actually did kind of prefer using military time as a system of measurement. It did result in notably less confusion than the standard everyone else went by. It helped to further reduce confusion when you worked the same hours that Dib did. In fact over the past week, Dib had spent arguably just as much time awake at night, as he did during the day, perhaps even more. He felt close to a breakthrough, though he wasn’t exactly sure on what. Regardless the time had come for another one of his progress reports, or “Verifiable Factual Debriefings” as they insisted upon calling it. Honestly he never quite understood all of the insistance of this repetition of these acronyms. Everywhere he seemed to look it was “VFD” this, “VFD” that. If they could figure out some way of phrasing it as a VFD they did. He honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t just call it a video-conference or something. If anything, at this point the insistence on the VFD was more debilitating than anything else.

Regardless of his thoughts on their over reliance of the same acronym, they were due to call him in exactly 5 minutes. He wasn’t to get on the frequency earlier than 15:42. Well in 3 minutes now. He supposed that time could really get ahead of him when he wasn’t thinking about it. In fact it seemed like 2011 had just been a bust year for him. Dib hadn’t unrooted anything major conspiracy-wise, He hadn’t tracked down anything supernatural that was out of place or dangerous, and he hadn’t unveiled any secret plots by their enemies or even found any of their hiding allies. All in all, 2011 had been quite the terrible year for Dib. He still was no closer to unraveling the murders of the early 2000′s, or even finding out what happened to Zim.

He checked the time again, 15:41. He supposed he didn’t really have much time left to wonder about where Zim went uninterrupted. It wouldn’t be long before he had to get on the channel to discuss his progress with his superiors. And it was 15:42 right now, and just like that as he joined the channel the entire group of his superiors, all six of them appeared onscreen. Except that they didn’t really. All he could see, just like always, was their faces covered entirely in shadow. It was never any different.

“Agent Mothman. What is your status?”

It was technically the lead in rank asking him. He was always the first to ask, and it was always this exact same question. Dib knew best that he had to respond. “I haven’t found anything particularly new, revealing, or dangerous during my work here.”

Another voice spoke up,“Jeez then what did you even find Dib?”

This voice Dib actually recognized as his own sister Gaz’s voice. He could see her silhouette on his screen as well. It’d been a while since they’d been together in person, Dib wanted to say about 7 years or so, and her hairstyle hadn’t changed much in that time. “Like you’re one to talk Gaz. I’ve never seen you pull your attention away from a videogame long enough to make your own discovery.”

“Mothman. These attacks against your sister aren’t appreciated. You know exactly why she isn’t assigned to fieldwork like you are.”

Did mulled this over, it was about the 15th time they’d told him this in this year alone. Gaz was found unsuitable for fieldwork because she simply didn’t care enough to be out in the field in the first place. Instead they sorted her into the higher ranks with the idea that she’d be better in those positions because she wouldn’t have to actually do much. Then if anyone tried to pull her away from what she was doing, then she’d show them her scary side. He supposed this tactic worked well though.

“Mothman. Why are you even still out there?”

This came from the third voice, yet another man’s. Dib didn’t particularly like this man. In fact of his six supervisors, Dib only particularly like two of them, and they’d been rather quiet this time. Dib would have to admit though, he did know them best of all his supervisors, excluding his sister, though that relationship wasn’t exactly a good one. Gaz only really tolerated his existence at best. Those two however, in fact funnily enough they were married as well, he felt were they only people above him who respected him. In addition, they were pretty much some of the only surviving members from when he originally joined who hadn’t gone crazy, missing, evil, dead, or all four. Though his current leader was technically one of those.

“I’m on to something big here. Just give me a little bit more time.”

There was an audible sigh from the fourth voice, one of the supervisors he actually liked. “Dib, you’ve been searching here for the past 8 months. What really makes you think that this ninth month will be so much better?”

“It’s got to be, I can feel just how close I am to this one.”

It was time for her husband to speak up this time, “Look Dib, in all honesty it’s been really quiet here for a long time. We haven’t had any major incidents since” ----sssshcckck

At this point Dib’s screen went to static, and after fiddling around with the machinery for a bit he got the signal back. At this point most of the members just nodded at his return, assuming he more or less understood where the conversation had been going. Dib then held up a small rectangular box with a black screen and held it in view of the camera. “Why don’t we use these anymore? They are way more reliable than using the internet, and they’re more secure as well.”

It was the first guy again this time: “Agent Mothman, we no longer use the Farnsworth devices since the understanding of them was lost. Without agents able to replicate them, we can’t use them unless all members were able to have access to one. Since only a limited number of them were ever produced, as well as the fact that several of them have fallen into enemy hands as well, just serves to make them highly impractical overall.”

“Well Mothman. Do you actually have anything important to tell us or has this entire checkup been a waste of our time?”

It was the sixth of his superiors. Dib hated this one almost as much as he hated the first one. He never had anything nice to say to him, though none of them really did excluding the couple, and he always said it in such a cruel tone too.

“You guys were the one to assign me this checkup in the first place you know. And no, I haven’t found anything important enough to report back either.”

It was the same man who replied this time: “Well then Agent Mothman this call is over. And there won’t be anymore in the future unless we decide that we actually have a use for an agent as useless as you, because from this point on, your on your own.”

With that there were four clicks and everyone except the couple hung up on him. “What, Wait! You guys can’t just leave me like this! Man, I really hate that guy.”

Another sigh from the woman and then she spoke up: “Dib you know you can’t say that about your superiors.”

“I know, but he can really be such a jerk sometimes.”

It was the man this time: “Dib you can’t let him bother you. You have to be a professional agent. They debated just outright calling you back in and leaving you as a teacher of the new recruits.”

“I’m trying the best I can! You know exactly how powerful our enemies are and just how good they are at hiding. We wouldn’t even have the membership problems that we do have if they weren’t this good!”

“Dib what did I just say about being professional. I know that you’re a new agent, and me and my wife have been plenty patient with you and your progress. Unfortunately the council has not been, and you’re lucky that we managed to convince them to just let you go off on your own. And that wasn’t an easy argument to win either. Consider your freedom from the council, as well as your new freedom to investigate this as you see fit an early Christmas gift from us.”

“But I don’t have access to any of our equipment or resources anymore. Who am I even supposed to contact in the event I actually discover anything!?”

It was the woman who answered him this time. “Us. You know exactly how to contact us, in addition to where we live. If you find anything that you think needs to be reported, then call us.”

“Thank you. Are your kids going to get involved with the organization anytime soon?”

The two answered together with a firm “No.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, I’m just saying that I wasn’t much older than your kids are now when I first started in VFD. And they are going to join eventually. It’s kind of fate at this point to join VFD. I mean they could join alongside you guys now, it’d be more or less the best experience they could get.”

The woman sighed again before she answered. “Look Dib, I get that Dipper and Mabel are old enough to join, and we really do want them to. We just want them to do that when they are ready to join. We don’t want to just rush them right into. Anyways we have to go now. Bye Dib.”

With that the conference ended with a final click. Well he’d just been fired, and he was left with only two real contacts left. He couldn’t even call his sister since she insisted he didn’t know her number, since after all “Being your supervisor is bad enough already Dib.”

Since he no longer worked for VFD truly he didn’t have to worry about any of their restrictions they’d given him impede him. Without these restrictions he could finally go where all of his investigations seemed to point him. “Well it looks like I’m headed to Gravity Falls, Oregon now.”

Omht xdt fv jsh ytrm hojxhn, fqjykzw gjtu juhix.

I'd say Wendy still misses Dipper, but hear aim is too good.

Winter for a Pine Tree

Disclaimer: Hey this gets dark real fast (0 to 60) and was written primarily to “Balance out the forces of the universe” After a friend of mine took a join project I’d been involved in and taken it off the rails into Wendip Territory (The stories ended up splitting into 2 stories written by two authors each instead of 1 story by 4). Anyways to balance out the force of the universe (and yes, I’m looking at you Graviti and Futur) I wrote this.

It gets dark so I tagged it as Depravity Falls, and spoiler alert, it involves death. So you’ve been forewarned.

Keep reading

So as someone who recently finished Space Age, I have to say, I had to return to rebuild, unclog, or fix a bottleneck manually on Fulgora, Nauvis, & Gleba. I’ve had to do it the most on Gleba, but at no point did I find it so hopeless I had to reload my save. I did rebuild my entire base 3 times roughly, and I’m still not super happy about it, but I really did enjoy it, and it was one of my favorite planets. Spoilage was and is my favorite mechanic, and I’ve built 2 completely different Glebas on a singleplayer save, and a multiplayer save. Gleba is a beast and it rewards approaching it differently. All my Glebas have been belt-based for almost every “core” resource (My mall is bot-based and that’s it, it matches all my other bases except Aquilo, which has no bots at all, not even to load the one silo I have). I think overall I can agree with several of your points, like the terrain is very unclear, and I think a major part of it is due to how Gleba got trimmed down in scale over development. I suspect the reason why Gleba has roughly 4-6 different biomes (Green marsh, Red Marsh, Grey marsh, Rock highlands, yellow highlands & lakes) is due to it originally having more fruit lines.

I don’t know when your post is from, but one of the patches from a month or two ago MAJORLY fixed a huge gripe I’d had with Gleba. And it was BAD. I’d noticed while playing on my first save that the spore clouds spread far and fast, but not densely like they do on Nauvis, and came to the hypothesis that spores aren’t absorbed by terrain (which was a bug or balance change). Wube has since changed this, giving the terrain spore absorption, and since this change happened, I’ve found the same base produces far less spores on the map, and attacks massively scaled down.

On power… a lot of people seem to ignore that rocket fuel is a very viable fuel source for the heating towers on Gleba, and it’s very efficient to do so. I circuit control the heating towers to only input spoilage/spoilables if they’re below 950 degrees, and if they drop below 600, I flood my incinerator line with excess rocket fuel. Since I set this up, I’ve only had a blackout once, and it was after the whole base crashed due to accidentally incinerating all my seeds once, over an hour before it blacked out.

But yeah, I do agree you have to have most of your base built out, like a bare skeleton of the production line to actually hook it all up. Ironically, as I come from software engineering, it felt like having to do all the documentation first, before getting to “code”, because I had to have a roughly finished setup first, but… you can do that with roughly 6 biochambers to set up biochamber production, and lay it out in an easily expandable setup. I’ve tried a few different methods (all belt-based) so far for my Glebas and I still have ideas for refining and experimenting with new layouts. I’ve tried actually liked my second game’s Gleba better because I was more ambitious with setting up my infrastructure, and made it much more expandable/experimental. My OG base has a direct belt connection from farms to processing, uses quality, and basically has struggled ever since I got epic quality unlocked. Like I’ve redesigned it more than a few times and every time felt really proud. It challenges me in a way the overhaul mods never did before.

My MP base is built almost exclusively with just Gleba and Vulcanus tech. I do have turbo belts, foundries, big drills, and EM plants, but no recyclers, Tesla turrets, or artillery. (I’m technically waiting on our Fulgora player to export those, but we don’t have them researched and our Fulgora is out of rocket fuel, and I don’t want to touch someone else’s planet. Our Vulcanus player hasn’t set up a production line for artillery either, so I’m actually just defending with only gun turrets atm). Like the power plant is just a 3 heating tower setup, I only burn spoilage, eggs, carbon & rocket fuel (burning fruit is more fuel efficient, but I’m using a main-bus that cleans itself instead of a flowthrough design, the reason was to reduce spore production rather than maximize freshness like my other base. I only have a flowthrough section for bioflux, as I determined only bioflux & lime science freshness matters). I say this Gleba is more expandable, as if I wanted to, since I used a rail network, I could just add more farms to the network, move to a new highland area, design and setup a new base, and then start sending in the trains once it’s ready and either keep two bases, or decommission one. I’m legit thinking about designing different bases spread across the map for different products, so I can have them specialize how they handle the chain to take more or less advantage of the different build styles. It’s funny because now Gleba is the planet I look forwards to because I like trying to figure out better ways to handle it. (I am doing similar on Fulgora, trying to find ways to optimize my scrap production for science, modules, and holonium products simultaneously while reducing waste… it’s an interesting challenge, but it pales in comparison to Gleba.)

Ultimately, I do think Gleba is ironically the hardest planet in the game, by far. The only part of the game I have found can even compare with its difficulty is the shattered planet, and I do think more people should try to keep a more open mind about Gleba. I do really appreciate the people who say “I want to like Gleba” because it is worth liking, but it does have its flaws. Gleba tests you in ways that very little else does, and I admit some of that is frustrating. Especially since Gleba’s rewards are unfortunately not helpful outside of research or combat. The Biochamber & Biolab do not compete with the possibilities Foundries & Big Miners or Electromagnetic Plants & Recyclers offer to bases. Like I love the biolab, but… it doesn’t warrant a base redesign on any planet other than one build on Nauvis… the EM plant and Foundry offer worthy redesigns on EVERY planet, AND SPACE PLATFORMS. Meanwhile… outside of Gleba the agricultural tower and biochamber ONLY have uses on Nauvis, and BOTH are really niche… like 50% bonus to oil cracking, rocket fuel, & fish breeding and infinite wood… cool if you’re doing legendary wooden power poles, but if you’re not, completely useless. Likewise fish breeding is ONLY useful for quality spidertrons, which… is unfortunately a quantity beats quality area… there is no real time I can think of when one legendary spidertron would be better than 5 common ones. It just feels like bragging rights, and we already have mech armor for that.

The problem with Gleba

There's a game I'm a big ol' fan of and don't write about enough called Factorio. It's an interesting beast of a game. There's a lot of RTS DNA in it, and a lot of grand logistics puzzle/progammer-brain game. The main appeal is that as a the player, you are running around setting up a giant tangled mess of machines, conveyor belts, and little robot arms to produce large amounts of stuff to feed into research machines, teching up to more on more complex stuff, requiring you to scale up more and more until eventually hitting a win condition, but the more you expand and produce, the more the resulting polution causes your basically-Zerg neighbors to become larger and more aggressive. There's a really great inherent push and pull to this where if you're new to the game and just kinda struggling along, you generally have a lot more leeway on enemy aggression, and if you're really confidently rushing through (or just seriously overbuilding all your production), big deadly attacks roll in super early and you'll have to be way more aggressive about defenses.

Back in October, Factorio got an expansion, which I described while streaming it as the sort of expansion that's for "real Factorio sickos only." It makes the game significantly longer and more difficult, mainly in that normally, you advance through 5 flavors of science packs, each more of a challenge to produce at the rate you'd like, then head off into space. In the expansion, you can get into space with just the first 3 science flavors, but to hit the new victory condition, you need to be producing the original 5, plus an additional 5, one produced on orbital space platforms and the rest each coming from setting up bases on 4 new planets, each of which basically require you not only to start your big setup from scratch, but have their own resoruces, tech trees, and obstacles, meaning you end up playing 5 variations of the base game, simultaneously, and an extra logistical challenge in tying their science outputs together.

As a real Factorio sicko myself, I love this, for the most part. I have long since mastered the base game to the point where it's fairly trivial for me to get a thriving base going on what's now just the starting planet, and set up defenses that won't hold up INDEFINITELY without any further input from me (places to mine up the most basic resources do eventually run dry and one must push out into the map to set up new outposts now and then). So hitting a point where I have to just step away from my primary base and spend several hours setting things up on new planets is a cool change of pace.

And of the new planets, three of them are just fine. There's a volcanic planet where there's no water with which to set up the usual early game steam power nor the late game nuclear plants, nor can you mine for the iron and copper you need to produce basically everything in the game. The big challenge is figuring out the new tech tree and how to get the basics set up, then in realizing just how incredibly generous this new tech tree is with everything, and how much more efficiently you can set everything up, and the normal enemies that would be harassing you have no real equivalent. There ARE stupifyingly large and tough new enemies, but they won't come to you. They camp out around the map, guarding their personal territory, and requiring you to essentially handle a boss fight every time you need more territory to set up your stuff or harvest finite resources (but honestly, in practice, you'll need to expand in this just once, most likely).

Another planet's main hook is that literally the only resources to work with come from setting up your mining drills on the ruins of a long-dead civilization, pulling up an odd slurry of what in the base game are end-game resources. Complicated electronics, fuel, and superstructure materials just come out of the ground, and need to be broken down in recyclers for the actual base resources, which is just sort of hilarious. And the real puzzle is you have this mixed slurry of all these resources you need to sort out, then also deal with the incredibly unbalanced ratio, and find some way to keep the resource pipeline flowing and not getting gummed up with all that concrete and super advanced electronics you don't actually need that many of. And the final planet, only unlockable after mastering the rest, needs a good interplanetary logistics network as you need to important damn near everything from elsewhere.

All of this is great. Head to a new planet, spend a couple hours puzzling out it's quirks and how to set up a new rocket platform, its required inputs for perpetual rocket launches, and how to produce each planet's science flavor to send home. Then since it's been a few hours since you've checked on your main base, you head back, do some maintenance, maybe move some mines, maybe take a moment to make upgrades everywhere as each planet also has some infrastructural stuff that can't be made anywhere else, giving you better production structures and faster conveyor belts and so forth you might want to use everywhere. But then there's Gleba.

The gimmick of Gleba is it's the biological planet. There's no metal to work with (technically). No oil. Solar power doesn't even work particularly well. So like the volcano planet, you have to reinvent the wheel with everything using a new tech tree where you harvest two types of fruit, throw them into a series of goop-filled tanks powered by "nutrients" rather than electricity, and various combinations of byproducts your tanks spit out let you make literally everything you're ever going to need. In fact, a properly set up Gleba base becomes a perfect closed system, circulating seeds back to the two fruit farms for an infinite suppy, producing all the nutrients required to keep everything running, and enough surplus production of some form or another to feed into incinerators to provide electricity for the few things that still need it (basically just the inserters moving things from one tank to another).

And then there's the downsides. First, and this is a real serious problem for anyone dealing with this for the first time, Gleba has a real serious problem of "what the hell am I even looking at?" Everywhere else, there's pretty clear divisons between flat open ground, cliffs, some sort of liquid, and whatever useful resources you can harvest, without anything else really factoring in. And then here's Gleba.

I love the visual variety, but for comparison's sake, the base game looks like this:

It is very clear where the water is, it is very clear that there is a big patch of copper you can mine up. Meanwhile in these Gleba screenshots, you can't make out where the important resources are (a bit of a cheat because I didn't actually include the biomes where either of the plants that matter grow), and it's honestly quite hard to tell where the water is (I'm PRETTY SURE there's some in every screenshot, and probably a lot more than you'd think as it looks real different when very shallow)... oh and almost all water on Gleba is shallow to various degrees so you can't even go by what's walkable, you'll only really notice an area is flooded when you try to place stuff on it. It will probably take you quite some time before you can even successfully identify what's important, where it comes from, and where you have enough dry land to set your base up. And during that time you'll probably start dealing with the second complication.

Everything rots on Gleba. Well, almost everything. Stuff you build is fine, but the two important fruits, their intermediary peeled forms, the main intermediary material you make from mashing them together, the nutrients that power everything, the bacteria that you need to breed for your basic metal supplies, the one ingredient I haven't mentioned, and even the science packs you're eventually going to be exporting decay over time. Fresh picked fruit spoils in an hour. Peeled fruit and nutrients only last a few seconds. And once stuff rots, generally, you have this completely different item called spoilage, which is going to gum up all your automation by blocking conveyor belts or the input slots of machines and it can be pretty difficult to clear out.

Also as some things decay VERY quickly, any number of problems can cause something vital to spoil in transit, like say the nutrient supply to getting fruit initially processed, or the nutrients powering your production of nutrients, and everything's going to grind to a halt. Including the little inserters that move stuff to the burners providing power to those very inserters. So it's not at all uncommon when setting stuff up on Gleba that one tiny thing will be wrong, maybe as you cut off a belt to reroute it for a change in your overall design, everything rots, the whole base dies, and you have to go around clearing out rotted gunk from literally everything by hand, hand-produce a few nutrients from said rotted gunk, and slowly manually restart everything. Meanwhile we have the last issue to worry about.

Gleba is the one planet other than the one you start on with aggressive enemies to worry about. And there's a lot more to worry about from them. As the above sizzle real shows, they're significantly tougher on an individual level, but also, having these cool stretchy legs, they ignore all terrain. So you can't funnel them to choke points with walls, and they're likely to skim over water you can't build on in their approach. So you just sort of have to have a huge amount of standing firepower where they're likely to attack, which will only be your tree farms (and the path they need to take to them) which will be two very remote locations that are more or less completely flooded out... and your defenses most likely will require a lot of electricity, which is hard to get.

Also that last ingredient you have to worry about rotting? These things' eggs. Yeah both the buildings you use to produce everything on Gleba, and the science packs you eventually export, require the eggs of the local monsters to produce. Good news is, you really just need to risk your life attacking their nests to run off with a couple to start with, since you can make more eggs from eggs without too much trouble, but if one sits around for a few minutes without being processed, it hatches, and now there's a bunch of baby monsters freaking out in the middle of your base. And more importantly, after you clean that resulting mess up, you have to go on another super dangerous safari to get fresh eggs.

Now, individually, I actually love all this. There's some delightful cruelty and the puzzle of working out how to keep everything from rotting and clogging everything up in a fail-safe way is pretty neat. But putting it all together, there's two big things here that just feel real real bad.

First there's the pollution system that makes me love the base game so much. If I'm barely mining and producing stuff, I'm not causing a lot of pollution, so enemies aren't getting big and scary. If I make some huge mistake like, oh, running my whole base on coal power, scaling up a ton, and forgetting that I'm just plain not bringing enough coal in to sustain that, and my entire base de-powers and grinds to a halt, that's pretty bad, but I am producing zero pollution until I get it back online. If some small part of my factory stops working, because I'm massively overproducing something or I'm under-producing something, some machines are just going to stop doing anything until they get what they need, or have a place to dump their stuff, and even mines will stop mining if their output backs up.

Gleba... doesn't work that way. When anything goes wrong in any way, you go from having a ton of stuff you've produced to having a ton of spoilage. Or if you have some safety valves, you are suddenly tossing a massive overproduction of eggs or science or something straight into the furnace. But you're always going to be planting and harvesting the important plants (unless all your fruit rots on the line and there's no seeds to plant) whether you're really doing useful things with that fruit or not, and that's the one and only thing that generates "pollution" (officially it's spores that smell really delicious as a byproduct of harvesting). So catastrophes that end up being more of a full reset than a pause still leave you with jacked up pollution and much deadlier attacks, and that self-balancing difficulty just doesn't happen.

The other big problem, and this may be a bigger one, is you're really discouraged from tweaks and experimentation. You really are just sort of forced to fully design and deploy your entire Gleba base, with every emergency pressure valve and contingency, and the full production line to producing the final products you're shipping offworld before you even "plug it in" and start the actual plant harvesting. You can't really slowly build it up as you go (largely because you kinda get all your power by burning overproduction at the end), making a tiny change is going to make something start starving or backing up which can cause a disaster within seconds, and you either need to really really carefully manage ratios, or commit to massive overproduction and burning everything (spiking the difficulty).

So the first time you ever set up a base on Gleba, you're probably going to spiral into a failure state and need to reload from when you first landed there, maybe several times. But once you know what a functioning base looks like, either from your own trial and error or copying from someone else, you're going to have a nice little blueprint saved of this very nice compact efficient closed-loop base you can just stamp down on future play-throughs, hook up, and basically never have to look at again, ever. I was prompted to write this because I'm doing my second run of the expansion, got set up real quick here, and it's going to be a couple hours still before my defenses even get tested. Meanwhile I have basically all the Gleba research done already. There's no middle ground here between overwhelming and frustrating and a totally dull turn-key setup. Which is a huge shame!

Of course I'm also saying that before testing my defenses. The other inherent problem with Gleba is that from the moment you set foot on it, you do inherently have two planets with a steadily increasing difficulty modifier. Plus the science rots. So you are always going to have to divert SOME mental processing cycles to babysitting it at least a little bit even after you've solved the planet, even if it's just remembering to clean rotting science out of the labs on your starting planet here and there. And that really makes it into something you're still going to want to put off visiting for as long as possible even after playtest response to it being such a nightmare lead to the developers locking all sorts of cool researchable goodies behind it.

And then thing that really bothers me about all this is I can't really think of an easy fix for it. The closed loop where overproduction gets burnt is too conceptually foundational to really mess with. The cascading difficulty spike you could maybe fix by tying it to space launches and not basic production (rockets ignite methane in the air and freak the locals out)? Make solar work OK or take inserters out of the equation maybe by just letting belts feed directly into and out of the important machines here? If nothing else it'd certainly help if coastlines were more obviously marked in some way.

Also like... I'm not an outlier griping about this. Everyone hates Gleba. I just want to be the weird contrarian who thinks no, rotten planet is super rad, you should head there first even, get all that cool stuff to use elsewhere but... no there really are problems with it that are always gonna suck.

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