Factorio Gleba What to Bring - First Landing Checklist

Gleba is the planet that punishes players who land unprepared, because almost nothing works the way it does on Nauvis. There are no drillable ore patches. There is no crude oil. Half the map is standing water. And every item you produce is quietly rotting.

The core problem: the standard "bring machines, mine locally" loop does not exist here. Your first hour depends entirely on a biological chain that takes time to spin up.

Resource	Available locally?	How you get it	Landing consequence
Iron plate Iron	Indirect	Nutrients Iron bacteria cultivation in a biochamber	Need imported plates to bootstrap
Copper plate Copper	Indirect	Copper bacteria cultivation in a biochamber	Same bootstrap gap
Crude oil Crude oil	No	Replaced by bioplastic / biosulfur / biolubricant	Bring processed oil products
Coal Coal	Indirect	Coal synthesis	Do not plan around boilers
Stone Stone	Yes	Mine patches in the dark highlands biome	Only mineable far from the marsh
Water Water	Yes	Offshore Offshore pump	Trivial, do not waste cargo space
Nutrients Nutrients	Yes	Mash from Yumako yumako / Jellynut jellynut fruit	Spoils in 5 minutes
Lubricant Lubricant	Indirect	Biolubricant recipe	Bring barrels to start

Note the pattern: you can make everything eventually, but not in the first 20 minutes. That gap is exactly what your rocket payload has to cover.

If you are still deciding whether Gleba is even the right second planet, check https://factorioguides.com/space-age/guide/planet-order-guide/ before you commit the launch - Aquilo later reuses the heating technology you build here, but Gleba is not mandatory as your first stop.

The full list, in priority order:

Item	Quantity (one person)	Why it is irreplaceable
Stone brick Landfill	2000+	The marsh cannot be built on at all
Iron plate Iron plates	4000	Covers you until bacteria cultivation runs
Copper plate Copper plates	2000	Same bootstrap window
Lubricant Lubricant barrels	50	No crude oil means no lubricant refinery
Plastic bar Plastic bars	500	Before the bioplastic line exists
Gun turret Gun turrets	20	Pentapods arrive fast once spores spread
Piercing Piercing rounds	1000	Cheap insurance, stacks well
Transport Belts, inserters, assemblers	Full kit	You cannot build a factory without a build kit
Electric Power poles and substations	Several hundred	The most commonly forgotten item on the list
Heating Heating tower	2	Power generation and later the Aquilo prerequisite

Landfill deserves special emphasis. Gleba's lowlands are shallow water tiles with a marbled, unbuildable surface. Your landing pad itself is fine, but the moment you want to expand outward you either find elevated terrain or pour landfill. Bring more than you think you need.

Item	Why it is a mistake
Yumako Yumako / Jellynut jellynut fruit	Grows everywhere, spoils while sitting in a chest
Seeds	Harvested from trees you have not even planted yet
Stone Stone	Mineable in the highlands, just walk there
Coal Coal	Coal synthesis covers it once power is stable
Solar panel Solar-only plans	Surface solar output is only 50% here
Large buffer stockpiles of anything biological	Buffering does not work - spoilage timers beat you

This is the single biggest mental adjustment: throughput beats storage on Gleba. On Nauvis you can buffer 10,000 iron plates and forget about it. On Gleba, Nutrients nutrients have a five-minute spoil window, so anything you stockpile turns into Spoilage spoilage inside the container. When that eventually jams you, https://factorioguides.com/space-age/gleba/spoilage-backup/ walks through clearing a backed-up line without tearing the whole block down.

Pick where you drop the Cargo cargo landing pad before you commit the launch - relocating later is expensive.

The three biome rules:

1. Red and green marshlands are where Jellynut jellystem and Yumako yumako trees grow. You need both.
2. Dark highlands hold the Stone stone patches and sit above the water line, so they are directly buildable.
3. Pentapod nests only form on shallow water tiles - so highlands and midlands act as natural walls against expansion.

The trick most players miss: land on a highland/midland shelf wedged against both food biomes. You get buildable ground, stone access, food adjacency, and the water being between you and nest expansion instead of around you. You can push the enemy back further later by landfilling the shallow water they would otherwise use.

1. Power first. Drop a Heating heating tower, attach a Heat heat exchanger and steam turbine pair. This also unlocks the heating technology you will need before Aquilo.
2. Farms second. Agricultural Agricultural towers onto the fertile soil tiles surrounding wild trees. Do not place them on random marsh.
3. Nutrients third. Fruit into mash into nutrients, headed straight into biochambers. Keep the line short - this is where the 5-minute timer bites.
4. Bacteria fourth. Iron and copper bacteria cultivation inside biochambers. Only now does your metal supply become local.
5. Spoilage sink fifth. Route Spoilage spoilage into a Recycler recycler or burn it. Without a sink, one stalled machine backfills the whole line.
6. Defense sixth. Turrets on the side facing the marsh, because that is the only direction attacks come from. The perimeter layouts in https://factorioguides.com/space-age/gleba/pentapod-defense/ assume exactly this geometry, so build to match it rather than boxing yourself in.
7. Science seventh. Agri science Agricultural science packs can only be crafted on Gleba, so this is your export product.

Once you are past step 4 you are self-sustaining, and the imported plates stop mattering. Most failed Gleba runs fail somewhere between step 2 and step 4, because the chain stalls and everything rots.

Solar panel Solar panels produce at 50% effectiveness on the Gleba surface, which makes them a supplement rather than a solution. The real chain is:

Stage	Source	Notes
Ignition	Heating Heating tower burning local scrap	Cheap, needs a manual top-up early
Steady state	Heat exchanger plus turbine pair	Requires water from an offshore pump
Scaled	Rocket fuel Rocket fuel made from jelly	Gleba generates rocket fuel renewably

Gleba is one of the best power planets in the game once running - it just has an awkward startup window. Your imported material should buy you through that window, nothing more.

Mistake	What happens
Landing without landfill	You are boxed in by marsh in every direction
Buffering nutrients	They spoil inside the chest before you use them
Building before picking a biome	You end up relocating the pad and losing the launch
Assuming you can drill for ore	There is nothing to drill; it is bacteria or imports
No spoilage sink at scale	A single stall backfills the entire production line
Ignoring spores	Pentapod egg Pentapods are drawn to biological output, not pollution

Past the first hour the pressure shifts from setup to survival. Pentapod waves scale with your biological output rather than pollution, so the base you just built starts drawing attacks precisely because it is working. https://factorioguides.com/space-age/gleba/gleba-survival-guide/ covers keeping that base intact once the waves arrive, which is the point where most first landings actually collapse.

• Factorio Wiki: Gleba - biome properties, resource restrictions and spoil timers
• Reddit r/factorio - player-reported landing loadouts and first-hour routes

Last updated: 2026-09-26 | Verified against Factorio 2.0 / Space Age.