IntroductionAlbert Making a new world in Factorio is relatively "easy", just create a new set of tilesets for the ground, add some new models of trees, create a bunch of new decoratives, some decals (optional), a new skin for the cliffs (optional), and bam! you get a new planet. Well, to be fair, you also have to play with the terrain generation noise and autoplace algorithms, experiment with proper LUT's, and adding some new shader won't hurt either if you want to succeed. The problem of making it from this simplistic perspective, is the danger of falling into a superficial automatism. So probably all your planets will end up looking the same with just different colours. Gleba is the one planet that has all the things needed to make a new Nauvis-like planet in Factorio, but it is still different on many other levels. What makes Gleba very special, at least to me, is how we twisted the core-concept of the planet and pushed the necessary elements in a specific way to make it more unique. Before having its final name, Gleba was internally called "biological planet", and an obvious direction for that would be a planet looking like a jungle. This would be fine for a new biome in Nauvis, but for an exotic planet, never explored, and full of life (more than ever), this time we needed something more alien looking. With not too many clichés in it, extravagant, and if possible playing with new colour palettes. Ah! But also with some link to the reality of Nauvis. And it needs to look very different from Nauvis. Ufff, Okay!. So we started to think about the microcosmos of the world of lichen, fungi and algaes under the sea. Something that exists in our reality, which it's believable already, but it has all the requirements mentioned above. In this video we made the effort of showing what exactly we have in mind for the look and feel of Gleba. The planet is still work in progress. But we better show it now because we will need to keep showing elements of Gleba in future posts. The map was handmade, but with a realistic vision of the autoplace algorithm and the map generation. The "trees" used are concept art used as placeholders. The cliffs are also placeholders, some tilesets will get tweaked to integrate them better. Some doodads will be added and modified. Colour grading is less or more missing, and the rain shader on the foreground will be tweaked. For a planet full of life (more than ever!), now it looks very static, but we are planning on adding some more animated "things" to really bring some life to the experience. And overall, we are avoiding to show, on purpose, the red area of the planet (look at the map during the last frames of the video) that one is too early to show. This video would be 55% worse (or more) if Petr wouldn't have composed and recorded this soundtrack for Gleba. You do remember our dear Petr, right? from the FFF#406 Space age music. The track is not exactly as it will sound during the game, now he is finishing some remixes of the tracks to make them flow perfectly fine for the gameplay requirements. Now our usual galactic tour operator will guide us through the sophisticated nuances of the nature of the biomes and habitats of Gleba.