Stromatolite is kicking my butt. I can't seem to use the gold ore fast enough to get enough moist stromatoline to run more than one desiccation oven. Am I using too much steam (it looks really cool)? Or maybe there's some other way to use gold that I'm not seeing? I'm standing at the end of my storage zone picking up all the gold ore that gets missed.

Did you upgrade all burner assemblers to steam assemblers? It's probably not viable to run the whole base on steam. You need to mix with burner assemblers and lumber mills. This is not full-blown steam age as in Industrial Revolution. But just one desiccation furnace sounds wrong. I always needed multiple. Does the stromatolite give 25 moist remnants and desiccating 10 of those gives 150 steam and the steam assembler uses 25kW?

I upgraded some. Possibly too many, but I am so used to being able to scale up my power as I need to. Yeah, all your numbers are right. The biggest issue is I have like 12 wooden chests filled with gold ore to run those two ovens. If I scale up my gold growing operation any more, I'll be running the gold to storage myself lol. As I type this, my provisional rocket is staging itself for launch, so it clearly wasn't an issue.

As an aside, my dumb ass had like 8 more desiccation ovens primed and ready to go. I know Nauvis; I do not know Lignumis.

Ok. I'll take a mental note. If others report this, I need to tweak the numbers.

I instinctively upgraded all of my assemblers to the faster speed steam assemblers once I unlocked them and also most of my inserters, running everything off of steam except for the labs, lumber mills, and furnaces (only because they don't have steam variants). I didn't think it was too painful to stash the extra gold I built up, but I definitely could have done with less gold being produced.

To power my entire base at about 25 SPM for both sciences, I needed 5 towers of gold stromatolite production, but I think only one tower on its own could have produced the required gold for the research (plus maybe another tower for gold for buildings/rocket parts). And even then, it was borderline enough that I had to use burner inserters to insert the moist remnants because steam power would momentarily blip out.

I personally think that the steam-powered factory is a cool design and I'd adjust the numbers to make the gold vs. steam work out better, but I'd understand if you prefer to encourage players to keep a bunch of burners (though in that case, you might want to make a tip telling people not to do what I did). Or alternatively, a sink for gold bacteria (but not the ore they spoil into) might be interesting to play with by forcing you to care about the spoilage timer if you want all-steam like I did.

I think I'll do both. Increase it a bit and tell people to not go 100% steam. I added steam inserters just recently and that encourages 100% steam more than it did before.

I ran into a similar thing and am using boxes to hold excess gold. I turn it into gold plates and then put it in boxes, and then once in a while manually move the plates over to a big array of boxes off on the side, so that the ones by the belt can go back to filling up again. I think it will work fine so long as it all keeps going until recyclers and heating towers are available.

In general, the situation is much like Aquilo, where you produce ice and amonia from the same recipe. The general wisdom is that you end up wanting a way to void either of them, beacuse conditions will change over time and cause you to use one of the outputs more than the other.

A simple way to set up voiding on Lignumis would be to have a special compost heap building that only works on Lignumis and that gets rid of the special local resources: peat, gold ore, and moist stromatolite. It could also potentially manage gold seeds.

Thematically, maybe the building could have gold bacteria as one of its ingredients. The idea would be that there are quiescent native bacteria in there that can consume the native resources.

However it worked, throwing away gold would, in general, just be pretty funny. It would be like Spice on Arakkis: the whole galaxy wants it, but on its home planet, there is way too much of it.

I increased the amount of steam quite a bit. I forgot about the "telling the user part". I might add a tips and tricks page for steam on Lignumis at some point.

Sorry if it's beating a dead horse, but one funny thought I had is the idea of a "basic recycler".

Lignumus has low-tech versions of several things, including robots, chips, assemblers, inserters--lots of things. Why not a basic recycler? After all, the wood processing on Lignumus has some similarity to the organic processing on Gleba, just mercifully a little simpler and lighthearted. Gleba needs a way to void things, so that your pipelines can re-harvest and never stop moving. It's also desirable on Lignumis, so that your tree farms can just go and go, no matter whether you use more steam or more gold.

A basic recycler would be a lot like a regular one, but specialized for Lignumis. Some thoughts:

• If it eats gold, then it would solve the problem in this thread.
• If it eats lumber, then it would make burner agricultural towers more useful on Nauvis. It is fun to set up little tree gardens all over that aren't necessarily close to your main bus of tree products. I am finding that, without recyclers, I end up with rows and rows of boxes holding tree overflow.
• It maybe doesn't eat much else. Just Lignumus stuff. It could potentially eat gold seeds, if you wanted to phase out the special recipe for voiding gold seeds, though it's a fun recipe the way it is.
• To make it even more basic, a basic recycler could take no modules and perhaps output nothing at all. This is not a quality stepping stone but really just a way to get rid of things.

Oh, and it would be colored brown. Tree brown.

I think I don't like the idea too much. I don't want it to be solved. There are some limitations when you land there and I don't want to offer solutions for that. Once you come back it's trivial because you have the tech from Nauvis. It's all intended.

I can see that. It makes a lot of sense for the first time on the moon to be a little klunky. Putting things in boxes is enough to get you through that phase. You can certainly make a lot of boxes with all these tree farms.

For tech from Nauvis.... I had been picturing voiding as the answer, but I guess at that point you are going to easily consume all the steam this setup generates, so long as you set up an alternate power source that dwarfs what you get from the dessicators. So, I guess when you are back from Nauvis, you just don't mind any more if the gold/dissicator pipeline backs up. Fair enough.

Funny story, I am back on the planet after Nauvis, now, and could not figure out why gold is now running out for me (?!), rather than being way too plentiful. Welp, it's because of those diversion boxes I mentioned. I had set them up weeks ago and forgotten they are there.