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.