I would absolutely recommend taking time to get comfortable with blueprints, they’ve been a huge timesaver for me. I just got my 600 caterium ingot factory up and running. Took me about 15 minutes to build, connect and wire 50 refineries. They don’t look pretty but I don’t care about pretty. If I wanted to make them pretty I could always build a building around the blueprint.

I also have blueprints for smelters, foundries, constructors, assemblers and manufacturers. All of them running vertically so whenever I need to scale up the production I just build my towers higher and the only manual things I do are connecting the wire between 2 blueprinted parts and connecting the inputs and outputs. Eventually I’ll hit the belt limit, but then I’ll just start a new tower next to the original one. I have also made blueprints for blenders and refineries but those expand horizontally and I’m not 100% happy with them, but they’re still better than manually building them.

I think I’ve saved tenfold the time I spent figuring out good blueprints and it has taken off a huge mental load of factory maintenance because everything is built using the exact same style so it’s pretty simple to understand what is going on in any of my blueprinted factories.

Mostly, my general advice boils down to three things: fully automate everything you can as you go, don’t tear down factories without a specific goal in mind, and break big production lines down into smaller pieces

• fully automate: it can be tempting to stand up box fed mini factories to solve a short term goal, but it’s almost always better long term to automate it, even if you just do it sloppy and inefficiently. At least it’s there and can churn away quietly and be ready to plug into something bigger later
• don’t tear down: if you aren’t rebuilding a factory to handle more throughput, there’s probably not a good reason to remove it yet. It can keep idly producing as long as there’s power and somewhere for the product to go. You might find yourself needing something you’re already making that’s gone idle and it’s usually easier to redirect an output that build a whole new factory. Critically, DO NOT DISASSEMBLE PROJECT ASSEMBLY, pretty much all of it gets used again and again and having the factories continue running means you’ll have a leg up on the next part in the chain. When I got to the last part, ballistic wrap drive, I realized my factory making turbo propulsion rockets had slowed a lot due to some upstream issues with nitrogen gas hauling, but it didn’t matter because I’d already made enough to finish by then anyway
• break it down: don’t focus on the big picture, it’s overwhelming. Solve the production line one step at a time and the end of the production line will just be plugging in the inputs, more or less

Bonus tip: look up Satisfactory Tools if you haven’t already, the production calculator on it is fantastic and once you get the hang of all it can to it’ll make production planning way easier. With bigger builds, I’ll look at the parts and add them in as direct inputs if I am already making enough of it and it makes the diagram way simpler. I’ll even split off parts into their own production plan to eliminate the rest so I’m just focusing on that bit. Before you know it… It’s done.

I often just don’t do anything with my factory; instead, I go exploring and murdering and I then grind my murder victims into mush For Science™. Sometimes I work on my factory too though, but I’ve been recently reticent to untangle an unproductive early bit of my factory which takes some thinking juice which I don’t have a lot of these days because I’m also in school.

So, try exploring and murdering; not just building.

Much like Factorio I tend to rip old builds out and replace them more efficient ones.

Take a couple hours and go artifact hunting for hard drives and loops to improve productivity.

The progression you’re seeing is part of these sort of games. The best idea I can give ya is to go watch some YouTubers that spend their time building in satisfactory and clean some tips off of them.

The big things that I rely on are

• factory templates that I make myself in the blueprint designer
• using the Satisfactory calculator to help with the more complicated item dependency graphs (the more complicated the thing the more ingredients needed)
• scaling up production of my basic ingredients
• deciding if I want a Mega factory that does everything or if I want several smaller factories with more focus to them (i.e. this factory over here only produces frames)

We tried using blueprints a bit, but they were kind of clunky and it felt like there was only so much we could do with them.

I felt this way, too, until I made myself some mini blueprints. I’ve only ever seen people post the wacky, crazy “I fit 12 generators in this!” but I never liked those. What I made instead is a 2 constructor bp, with all the belts and power setup. I only have to connect the ins/outs. If I need more, then I place the bp twice, now I have 4 constructors. Do the same with assemblers and refineries, etc. It simplifies the builds.

Also, I use signs to leave myself post it notes. How many iron do I need? 37 per minute. Write that on the sign.

Treat it like an elephant you want to eat. One small piece at the time. I’ve unlocked tear 7 right now and have zero pieces for next stage of the space elevator even planned. I’ve spent evenings just running around, gathering mercer spheres, somersloops and hard drives. Spent few hours here and there on ziplining on power lines and setting up radar towers across the map (while gathering spheres, somersloops and drives), accumulated few stacks of various remains and just having fun on exploring the map.

Today I had few hours to spare on my save world and ran into an issue where my power network went down. I originally planned that I’d unlock nuclear power but instead I needed to debug my fuel generation farm (where majority of my power is coming from) and I found that I missed a belt on half of the refineries so they got filled with resin and after fixing that I found out that I might have miscalculated something since not all the generators became online, but that might be just that it takes a while to fill the pipes, so that’s a chore I need to take care of at some point before proceeding.

But if that doesn’t feel like fun I can run around and tinker with my other factories, install smart power switches so that I can keep the power generation on and at least some production running and keep the lights on in general. And when that’s been taken care of I have still a ton of map to explore, a lot more tinkering to do (turbofuel power plant would be nice) and so on.

And that’s what I’ve been doing so far. I’m just enjoying the gameplay. End game parts are a bit of a pain to mange, but I can split all of those into manageable parts and work with them whenever I feel like it. Like having enough copper sheets to run my computer production. I started on grassy fields and ran everything I need from couple of nodes from there with mark1 miners. That didn’t take me too far, but I’ve had my fun on upgrading the existing stuff. Tearing down all the ‘old’ stuff from the start and building them up better, or just upgrading the bare minimum to get to the steamed sheets or something else.

Late game stuff requires a lot, but I’ve just ignored it and tinkered on with what I have and I have a ton of room to improve pretty much everything. Eventually I of course move on to the late game stuff, but before that I’m just having fun on trying different build styles, figuring out efficient use of blueprints, hunting down more spheres and loops and so on.

I know some people are just speedrunning the whole thing and others who meticulously plan every step even before starting the game and run it with a spreadsheet on second monitor, but my play style is just to do whatever feels like fun at the time. Sometimes it means to jerryrig an existing factory to accept mark2/3 miners, other times it means tearing down whatever I already had and doing it better and sometimes I just enjoy the world and gather more DNA capsules.

You do whatever you find fun, it’s a game after all and rushing it to the finish line, at least for me, isn’t the most important thing. I have only limited number of hours I can sink to this and if it’s not fun then it’s not worth of my time. I stopped previous save a bit before coffeestain froze the updates and started to focus on 1.0. I was almost finished everything, but forcing myself to build a mess just to complete another stage wasn’t really fun anymore and I didn’t even think of the game for a half a year or so. Obviously the 1.0 release was a big part of it, but if you feel like it, just create signs or other clues to help you get back and let it sit for a while if you feel like it.

My approach has been to accept some spaghetti or otherwise inefficient production lines when figuring out the new mechanics. Once I feel confident in my experience I’ll approach the next factory for similar production lines in a more efficient manner.

Crucially, I absolutely refuse to do a full teardown of my old spaghetti and inefficient structures so long as they’re still producing what I need of them (at most I’ll do the bare minimum to get them working again), and I try to limit how much rebuilding I need to do to incorporate new production lines to the existing system.

Is it inefficient? Yup. Does it lead to wild power fluctuations? You bet! Will I have to wait an extraordinary amount of time to complete each phase? Absolutely.

I just want to say: you aren’t alone! This is my first time through and everything was going mostly good until I finished T7. Now it feels very overwhelming.

What part is overwhelming for you?

My biggest issue is the factory has gotten quite spread out and items are being created and split up and going to different places. So even if I know I’m making enough cable or copper sheets, I don’t know that a given line actually has enough. The organic growth that was happening has hit a wall and I need a new strategy.

Feels like my options are:

1. Overprovision everything so I guarantee there’s enough everywhere.
2. Figure out a new plan. :-)

#1 feels like it’s a stop gap and it’s just turning this from a now problem into a later, harder problem.

So, I’ve started roaming the map again grabbing spheres, sloops, and drives. I’ve also made some smelting BPs and tapped a bunch of nodes. Thinking I’ll ship those ingots somewhere and get some new production lines going. Dunno if I want to do mega base or smaller factories. It’s a beautiful world, so that’s been fun.

I’ve also started watching some YouTube vids, but It’s not been as helpful as I hoped. When someone with 6000 hours builds something, there’s a ton of internalized thinking happening that you don’t hear and that’s the stuff I need/want.

So, I’ll just start experimenting soon with all those ingots I’m producing and see what happens.