After playing through a few times, my advice is to embrace manifold layouts because they are easy to set up and even easier to expand (especially with blueprints). Pick a recipe to work on, and for each ingredient dedicate a line of producers to it. Do the same for the next ingredient, etc.

The key to this is that if (when) you need to extend your production of the goal recipe, all you need to do is add on to each line proportionally. Thus, you can set this up fairly early and just expand on it as you progress.

Note that you do absolutely end up making many lines of, say, iron plates and other early products; the goal isn’t to have only one line of each item, but rather to dedicate expandable lines to specific individual items (sometimes redundantly).

Also, the early belts do limit you and it certainly makes more sense to use load balancing rather than manifolds at that point, but you also don’t need to wait until the final tier of belts to start using manifolds.

Here’s some ideas from my experience:

• Use https://u6.satisfactorytools.com/production to help plan Production. You can pick which Alternate recipes to use, and work out what you can output, and from what Inputs you’ll need.
• Break things down into separate production pipelines, for more manageable chunks. Rather than build everything in one mega-factory, have smaller factories for grouped similar items, with similar raw requirements. Using the planner above, you can put Products from other factories as Input items.
• Use Trains to shift resources around. This could be moving raw ore from a remote mine, to moving mid-tier components like computers to another factory for higher-tier things. (Later on you can use Drones!)
• A more extreme way is to make mini-factory blueprints, and then just put down however many you need within a larger factory. You can make Heavy Modular Frames in one blueprint (using Iron Ingots, Steel Ingots and Concrete as inputs).
• Reusable blueprints can also simplify the tedium of larger builds. eg; a Blueprint with 8 Constructors at a time, or 6 Assemblers, that you can chain together.
• You don’t need mega-high throughput for many late-game items. Ignore the mega-factories popularly shown online.
• Try to keep expansion in mind when laying out a factory. Have a rough idea on being able to scale it to 2x or 4x throughput (eg; building extra floors of the same layout, or stretching a manifold out to double-length).

I’ve played the game through about three times now, and here’s the two major things that get me through it:

1. Modularity. I built a lot of things in standard 10x10 blocks I could quickly spam out with the SMART mod, and using that as a basic building block I would build production lines and whole factories. 4 modules of smelters, 4 modules of constructors, 2 modules of assemblers and 2 modules of manufacturers and you’ve gone from raw ore to computers or something. This approach is extensible, you can quickly bang out a production line, get some of it going, then widen it in parallel to increase throughput as demand increases.

2. Step by step. When I stop to think about how my whole world-circling megafactory works, it’s kind of overwhelming. I don’t think I could have sat down and designed it from the top down. But “This factory mines iron and copper on site, gets plastic from the train network, makes circuit boards and computers, and then sends them out the train network” is easier to manage. As you build a step in the process, stop considering the rest of the world, think “this will get ingredients from somewhere and will sent products to somewhere else.”

Hey there, I don’t know any guides but if you mention a bit how and where you get stuck, i can try to help about those. Eg. Aluminium is too confusing. I don’t know how to ship oil from 2 kilometres away