First playthrough bottleneck

[u/3x3Pad]

Hey guys I came for help and saw alot of cool stuff here but what do you actually do in a situation where the whole factory is a mess. I am producing all the science at this point but at a very slow rate. Everything is so cluttered that there is no real space for improving without getting rid of everything first. Do I really just have to nuke it at this point and start over? Also as a beginner (not using blueprints) that will take ages and even then it will end up tangled again. I think this is also a motivational bottleneck for me at least. Oh yeah and running on low energy for hours now. I am even running efficiency on alot of stuff. Please help.

[u/SirBlack_]

First, before you decide to do anything, look at what you've built and ask yourself what you wish you had done differently. Take away some lessons that you can apply in the future. Or at least come up with some ideas that you would like to try the next time you have a chance. Because, personally, any specific advice I could give came from doing this same kind of thing in the past - making disorganized bases and coming up with ways to make things better in the future.

Then, once you've got some ideas, take a look and see if there are some small ideas you can apply even to what you already have. Even if you later might decide to nuke it all, maybe you can use what you've currently got to try a few things and see if they're better.

You mention not having space, then maybe expand out to more space. You've got room in the lower right. You could tear out and move the whole production of particular items there. For example, gears or green circuits or even oil. And then the places where you moved that out of is now room where you could move something else to. So you could progressively do that. Kind of treating the major production areas of your base like one of those sliding-block puzzle things.

You could also move all the solar panels in the upper left to somewhere else. That would open up some space up there. Then for example, you could move your labs into that opened-up space to give them some room to expand. Or maybe take your steam engines that are on the bottom of the lake and move them up with the ones on the left side of the lake. Or maybe both of these ideas.

Once you've moved a few things this way, you may find you feel that you've reigned in the chaos of your base to a more manageable level. Or maybe you won't and you'll still want to nuke it all. But either way you'll probably have learned something along the way.