I JUUUUST learned a basic Satisfactory skill that everyone else probably already knows, because I played so much Factorio I went in with the wrong concept.

In Factorio, the concept of a main bus has such power because things fill up. Things stop. So while things near the front of the bus have resource priority, they only produce what they need, and when they're done, they stop.

Satisfactory isn't supposed to be like that, and now that I know that, things are going great.

Satisfactory's "AWESOME" shop (the part of the game I despise) is built specifically to push you to have "always on" factories.

Nothing is ever done producing. Nothing is ever full. If something is full, it should be dumping its produce into the void in order to unlock advanced space age concepts like "gold paint" or "a mug".

This is a completely different resource paradigm, because now you have static resource loads.

This is something it seems most Satisfactory players just... inherently get. They don't even really talk about it.

If a factory needs 240 iron ore, you pipe in exactly that much and it's just... off the market entirely. Until you shut down the factory.

Now that I realize that, I've simply started leaving screens noting how many of a resource has been allocated for which factories, and it's really helped me build easier and more freely.

This obviously can extend to secondary products. If I have a factory that produces 900 steel ingots per minute, I can simply note right there that 240 of it is specifically allocated to the SAM/Stator plant and will always be allocated that way, whether delivered by rail, truck, or conveyor.