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.
@Craigp I think I found the AWESOME Sink was the valuable thing, because it allows you to keep more complicated workflows from blocking up due to too much of something going in on combined belts, the tickets were I bi product I wasn't fussed about. Though maybe the combined belts thing is me being lazy, and perhaps I should deisgn better.
I have made some really (in my mind) elegant little packaged factories. But for the complicated stuff I'm a mess! Still I love this game.
@robertklaschka Yeah, if I consider it as just a trash dump, its purpose makes sense.
For me as someone that wants to decorate factories, it was an unreasonably bad design decision to ask me to just burn random resources to unlock ladders.
Craig P
Robert Klaschka