Title.

Coming from Krastorio 2, I really wanted to like this mod. And I love the polish, and the unique playstyle, and the unique progression. I like salvaging the broken stuff from the wreck and repairing them later, I like the unique energy generation. Everything about it should make it exactly what I'm looking for in a mod.

But the process for making conveyor belts is ~twelve steps, including five different types of buildings, advanced fluid handling and two different non-voidable waste products - and about 3MW of power.

That's... a big oof, for me. Is the whole pack that level of insane complexity? Does it only get worse? Do you ever get access to easier ways to make basic things?

You get bots in purple science. They're too slow at that tech level to be very good for high volume intermediate products, but they're excellent in a mall for making factory construction materials.

You also get hand crafting tools, so prior to having a bot mall, you can pump up your hand crafting speed and make some belts yourself. When you craft, most of your effort goes into the same intermediates over and over. Instead of focusing your efforts on automating a sngle product all the way from start to finish, focus on automating one intermediate, and then another. The more intermediates you automate, the faster your hand crafting will go as you can pick up stacks of increasingly expensive intermediates.

There aren't really 12 steps to automate conveyor belts. There is 1 single step to automate conveyor belts. Everything else is a material that you'll need for more than just conveyor belts. If you keep making the same materials over and over again repeatedly in different builds, your factory is going to have a lot of redundancy and be much more sprawling than necessary. Each item that goes into a belt is something that could be on your bus. Then it's only 1 step to make a fairly basic intermediate, and 1 step to combine it into something else.

Factory Planner and Helmod have their uses, but they don't have to dictate your building style. If an intermediate isn't on your bus, make it a single time for everything that will eventually need it rather than making it over and over again. If you build a bus style, at least for your key intermediates and early building materials, then you factory can never be more complex than the number of items you have, since you'll have at most 1 construction step making each possible material. When you eventually get a bot mall you can use your intermediate bus to feed the bot mall with raw materials. You don't want to go full bus and make lots of expensive buildings just to put them on belts.

I suppose that makes sense. Very different from how I'm used to playing - for my playstyle I tend to avoid buses and instead focus on end-to-end automation of each product just because its easier to keep track of in my head.

Plus Factorio not letting you underclock structures can make it a little tricky to control resource flows. Like, in Satisfactory, if I'm producing 60/m of some intermediate and there's a product that wants 30/m of that item to craft at full speed but I only really need 3/m, I can just set it to produce at 10% and then I know I'm only consuming 3 out of my 60 production.

But I haven't found any mod that lets you do that in Factorio, so it becomes much harder to keep track of how many intermediates I'm consuming sometimes. I've been avoiding that problem by just doing everything end-to-end.

if I'm producing 60/m of some intermediate and there's a product that wants 30/m of that item to craft at full speed but I only really need 3/m, I can just set it to produce at 10% and then I know I'm only consuming 3 out of my 60 production.

Usually you dont need to do such "underclock". If something is consuming 3/m items, and you supply 60/m , then eventually (after some time) that belt (or belts) carrying 60/m items will fill up and will limit itself automatically to 3/m.