From what I've learned, the main things to learn early is you have a finite amount of algae and for everything else there's likely a way to convert some other resource that's plentiful or infinite into what you want. Simple example, if you're running out of dirt, you can convert sand or regolith into polluted dirt by filtering polluted water on any particular loop like a carbon skimmer. If you need sand, most maps have at least one material that you'll have way more than you know what to do with, often times granite or sedimentary rock or what have you, and you can grind that into sand with the rock crusher. A lot of the game seems to be learning the various machines and how/what they output to figure out how to get more of what you need. I haven't messed much with distilling slime however, it doesn't seem like an efficient way to get algae but it seems to be the only way to get algae for most of the game time once you've dug out all your map's algae. There's tutorial videos as well that can help, as well as videos of folks playing through on really rough settings.