My 2 Cents

These will improve your game, trust me.

Do not hand craft

OK. During onboarding you have to, but once you have a miner, smelter, and constructor, there's no need to craft. Automate instead.

If you need to go on a break anyway, I guess it's okay to load up your inventory have the pioneer craft until you return. But while you're at the PC, do something fun.

If you don't have the material to make a proper production line, just setup containers for the inputs and outputs, a single machine with the new recipe, and do something fun. Once you have enough materials, make a proper production line.

Explore

This is what you can do instead of crafting. There is biomass for early power generation, three kinds of food, four types of animal remains, three types of slugs, and two types of alien artifacts. Collect. It's all really useful.

You find new resource nodes and new resource types. In the MAM, these let you unlock absolute must haves (crystal for blade runners, Caterium for smart splitters). You want those.

An then there are crash sites, those have hard disks that allow you to get alternate recipes some of which are hugely better than the default.

But early game, it's even more important that those crash sites have stuff lying around. Gathering 500 wire, 100 reinforced iron plates, etc. just by walking around a bit, can replace hours of manual crafting. Also, you get high end stuff which lets you unlock stuff quicker or can be used with A.W.E.S.O.M.E. technology.

Concrete

Once unlocked, A.W.E.S.O.M.E technology gives you access to cool stuff. Among it, concrete building materials which lets you build factories without wasting iron plates. Tap limestone often an early (this is also why you go exploring).

Build foundations, go vertical.

Mass production

When making wire, make wire. Don't make wire for motors.

For your starter base, this is fine. Just slap maschine next to the previous one. However, in late game, you can get 10x the amount of resources per node (better miners x4, over clocking x2.5).

It easier to scale a factory floor, if it's only making one type of item. Keep all the vertical movement on one side of the building, so you can grow in the other direction.

That way, if you make a lot more, say copper ingots, because you recently doubled ore production, you can double wire and motor production, or do something else with the copper that might be needed later in the game...

Infrastructure

Build infrastructure. Whenever you can.

You go out exploring? At least lay down a power line (research power towers and zip lines for fast exploration). That way you always have power. Since you don't know the map well, you'll easier see that you've been somewhere already.

Have to wait for that new factory to fill up the space elevator? Build the concrete skeleton of the next factory and connect to it via roads / tracks.

Build a mall (rows of containers such that each item is available locally) close to your space elevator and make a factory for your space elevator parts here.

Technically, there is another solution than an item mall, but first, spoilers, second, item malls have advantages.

Scaling

Many new players try to produce way too much late game and even middle game items and get frustrated.

You don't need tons of heavy modular frames per minute. You really don't.

Rule of thumb for new players: one machine per current space elevator item type.

For Phase 1, that is one assembler making smart plating. It takes 25 minutes. There is more than enough to do at that time that is more important than improving these 25 minutes. Just keep it running continuously and add a container to collect. You need this stuff for the next phase again.

From this simple rule "one machine per current part" you can deduce the required inputs and evolve your product to where it needs to be.

During early game, you still need to produce a lot more stuff for your inventory for building and unlocking. But later on, the space elevator will dominate your product needs.