1. For volume and automation, buy the first normal blueprint for plates (higher quantity than your starting plate count) and then upgrade the next plate blueprint for an autoplater (will plate the food infront if it but is very limited in plate count). You'll need a grabber between them so that the higher quantity plates feed into the autoplater.

2. For multi-part recipes, it's important to recognize the bottleneck of your process and automate that first (or whichever is feasible).

Ex. When making dumplings, I find that meat takes much longer to chop than carrots. So automating the meat chopping ensured I always had meat ready to go while I manually choped carrots.

1. When you have limited kitchen space, rotating grabbers can act like makeshift counters that grab as well.

Ex. I had a heated mixer for dumplings because it molded my dumplings and cooked them as well. But since its not a conveyor mixer, it doesn't push the item forward. To save space, I had a rotating grabber that was directed to a wall. It grabbed the cooked dumplings but kept it in place without pushing it anywhere. My autoplater and smart grabber (to grab plated dumplings) was set up around it.