Thanks to Ubi, Chillgaming, Trichouette, Flajo, Kosh, VixenACE & the wiki the later 3 created for inspiration and tips.
And of course to Ben, Lothsahn, Chez, and the rest of Never Games for an amazing far future sci-fi space automation game.

Check out Kosh's video guide to the right if you prefer learning through watching and listening over reading, though his video doesn't cover all the same content and some features have been changed after 2025-07-03.

Also note that this guide was made very early in the game's early access stage, so many of these tips may have changed or be more visible in the game now than when the guide was written.

Now, to start the guide!
Here are some shortcuts everyone should know:

• Press R to rotate a structure or blueprint. For structures, this can be done before or after placing it.
  
• Press F3 to hide your fleet of bots.
  
• Press F5 to hide cargo drones so you can more easily build under them.
  
• Press Q to sample whatever you are hovering over.
  
• Press Ctrl+Click on a building or dropped contained to pick up items.
  
• Press Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to cut, copy, and paste in a box you select. This also allows you to save the copied content as a blueprint.
  
• Press Alt+D to mass-delete in a box you select.
  
• You can dismiss alerts by right clicking them.
  
• You can click items and put them in the toolbar instead of placing them in the world.
  
• You can shift+right click to copy the settings of a structure, and then use shift+left click to paste those settings into a structure capable of accepting them. For example, the recipe of an assembler can be copied to another assembler, or to a connector to set the connector's filter to be what the assembler makes.
  
• You can ctrl+click items from the crafting bar to get a ghost to place in your toolbar or in the world without having an example of the item in your inventory.
  
• The bottom toolbar is quickly accessed by hitting Shift+number, the S stands for Shift.

Some obvious non-spoilers that the game should advertise better because they are fundamental:

• The tutorial guide in the beginning gives you a bunch of research points, and just clicking "complete step" gives them to you, you don't actually have to do the steps.
  
  
• The Inserters can pass over some structures, like solar panels, antimatter wings, repair centers and notably connectors and struts that are placed perpendicular to their direction of travel.
  
  
• Cargo Drones can pass over pretty much anything except logistics stations, mass drivers, and other cargo drones.
  
  
• Resources can pass through structures in Final Factory! Use connectors or inserters with filters to pass them through in a row of assemblers or printers.
  
  
• Mass Drivers do not need clear lines of fire, the receiving mass driver only needs to be in range.
  
  
• Organic Compounds and Ice are first gathered from Comet Fragments, tiny black-blue asteroids that you can find floating around in space. Harvest them by holding right-click on top of them.
  
  
• Some structures are necessary to bind the structures of a station together. Two Mining Stations next to each other will count as two separate stations. To tie them together into one station that can share power, heat, stability, and signal you need structures such as the connector, strut, capacitator, or armor blocks.
  
  
• Some structures, such as the Heat Exchanger, need to be attached directly to other structures to work. If they have more than one connection point they need them all to connect to said structure.
  
  
• Other structures, such as the Antimatter Collector, need to be directly attached to a specific structure.
  
  
• Armor blocks among others do not cost stability.
  
  
• Once you have researched rocket adapters/mobile stations, any station is mobile at 8 meters per second, regardless of thrusters.
  
  
• With the energy and heat transmitters, you can essentially move power generation and heat handling away from your assembly station so that it no longer burdens its stability.
  
  
• Left clicking alarms takes you to the source of the alarm.
  
  
• You can lower the sound of alarms! Check in the settings.
  
  
• Some structures like laser turrets and mark 2 mass drivers require Charge, generated by Capacitators at the cost of energy.
  
  
• Capacitators can be placed in a similar way as armor blocks to connect structures, though they do cost stability and energy.
  
  
• Duplicators function as this game’s version of Dyson Sphere’s Proliferator Sprays or Factorio’s Productivity Modules, they are very potent. They increase the number of items made from a recipe without increasing the resource cost by 10% per duplicator attached to a station.
  
  
• Overdrivers will speed up the operation of your station, but also generate heat and additional signal that will cause problems if not considered. Heat will cause the station to overheat, signal will attract enemy attack.
  
  
• Struts are a very potent tool to control stability, often rendering station cores unnecessary.
  Struts cost 0 stability, connect structures together, and reduce the stability cost of a structure on both sides by 1 to a minimum of zero. Several struts can apply to a single structure with the only limit being how many you can attach, but they must be connected on both sides - but this can be to an armor block or another strut!
  
  Assemblers that only cost 4 stability can be reduced to zero stability cost with 4 struts between the assemblers, leaving 4 slots for inputs and outputs.

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read past this line if you want to discover these mechanics yourself.

• In more difficult modes, keeping stability and signal low becomes important as global stability increases the difficulty progression of enemy attacks, and signal causes the enemy to actually attack. Station Cores are very rarely needed as builds can often be kept below 60 stability by judicious use of struts.
  
  
• Mining drones have an extremely simple recipe that only requires Bauxite as a raw material. As result of this you can find a random bauxite asteroid out in the middle of nowhere and secure it and set up mining drone production, which will likely cover the majority of your bauxite consumption that would otherwise hit your first bauxite asteroid hard. This way you don't even have to transport the material anywhere. If you find a bauxite asteroid close to a silicon asteroid, you can also add Bats and Asteroid Research bots to this little production setup.
  
  
• Cargo drones can be used to build a copy-pastable main bus. Items can be extracted from it using mass drivers or inserter bots placed right under the cargo drones, especially with the F5 key that hides the cargo drones. You can also use them as super-long inserters to add new ingredients to the middle of your build if you for some reason don't want to use Mass Drivers for this purpose.
  
  
• You can use Inserter Bots instead of connectors in many places in order to save stability and power use from a station - but this means that station will no longer be easily mobile as inserters are not brought along if you tell a station to move somewhere else.
  
  
• Mobile stations (ships) don’t need to move cargo around within them. You can just deposit directly into a cargo hold, and then fly that cargo holds over to the new station and inserters there can withdraw directly from the cargo hold – this makes managing mobile station haulers much easier, especially small ones.

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read further unless you are absolutely sure you want to extract every last shred of nearly exploit-like efficiency that may render the game void of challenge.

• If you place down a Tesla artifact near 10 transmitters you can get absurd amounts of power at very very low stability and space cost as each transmitter counts as its own station and the Tesla artifact only reduces the output by 1kw per item it connects to rather than dividing it among them.
  
  
• Singularity stations cost zero stability and are incredibly potent when loaded with very high-mass items, generating several thousand kilowatts. With duplicators, more stages of processing in each item result in more efficiency, though mass energy converters or items that include mass energy converters in their recipe are often well to avoid due to their long processing time and therefore large signal blueprint. Overdrivers or assemblers are currently excellent singularity station fuel.
  
  
• I lied earlier, Duplicators are not very potent. They’re downright broken powerful. At the moment they encourage enormous megabases with only the assemblers, overdrivers, struts, logistics stations with radiator artifacts, stability artifacts, receivers, and the duplicators themselves connected by spiderwebs or spruce-frames of connected armor blocks. Power and heat can be handled by other stations.
  
  Power can be added through singularity generators, dyson platforms, or external power generation stations that feed into transmitters – only the heat from the assemblers themselves and these transmitters needs to be dealt with.
  
  Normally you can easily attach 2-4 duplicators to your assembly arrays. 2 duplicators multiply your output by 207% after just 4 stages of refinement, each stage increasing the amount by 20%.
  
  With the 10 duplicators you can afford very early in the game using this setup, those same 4 stages will instead increase the output of the 4th stage product by 1 600%, each stage increasing the amount by 100%.
  
  
• This gets even more ridiculous when you reach the fabled Dyson Platform and its 100MW receivers and transmitters – or even a direct armor connection to it which does not increase heat at all. This allows you to reach enormous numbers of duplicators and more or less permanently solves your need for resources.