Treat it like an elephant you want to eat. One small piece at the time. I’ve unlocked tear 7 right now and have zero pieces for next stage of the space elevator even planned. I’ve spent evenings just running around, gathering mercer spheres, somersloops and hard drives. Spent few hours here and there on ziplining on power lines and setting up radar towers across the map (while gathering spheres, somersloops and drives), accumulated few stacks of various remains and just having fun on exploring the map.

Today I had few hours to spare on my save world and ran into an issue where my power network went down. I originally planned that I’d unlock nuclear power but instead I needed to debug my fuel generation farm (where majority of my power is coming from) and I found that I missed a belt on half of the refineries so they got filled with resin and after fixing that I found out that I might have miscalculated something since not all the generators became online, but that might be just that it takes a while to fill the pipes, so that’s a chore I need to take care of at some point before proceeding.

But if that doesn’t feel like fun I can run around and tinker with my other factories, install smart power switches so that I can keep the power generation on and at least some production running and keep the lights on in general. And when that’s been taken care of I have still a ton of map to explore, a lot more tinkering to do (turbofuel power plant would be nice) and so on.

And that’s what I’ve been doing so far. I’m just enjoying the gameplay. End game parts are a bit of a pain to mange, but I can split all of those into manageable parts and work with them whenever I feel like it. Like having enough copper sheets to run my computer production. I started on grassy fields and ran everything I need from couple of nodes from there with mark1 miners. That didn’t take me too far, but I’ve had my fun on upgrading the existing stuff. Tearing down all the ‘old’ stuff from the start and building them up better, or just upgrading the bare minimum to get to the steamed sheets or something else.

Late game stuff requires a lot, but I’ve just ignored it and tinkered on with what I have and I have a ton of room to improve pretty much everything. Eventually I of course move on to the late game stuff, but before that I’m just having fun on trying different build styles, figuring out efficient use of blueprints, hunting down more spheres and loops and so on.

I know some people are just speedrunning the whole thing and others who meticulously plan every step even before starting the game and run it with a spreadsheet on second monitor, but my play style is just to do whatever feels like fun at the time. Sometimes it means to jerryrig an existing factory to accept mark2/3 miners, other times it means tearing down whatever I already had and doing it better and sometimes I just enjoy the world and gather more DNA capsules.

You do whatever you find fun, it’s a game after all and rushing it to the finish line, at least for me, isn’t the most important thing. I have only limited number of hours I can sink to this and if it’s not fun then it’s not worth of my time. I stopped previous save a bit before coffeestain froze the updates and started to focus on 1.0. I was almost finished everything, but forcing myself to build a mess just to complete another stage wasn’t really fun anymore and I didn’t even think of the game for a half a year or so. Obviously the 1.0 release was a big part of it, but if you feel like it, just create signs or other clues to help you get back and let it sit for a while if you feel like it.