Hi,
Some extra information (War Dog\'s reply is very good, so read that first).
All factories to are sychronised and do their thing at exactly the same time every 5 seconds. What this means is that power tanks are very important for medium/large factories. For example, every 5 seconds all of your factorories might consume a total of 1 million power in an instant, and then you\'ve got 5 seconds to regenerate the power to fill the tanks back up (so you\'d only need 200000 e/sec power regeneration in this case).
For manufacturing; it\'s best to split all blocks into 5 categories:
1) Natural blocks (rock, sand, grass, etc). The ingredients for recipies that create natural blocks are alwaysother natural blocks.
2) Minerals (awesomite, oxogen, etc). The ingredients for recipies that create minerals are always natural blocks
3) Chemicals (paints and protiens). The ingedients for recipes that create chemicals are always natural blocks.
4) Electronics (processors, memory modules and expanders). The ingredients for these recipes are always minerals.
5) Other (thrusters, power generators, shield, hulls, etc). The ingredients for these recipes could be anything in the other categories.
As you can see, the most important type of blocks are the natural blocks. If you have a factories that produce natural blocks, then those natural blocks can be used by other factories to produce everything else.
The recipes you buy have random ingredients, and some recipes are good and some are bad. To create a good factory you need good recipes. A good recipe is one that only uses one ingredient (and hopefully a low number of that ingredient) - any recipe that has more than one ingredient should be sold back to the shop (possibly after using it to create enough blocks to buy a different recipe).
Because recipes for natural blocks use other natural blocks as ingredients (and because they\'re the most important type of block); when you start building a factory you want to focus on natural blocks. The goal is to find pairs of good recipes for some of these natural blocks. For example, you might get a recipe for rock that uses 2 sand blocks as ingredients and a recipe for sand that uses 4 rock blocks as ingredients. When you get a pair of good recipes like this you want to set them up as a feed-back loop, so that (after the recipes have levelled up) you produce an infinite number of both types of blocks.
To get pairs of good recipes you keep buying recipes for different types of blocks (I tend to focus on common/cheap blocks like sand, lava, ice and rock) while discarding bad recipes and storing the good recipes until you find a matching pair.
Once you\'ve got several of these infinite item generators (e.g. generating 10 or more different types of natural blocks for free) you can start building your secondary factories that use your free natural blocks as ingredients. These secondary factories would produce the remaining natural blocks, minerals and chemicals.
Finally you can start the third layer of factories - the ones that use everything else to produce thrusters, shields, etc.
Note 1: For minerals; currently you can go to a shop and buy an L5 mineral, then coarse it to get 10000 L4 minerals, then use those L4 minerals to get 2 recipes for that L4 mineral. With a little luck you can use natural blocks from your \"infinite natural block generators\" as ingredients for a recipe to create L4 minerals. After a while your factories will produce enough L4 minerals to refine and buy a recipe for L5 minerals (which will hopefully also use natural blocks from your \"infinite natural block generators\" as ingredients). In this way (after enough work and \"trial and error\") eventually you end up with a factory that produces infinite L5 minerals from nothing.
Note 2: Currently when you first start creating a factory the absurd recipe costs are extremely frustrating. For example, to get 5000 mini cactus blocks you need to demolish about 10 entire desert planets (and you may need to buy about 50 recipes before you get a good one). Alternatively you can buy them from shops - each shop might have 100 mini cactus in stock, so you might only need to visit 50 shops to get enough for one recipe. Of course this is purely idiotic. To get around the sheer stupidity I recommend exploiting the blueprint system. Basically; create a \"ship\" with 1 ship\'s core and as many mini cactus blocks as you\'ve got and save it in the catalogue, then pull it apart and buy a copy of your \"ship\" (and add the original mini cactus blocks to it and save it again and pull it apart). This is the only sane way to get enough blocks for your first recipe/s. Of course this works for most types of blocks (not just mini cactus) but does not work for some block types that can\'t be placed on ships - factory inputs, factory enhancers, undeathinators, shop modules, etc. My recomendation is to buy as many blocks that can\'t be placed on ships as possible at every shop you visit until you get enough for recipe/s.
Note 3: It takes about 1 week of work to get a factory that produces an infinite number of all blocks in the game from nothing. You can use a shop module and set all prices to \"1 credit\" and use your infiinite/free items to restock your shop. By building a large factory with a \"free shop\" close to a server\'s spawn point, you can destroy the economy for the entire server (make credits worthless). Once you\'ve destroyed the universe\'s economy you officially win the game (building space ships and bothering with pirates is for losers).
