I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.

Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).

I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:

1. Smelters

2. Main bus based factory

3. Oil processing

4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)

Do not recommend main bus design to new players! The most fun I've in Factorio had was getting to a rocket blind and dealing with my spaghetti factory. Even mentioning any kind of pattern to new players should be avoided.

Would even recommend peaceful mode, biters to me always felt like the least fun part of the game, especially while still learning how things worked. It's like you have a coworker come over and interrupt whatever you were doing, except instead of doing small talk they close half your tabs, clear your browser data so you are logged out of every site, and steal your coffee mug

As a factory game vet, it's always fun to see how the big daddy factorio primes first time players in the other factory games, and you see main busses in Satisfatory (which is sub optimal because the limiting factor is belt transport capacity), and Dyson Sphere Program (viable in the early game before drone logistics, but only in the arctic poles, and irrelevant later on).

Obviously, this main bus pattern does _work_ in all the games, if sufficiently dedicated, as does having no pattern at all, if sufficiently bloody minded (johnson) about it.

I disable expa sion but also biters evolution. Without expansion and evolution biters are just the right amount of pressure for me for casual play without completely losing having to climb half of the game tech tree