You shouldn't worry about efficiency during normal play. There are no missable achievements. Play any way you want.

You will hit a point around the end of the game when all there's left to unlock are the really expensive hybrid machines, their related achievements, and the "Millionaire!" achievement for $1M.

Once you purchase all the hybrid machines, I suggest using a setup like the one in this guide to achieve:


This guide assumes you have the following things unlocked:

• 8 3-star Trash Collectors, each with 110kg+ max weight.
  
• 1 3-star Sorting Worker.
  
• 1 3-star Assistant, with a Daily Calls stat of 7.5+ (averages up to 8).
  
• All available Tier 1, Tier 2, and Hybrid Machines.
  
• About $2-3k worth of money for the initial set-up.

The basic strategy is pretty simple.


Every day, we will let the trash collectors do 1 contract each (for a total of 8) and bring back scrap. We will sleep early (at noon) to skip having to wait for their slow walk back and forth between the trucks and the sorting machine.


If you sleep at noon, it will fast-forward the rest of the day and skip time consuming waiting periods, namely:

• machines working and producing outputs
  
• trash collectors driving back (which usually happens at 4pm) and depositing bags into the sorting machine

There are 4 hybrid machines, each taking 2 different types of Tier 2 resources from the 5 basic types (excluding Organic). The table below shows each of the 5 basic resources, and how they split across the hybrid machines:


If we are to assume that we get an equal amount of each material, and we wanted to distribute the whole amount to just these hybrid machines, then we would end up with the distribution in the 3rd column, which gives us the ratio in column 4. We can use these ratios to select the appropriate recipes to craft to ensure equal utilisation of our resources (column 5). Note there's an element of randomness to what resources each contract will provide, but over time they should average out to equal.


This is the fun stuff. While the game doesn't explicitly tell you, it can handle some degree of automation. When looking at the input/output of a machine, you can hold left click to build a transport belt.

If you use the mouse scroll, you can scroll through different types of transport belts, including ones that increase/decrease elevation, bends, splitters, and mergers. The last two are really important:

• Mergers are pretty easy to understand: they take an input from behind, left, and right, and have an output forward.
  
• Splitters are slightly more complicated, but very useful. They have an input behind, and 3 adressable outputs, on the left, right, and front of the block. You can press E (default key) to turn any of the outputs on/off. Note that at least 1 output must be on at any time.

Your main build should look like the diagram below:


Some notes on the design flow:

• Tier 1 machines should have their input towards the sorting machine, making it easy to drop in scrap when it's ready.
  
• Tier 1 machines output into Tier 2 machines.
  
• Tier 2 machines output into a splitter, which directs their output towards the mergers.
  
• Mergers take in inputs from splitters, and direct everything toward a Hybrid Machine.

Once you have this design ready, hook up the outputs of the hybrid machines to the storage area (give them a bit of space so they can pile up).

You should also make a Tier 1 organic machine which feeds into a Tier 2 machine. This should only produce Liquid Fertilizer - Large which again you can directly hook into the storage area.


Once you're done your design should look like this:

Your daily schedule from now on is really simple. Follow these steps every day:

• As soon as you wake up, go downstairs and accept 8 salvage contracts. You may take the 8 from your assistant, or mix and match with the 3-4 you get on your PC. The difference is small considering the scale we're working at. Don't bother bargaining, money will soon become obsolete.
  
• Assign your 8 contracts to your 8 trash collectors. Make sure you assign contracts with an estimated weight lower than their max carry.
  
• Assign one of your sorting workers to sort through the trash from the previous day. This should only take a few seconds. You may skip this and the next step every few days, to let the trash pile up.
  
• Deposit the resulting scrap into each of the Tier 1 Machines.
  
• Look through the contracts for any that you can immediately redeem. Accept and redeem the contracts.
  
• Look through the marketplace, and sell any hybrid products wherever the buyer is offering above-market price (green text). This will get you the "Watching Charts" achievement.
  
• Go to sleep to start the next day. You can do this from 12:00 (noon) onwards.
  
• Repeat until "Millionaire" is achieved.

This strategy will get you to the $1M achievement soon enough. If you want to, you can look at the hybrid machines to check they have a shortage of one material, and make adjustments. For example, if the last few hauls had less Plastic than normal, so the Plastic + Metal Hybrid machine has a shortage of Plastic Pellets, you can switch to the Pan recipe which uses more Metal Ingots than Plastic Pellets to adjust.

If you found this useful or found better ways to make money, please leave a comment, would love to hear how you'd improve it. This was the simplest design I could whip up to get over the line, without too much effort.