Get yourself a mod that starts you off with construction robots, like FasterStart [1]. That plus ghost images plus blueprints allows you to plan your factory, and cut-paste it when you need to. Also, you can persist blueprints across games, so you don't have to re-invent a working factory layout in a new game if you don't need to.
As a bonus, FasterStart also takes away the grind of cutting trees by hand. I use it just for that. Few things annoy me more than having to take a break from building a factory to mindlessly holding right-click and pressing movement keys for a while because RNGesus decided to put a rainforest in the way of my expansion. It's the video-game equivalent of being broken out of a programming flow to sit in a pointless 2-hour meeting.
Another option is to use a mod like Factorissimo2 [2] which lets you put factories inside a building and move the entire building around. Buildings can also be nested so that you can group, say, all buildings related to iron ore -> iron plates inside one outer building. ( * ) Factorissimo2 was invaluable when I played a game with Angel's mods, because with Angel's the process of getting iron plates from iron ore starts off as a one-stage process but eventually becomes like a ten-stage process. There was no way I was going to lay that out on ground level while still accounting for future expansion.
( * ) IIRC this is disabled by default because people think it's unrealistic. I just pretend a nested building is an upper floor in the third dimension and the belt connections are freight elevators.
As a bonus, FasterStart also takes away the grind of cutting trees by hand. I use it just for that. Few things annoy me more than having to take a break from building a factory to mindlessly holding right-click and pressing movement keys for a while because RNGesus decided to put a rainforest in the way of my expansion. It's the video-game equivalent of being broken out of a programming flow to sit in a pointless 2-hour meeting.
Another option is to use a mod like Factorissimo2 [2] which lets you put factories inside a building and move the entire building around. Buildings can also be nested so that you can group, say, all buildings related to iron ore -> iron plates inside one outer building. ( * ) Factorissimo2 was invaluable when I played a game with Angel's mods, because with Angel's the process of getting iron plates from iron ore starts off as a one-stage process but eventually becomes like a ten-stage process. There was no way I was going to lay that out on ground level while still accounting for future expansion.
[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FasterStart
[2]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Factorissimo2
( * ) IIRC this is disabled by default because people think it's unrealistic. I just pretend a nested building is an upper floor in the third dimension and the belt connections are freight elevators.