Playthrough Strategy Tips
Tip 1: Because of the way the game is structured, you can't simply throw upgrades at one station and hope for the best. You can choose which product (steel bars, cans, drills, toasters, etc) is made by each station, but be sure that you have another station making the required materials, or your worker will sit there idle and not do anything due to lack of supply.
Tip 2: For items which can either be sold or used as supply (such as cans and steel bars), the worker will by default put the item into a box on the right side bracket. Move the box to the left side by tapping on the left bracket, and the item will go to supply instead of being sold. When it goes to supply, the transporters (the workers on the left side of the screen) will carry the finished product to the people who need it (such as toaster makers).
Tip 3: Go to the blueprint area to upgrade individual items. Each upgrade is fairly cheap but takes a lot of time to finish. You can do bronze, silver, and gold upgrades, which are worth a 30%, 80% or 150% boost to the quantities of the item that you make, whether the item is offered up for sale or used as a material for a more expensive item.
Tip 4: Any time that you pass a specific upgrade milestone at a station, the worker's performance immediately doubles. Go to the station and upgrade and watch the bar fill up; when the bar fills up all the way, it will empty again and the production of your worker will instantly double, in addition to the added production from the upgrade itself.
Tip 5: Don't use your super cash to speed up the production boosts. You can do that by going to the date and time settings on your phone and changing the date and time to an hour (or whatever length of time the current production will take) ahead of the current time. Then go back to the game and the boost will be completed for free. Do this as many times as you want in order to get quick gold production multipliers, and get ahead in the game at an extremely rapid pace.